― Mark, Tuesday, 22 January 2002 01:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
― dave q, Tuesday, 22 January 2002 01:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
― Ned Raggett, Tuesday, 22 January 2002 01:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
― Vic Funk, Tuesday, 22 January 2002 01:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
― mark s, Tuesday, 22 January 2002 01:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
― anthony, Tuesday, 22 January 2002 01:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
― dleone, Tuesday, 22 January 2002 01:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
― alex in mainhattan, Tuesday, 22 January 2002 01:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
― Tim, Tuesday, 22 January 2002 01:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
― DeRayMi, Tuesday, 22 January 2002 01:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
― rm, Tuesday, 22 January 2002 01:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
― A Nairn, Tuesday, 22 January 2002 01:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
― Sean, Tuesday, 22 January 2002 01:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
― Ben Williams, Tuesday, 22 January 2002 01:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
― M.Matos, Tuesday, 22 January 2002 01:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
― malcolm, Tuesday, 22 January 2002 01:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
― Tracer Hand, Tuesday, 22 January 2002 01:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
― Kris, Tuesday, 22 January 2002 01:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
i used to like them both. i used to listen to them both often. i used to not know much about jazz. (i know a bit more now.) i'm much more inclined to listen to on the corner, dark magus, or get up with it now and really nothing by coltrane so substitute dancing in yr head or the black saint and the sinner lady.
― jess, Tuesday, 22 January 2002 01:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
bah.
(or pangea for that matter.)
Whereas Kind of Blue is the ultimate fusion of theory and practice (cliche, I know): very experimental but your granny can listen to it and get it right away, and still hear stuff 10 years later. I will still be playing it no matter how many coffee bars I hear it in, how many lists it tops, and how much other supposedly deeper (because more "difficult"/obscure) jazz I hear...
(To split the difference, I listen to Quintet 65-68 box set or Live at the Plugged Nickel: the cool of the traditional acoustic, melody-based sound infused with the raw energy and improvisational, open-ended fearlessness of the 70s stuff. My favorite Miles, maybe)
PS: Meditations may be better than Love Supreme. Recorded around the same time; he hasn't gone off the deep end yet, but it's a lot lot more fiery.
― Ben WIlliams, Tuesday, 22 January 2002 01:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
I prefer ALS, on purely subjectivist grounds. Best jazz LP = The Blues and Abstract Truth. Because it does contain both.
― Sterling Clover, Wednesday, 23 January 2002 01:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
De, Meditations took me a long time. I only play it on special occasions now anyway. There's plenty of form - and it sort of quickly coalesces after the long beginning. I think there's a good article on it in an old Atlantic Monthly (so it's available online).
― Josh, Wednesday, 23 January 2002 01:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
I'll put articles in the whatever place I want to. :-P
I've listened to Kind of Blue a lot more than A Love Supreme, which isn't even close to being my favorite Coltrane album (that would be Afro Blue Impressions. I recently read that Kind of Blue still sells 5,000 copies a week, which blew me away. It's not all up to marketing, there really is something special about it that appeals to a huge range of listeners, which I think is neat. So anyway, Kind of Blue it is.
― Mark, Wednesday, 23 January 2002 01:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
'Kind of Blue' and 'A Love Supreme' are both GRATE albs. If they help ppl to 'get into' jazz, well, good! The fact that all us can prob. name 500 other jazz albs that are just as good or 'better' doesn't automatically make KOB or LS shite.
And I strongly disagree w/ Ben that 70s Miles albs are 'patchy'.
― Andrew L, Wednesday, 23 January 2002 01:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
My take is that some of it (more of it than not) is fantastic, but some of it just doesn't come together, and that overall he didn't quite fully realize the whole Stockhausen/Stone thing.
― Ben Williams, Wednesday, 23 January 2002 01:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
I actually like how Coltrane plays does his doped-up little chant (Track 1, 6:07-6:44) and then the bass echoes it like a heartbeat with a polyrhythm. Its not really a vocal...its a Mantra. The entire album is one long Mantra.
