Episode Details

What kind of artist creates one of the most foundational works in his field and then refuses to play it, saying it physically hurts and comparing it to eating day-old reheated leftovers? This episode is a narrative biography of Miles Davis at the most pivotal turning point of his creative life, the making of the 1959 album Kind of Blue. In late 1958 Davis was leading one of the most acclaimed and profitable hard bop bands in jazz, with John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Paul Chambers, Jimmy Cobb and Wynton Kelly, yet he felt the rapidly changing chord structures were strangling creativity.

We explain how George Russell's 1953 theory of modality gave Davis an escape route, why improvising on a single scale is harder than it sounds because it removes the safety net of chord changes, and how Davis brought back pianist Bill Evans for the project while keeping Wynton Kelly on one blues track, Freddie Freeloader. We go inside the March and April 1959 sessions at Columbia's 30th Street Studio, where sketches were handed out hours before recording with almost no rehearsal, and correct two persistent myths: the album was not recorded in one perfect take, and the producer was Irving Townsend, not Teo Macero. Finally we look at the album's influence on rock, classical and hip hop musicians, the arrival of Ornette Coleman's free jazz in the same year, and Davis's decision to abandon the modal style for electric fusion.

• Why the hard bop sextet's success felt like a trap to Davis by late 1958
• How George Russell's modal theory replaced the maze of chords with a single continuous scale
• The personnel balancing act between Bill Evans and Wynton Kelly
• What actually happened in the 1959 sessions, including false starts and alternate takes
• Why Davis later dismissed Kind of Blue and kept reinventing himself