Sort of Blue: Clone or Art?

Reprinted from http://jazzwax.com

By this time on Tuesday, the jazz community will likely be in an uproar—or will at least be dumbfounded. Blue, a new album by the quintet Mostly Other People Do the Killing, has broken a taboo of sorts by recreating the Miles Davis Sextet's Kind of Blue, note for note. I write about the album (due out on Tuesday), and its implications for jazz and the music industry in Friday's Wall Street Journal (go here). [Pictured above, from left, Mostly Other People Do the Killing's drummer Kevin Shea, bassist Matthew "Moppa" Elliott, alto and tenor saxophonist Jon Irabagon and trumpeter Peter Evans. Not pictured: pianist Ron Stabinsky.]

Kind of Blue (1959), of course, is jazz's most iconic album, influencing generations of jazz and rock musicians and becoming one of jazz's best-selling recordings. The modal framework used for the album's compositions and the genius of the musicians on the album created a breakthrough approach, providing jazz and rock musicians with a sense of how to improvise for limitless periods.

Tuesday's outrage over Blue is likely to come from two camps—those who don't take kindly to jazz's Mona Lisa being copied and positioned as art, and those who find copying Kind of Blue sort of wacky, since a perfectly good one already exists. To me, the fact that Kind of Blue has been copied is less interesting than why and what the thinking was behind it. Initially, I thought Blue might be a publicity stunt, since copying Kind of Blue could only produce one reaction among serious jazz fans—bafflement followed by condemnation.

Then I thought of Andy Warhol's series of 32 Campbell's Soup Cans in 1962. Imitation could certainly be art, if the creator had a dynamic perspective. As bassist-leader Matthew “Moppa” Elliott told me during our conversation: "Before people get too worked up over this, they need to realize that our album is a copy, not a clone—an object designed to reaffirm what people already love about Kind of Blue and to highlight what we could and couldn’t pull off."

Here's what Blue's trumpeter, Peter Evans [above], told me he learned...

"I learned a ton from doing this project—Miles Davis's trumpet playing being only one aspect. Attempting to really inhabit the corporeality and vibe of Miles's playing on this album was something I hadn't done before, even when I had studied these solos years ago. The whole nature of trying to do something that is by nature impossible and destined for failure gave me a certain momentum in homing in on the trumpet playing and sounds in a way that I guess hadn't been present before. I mean, this project was an insane thing to do and being pushed to that threshold was maybe necessary to learn certain things.

"In a lot of ways, Miles' playing from this specific album and period is pretty much the opposite of my general approach, at least on the B-flat horn. My piccolo trumpet playing, by contrast, has taken a bit from Miles. The more I dove into this 'bodily inhabitation' approach to reproducing his sound and nuance, the more I was convinced of the very deliberate quality of his playing. I mean, you have to remember that there are still people out there who think Miles's playing from this period isn't very good. I had a classical teacher tell me this, and while I never, ever bought into that, this project showed me that a lot of the things Miles does—such as undershooting notes, blowing softly to the point that the note might not speak immediately, a certain kind of 'fluffy' articulation—are very carefully and delicately constructed to get the sounds he wants. Very deliberate, while also being totally organic and completely himself.

"The guy had checked out many schools of trumpet playing from Clark Terry to William Vacchiano to Dizzy Gillespie to the famously under-recorded Freddy Webster, so he was well aware of the range of options, what his strengths were and how to achieve the things he wanted to adapt to the music. 

"One or two years after Kind of Blue came Miles's famous Blackhawk recordings, which find Miles playing with absolutely monstrous chops. Super strong and aggressive, which would have sounded pretty out of place on Kind of Blue. His Sketches of Spain is from the same year, and for that album he had to radically change his playing again to something really different, and it worked beautifully. The approach complements the music as a whole.

"This idea of bending an instrument to your will in the service of the music is not something I associated with Miles, although he was reasonably aware of the changes in his playing through different periods of his career. This concept is something I've taken to heart from a broad range of players and use quite often to get my instrument to do things that might seem un-idiomatic. It's nice to be reminded that a harmon mute blown softly on a microphone was an utterly new timbre that was about as un-trumpety as one could imagine. And Davis made that one of his signatures. By the way, the ballad pieces with the mute were the most challenging and the most fun.

Read more: http://www.jazzwax.com/2014/10/sort-of-blue-clone-or-art.html

Used with permission by Marc Myers