― Lord Custos, Wednesday, 23 January 2002 01:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
More like "conventional wisdom / the canon = dud by definition", I'd say. (Of course, that point of view is crap, but that's another thread.)
I'd pick Kind of Blue, by the way. It's a perfect album, with mistakes to boot! (cf. Coltrane's solo in "Flamenco Sketches", where he and everyone else momentarily disagree on a chord change -- I think the one to Ab Mixolydian.)
(My favorite Coltrane is probably Coltrane's Sound or Giant Steps -- both relatively conservative by comparison -- but I like A Love Supreme very very much. I still haven't really fully come to grips with Coltrane's post-Supreme works, i.e. the ones with Rashied Ali -- which is a pretty strange hole in my knowledge, but there it is. )
― Phil, Wednesday, 23 January 2002 01:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
no i genuinely find myself oppressed and deflated by both: i even tried KoB earlier this evening, to see if i was just being a scamp after all, but no i couldn't even stay in the same room
obviously both speak to my COLTRANE problem, but there's more that's wrong with both than just him: i will (perhaps) dig out ALS and give it a whirl also
there is by definition nothing to be gained from listening to perfect music, so i wd want to dig for vivid structuring flaws which cut across their seemingly deathly tedious "concepts" (modalism and mantra-ism, respectively) and help me change my mind.
HELP ME CHANGE MY MIND!! Possible start: at least three of KoB's mainstays were ex, current or soon-to-be junkies... I have a bad lifehistory of falling in love with junkies so maybe you can build on this.
― mark s, Wednesday, 23 January 2002 01:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
something to be gained from perfect music=trembling with awe at glimpse of the almighty's fingertips ;o)
But what is your Coltrane problem?
(i promise to stop going through yr garbage, mark.)
― jess, Wednesday, 23 January 2002 01:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
No idea whether this has ever come out on CD, but sometimes makes itself known in the bargain bins of West London.
"KoB - no McCoy Tyner on it" - but it did have Bill Evans on most of it; the unacknowledged architect of the whole "moody modal" ethos, surely (though, again, check out "Love Chant" by Mingus on the Pithecanthropus Erectus LP, recorded three years previously, which looks forward not just to KoB but also to In A Silent Way).
― Marcello Carlin, Thursday, 24 January 2002 01:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
Miles, of course, always namechecked Ahmed Jamal, esp. his 'Live At The Pershing Club' alb, as perhaps the major influence on his post- bop 'quiet' modal style.
― Andrew L, Thursday, 24 January 2002 01:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
― M. Matos, Monday, 28 January 2002 01:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
I feel both albums are seminal, and while KOB is quite a bit more complex, IMO, I have to say I like A Love Supreme more. It's just more emotive, IMO. The chanting doesn't turn me off, either....
Then again, I'm a Coltrane fanatic, so....there.
― Vijay, Tuesday, 26 March 2002 01:00 (twenty-two years ago) link
http://kindofbloop.com/
― jaxon, Wednesday, 25 November 2009 06:20 (fourteen years ago) link
― mark s, Tuesday, January 22, 2002 7:00 PM (12 years ago)
for all that ALS is supposed to be/express a spiritual struggle or striving of some kind, it seems typical for the TOWARD to be left understood (ish) and the FROM/OUT OF to be… neglected, i think, or to have it sketched in with a bit of biography (heroin, oppression, etc etc)
but i think the construction of the record - which is just conspicuous enough to mark it as an outlier in his catalog - points in a more useful direction.
the vocals are there in part to call attention to / retroactively cause the fact that a lot of his playing, and a lot of the writing/improvising, is speechlike. i think you can hear that especially in the iterations of the refrain that just lead up to the singing: with so much repetition, the emphasis is taken off the 'musical' somewhat, which lets the more conversational qualities of each phrase played to come out, as if he is just talking to you instead of playing (which is an act more, or differently, fraught with meaning, and in some ways liable to be taken too automatically - the spirituality of it not recognized for what it is, or could be).
and the point, then, of calling attention to the speechlike is to propose or wish that the playing be regarded as a kind of singing (like DUH: start with acknowledgement, end with psalm). i feel like 'resolution' is constructed a little bit so as to maintain a separation between the speechlike and the songlike; coltrane does improvise (in the customary sense) on the theme a short while before it's repeated again, but the nearness of that improvisation to the theme, and the cell/block-like structure of the theme, make the whole first third before tyner takes over seem not so much like a ~musical~ development, as a development of song-from-speech, but in a kind of formal, structured way, sonata-exposition style.
if there's a vivid structuring flaw i think it must lie in the role of 'pursuance' (first half of the long side 2) somehow. elvin's got talkier, and singier, playing on record. and the whole band passage to follow, i don't know, it just seems there in contrast to the intensity/focus of the other parts of the record. it also has the unfortunate job of ushering in the final 'psalm' part. i think there some of the same tension between speaky and singy playing returns, with the intention being to push toward the latter. especially in light of coltrane's playing elsewhere, i suppose that overcharged stuff is typically heard as, i don't know, an attempt to substitute noise and extremity for spiritual intensity. but when he's not outright screeching, he tends to still be very articulate in that playing, very plainspoken, still working those little phrases over and over, looking for every opportunity that the rubato tempo gives him.
if there's a way in there, i think it must have to do with the idea that, after all, he's NOT singing.
― j., Wednesday, 10 December 2014 05:49 (nine years ago) link
mantra-ism
awful nervous record for such a rep
― j., Friday, 27 November 2015 21:41 (eight years ago) link
Just saw this morning that Ken Clarke has an autobiography out called 'Kind of Blue' :-0
― Foster Twelvetrees (Ward Fowler), Friday, 7 October 2016 08:06 (seven years ago) link
bah: ornette fan, he shd have called it "for whom who keeps a record"
― mark s, Friday, 7 October 2016 12:53 (seven years ago) link
Why the fuck do people love Kind of Blue so much????? Sounds no better than your basic 40s/50s jazz like Lester Young or various Verve LPs to me.
― Mr. Snrub, Wednesday, 26 July 2017 11:38 (six years ago) link
umm ok
― she carries a torch. two torches, actually (Joan Crawford Loves Chachi), Wednesday, 26 July 2017 12:21 (six years ago) link
everything bill evans does on "blue in green" breaks my heart
― ToddBonzalez (BradNelson), Wednesday, 26 July 2017 12:39 (six years ago) link
http://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2015/02/kind-of-bleugh-or-seven-better-stand-alone-ways-into-jazz-in-the-early-age-of-the-long-playing-disc-possibly/
^^^here is the piece i eventually wrote abt kind of blue (only 13 years after the question was posed): it doesn't really answer snrub's question or talk at all abt A Love Supreme but it does ask whether there's maybe something problematic abt starting yr exploration of jazz specifically w/KoB, bcz i slightly suspect starting actually there stops a lot of ppl of ppl going further (see piece for why i think this and some suggested better places to start)
― mark s, Wednesday, 26 July 2017 12:59 (six years ago) link
i definitely agree it's a really bizarre choice as the place to start, and when i was growing up it was the album people picked from the entire history of jazz, in indie mags or whatever. which makes no sense whatsoever. i liked kob well enough buying it at 18 but i like it a lot better in recent years having gone through all the electric miles stuff and a lot of other jazz via house music
― Bein' Sean Bean (LocalGarda), Wednesday, 26 July 2017 13:03 (six years ago) link
but to question its quality is madness - it is amazing. every time i hear that first bassline it is a magic and happy moment.
― Bein' Sean Bean (LocalGarda), Wednesday, 26 July 2017 13:04 (six years ago) link
no it is bad just like lester young
― mark s, Wednesday, 26 July 2017 13:11 (six years ago) link
Lady Snrub
― Bernie Lugg (Ward Fowler), Wednesday, 26 July 2017 13:58 (six years ago) link
it took me a while to get into Kind Of Blue. It's always recommended as one of the absolute great jazz albums and therefore a good intro to modern jazz, but its strengths really show in its subtlety and details. I had to listen to it a few times, along with a number of other jazz albums, before I started to understand how extraordinary it is. Charles Mingus's Ah Um, or even Miles' Bitches Brew both work as better intros for the non-jazzer I'd say
― Shat Parp (dog latin), Wednesday, 26 July 2017 14:14 (six years ago) link
oh we all just said that..
I think it's cool that a deep album like Kind of Blue is considered one of the ones You Have To Hear. New listeners seem to respond to it with genuine pleasure. The only issue is that there should be more jazz albums with the same status.
― jmm, Wednesday, 26 July 2017 14:34 (six years ago) link
kind of blue is extremely singular imo which makes it both an ideal and odd prism through which to enter the remainder of jazz bc 1) it's representative of jazz's tendency to rewrite its approach to composition and improvisation while also being the most accessible incarnation of one of its shifts toward more flexibility and freedom 2) perfect soloing. it's just sort of this beautiful unrepeatable moment in so many ways that it doesn't really prepare you for any other jazz records or subgenres imo but i also think that's part of what's cool and special about it
love supreme is part of a coltrane's greater drift in the mid- to late-'60s so in a way it functions as a pretty decent introduction to jazz bc you're just sort of sat in media res in this larger improvisational journey but i don't particularly think it's even coltrane's best record from this period let alone his career
incidentally i'd immediately direct anyone enamored with kind of blue to olé coltrane
― ToddBonzalez (BradNelson), Wednesday, 26 July 2017 14:50 (six years ago) link
Agree w/ this. I always thought his next record (The John Coltrane Quartet Plays...) was a fuller realization of what the quartet was capable of. ALS strikes me as a transitional record, where he's working through certain ideas and approaches, but it never quite takes off for me. The live recording of ALS, though, is fully deserving of every absurdly over-the-top accolade the studio record received.
― Montgomery Burns' Jazz (Tarfumes The Escape Goat), Wednesday, 26 July 2017 15:06 (six years ago) link
Snrub are you seriously negging Kind of Blue because it's a beginner's record, or "no better than your basic 40s/50s jazz"? (You mean it's no better than a lot of really great records? Alrighty then!)
It may be entry-level compared to the arguably more "challenging" A Love Supreme but it is still awesome.
Defending the parapets of a niche art form from the casual n00bz is a great way to keep it nichey.
― okapi paste (Ye Mad Puffin), Wednesday, 26 July 2017 15:14 (six years ago) link
So are there a lot of modern jazz album aficionados who don't rate pre-war stuff? I think KoB's accessibility comes in part from how it's less busy than other peaks, easier to pick out the intersecting lines.
Money Jungle was the crack-the-code album for me.
― Mungolian Jerryset (bendy), Wednesday, 26 July 2017 15:37 (six years ago) link
i think these were actually my first two jazz albums! KoB is incredible obviously, i think maybe i bought it because yes it was the recommended starting point for jazz newbies, but it also didn't disappoint and unlike a lot of other recommended starting point albums from other genres it hasn't diminished for me over time.
― nomar, Wednesday, 26 July 2017 15:52 (six years ago) link
Coltrane's Live at Birdland was important for me. Something opened up with the crashing drums and piano on "Afro Blue".
― jmm, Wednesday, 26 July 2017 15:53 (six years ago) link
can't really understand any jazz fan not liking this album tbh
it is a fine entry point to jazz, there are a million others that are good too but nothing wrong w/ this one
― marcos, Wednesday, 26 July 2017 16:09 (six years ago) link
i might listen to ascenseur pour l'echafaud more but really nothing about kob has diminished for me in the hundreds of times ive played it
― marcos, Wednesday, 26 July 2017 16:11 (six years ago) link
i listened to it this morning and thought "yeah jeez this is the best thing in the world"
― ToddBonzalez (BradNelson), Wednesday, 26 July 2017 16:16 (six years ago) link
I don't listen to KoB a ton but whenever I do I'm never surprised at the reasons why people love it, it's a great record, it's a great example of that style at done at the highest level.
Love Supreme is great but (as I believe Meltzer once opined) if it were called "Coltrane Plays Some Shit" or wasn't arranged as a suite it would be just another well regarded mid-60s quartet record.
And agreed that Live at Birdland esp that vers of Afro Blue was a huge moment for me as a 16 yo, like that was when I "got it"
― chr1sb3singer, Wednesday, 26 July 2017 16:18 (six years ago) link
I came to jazz through KoB, the first one, in my teens, that I felt I "got." You have these two titans of the form in distilled contrast — Miles Davis sounding minty (cool, a little sweet), Coltrane like sour milk — and Cannonball Adderley, whose solos bring to mind a loping gentleman in top hat and tails. The record is full of catchy bits, and I could clearly follow what the soloists were building on. Being easy to get hasn't made it less enjoyable for me.
― dinnerboat, Wednesday, 26 July 2017 16:25 (six years ago) link
I don't think I've ever listened to Live at Birdland...? I know "Alabama" but my main memory of that is from some tv performance that made a big impression on me. Rectifying now...
― Οὖτις, Wednesday, 26 July 2017 16:29 (six years ago) link
live at birdland is the fucking best
― ToddBonzalez (BradNelson), Wednesday, 26 July 2017 16:32 (six years ago) link
Same.
I also agree that KoB is similar to pre-bop stuff in that there's a focus on melody in the solos, but in a new context (minimal chord changes + reacting to everything that came before it).
― change display name (Jordan), Wednesday, 26 July 2017 17:00 (six years ago) link
Live at Birdland was the first Coltrane record I bought (although I'd taped "Live" At The Village Vanguard from the college library a couple months earlier, and it never failed to blow my mind). I didn't know anything about his history or discography; all I knew was, if Elvin Jones is on it, it'll be good. I was hooked from the first seconds of "Afro Blue."
― Montgomery Burns' Jazz (Tarfumes The Escape Goat), Wednesday, 26 July 2017 17:03 (six years ago) link
The latter.
― Mr. Snrub, Wednesday, 26 July 2017 20:46 (six years ago) link
I guess I agree that it's not the ONLY entry point and there should be more n00b entry points, okay.
Because there really are a tremendous number of extremely good jazz records, any one of which could be a good way for a n00b to get hep to what kind of magic those jive-ass cats were blowing, back in the day. Kind of Blue is, in my view, ONE of those records.
HOWEVER, there's a wide gulf between that statement and "Why the fuck do people love Kind of Blue so much?" which is what you said.
― okapi paste (Ye Mad Puffin), Wednesday, 26 July 2017 21:26 (six years ago) link
I would say Mingus Ah Um is another entrance.
― calstars, Wednesday, 26 July 2017 21:56 (six years ago) link
yeah it was Mingus Ah Um and Black Saint & Sinner Lady that made all this music click, after which I was able to get into Miles.
― Shat Parp (dog latin), Thursday, 27 July 2017 08:59 (six years ago) link
my entry point was time out which is extremely accessible but prob not the best introduction to jazz as a whole
― ToddBonzalez (BradNelson), Thursday, 27 July 2017 11:04 (six years ago) link
Daughter of jazz drummer Jimmy Cobb—last surviving member of the historic ‘Kind of Blue’ band—has launched a crowdfunding project to cover her father’s medical and living expenses. https://t.co/G4fqK0p5ZV— Ted Gioia (@tedgioia) February 3, 2020
― j., Monday, 3 February 2020 07:57 (four years ago) link
Frankly dystopian, as ever with these kinds of fundraisers.
― toilet-cleaning brain surgeon (pomenitul), Monday, 3 February 2020 09:17 (four years ago) link
:(
― Bstep, Monday, 3 February 2020 10:20 (four years ago) link
so many of these old jazz ledges seem to be dying skint. I remember reading Sunny Murray spent his later years scraping by on benefits and occasionally making pennies by bootlegging his own work.
― calzino, Monday, 3 February 2020 10:26 (four years ago) link
it was Kenny Burrell doing the same last year.
― calzino, Monday, 3 February 2020 10:32 (four years ago) link