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Many of the scales Davis chooses, despite being more abstract in their total conception, still employ many of the flatted thirds and sevenths characteristic of the blues. Modal jazz emphasized melodies created through scales, just as the blues had always done, albeit with a more limited set of tools-typically the pentatonic scale. By the late 1950s, with the rise of R&B and rock-and-roll, younger white audiences were becoming more receptive to new modes of the blues. Music scholar Samuel Barrett argues, however, that this narrative oversimplifies both the way Kind of Blue was composed and performed, and its true cultural impact.īarrett stresses instead the way this new approach made the blues more accessible to its potential audience, as is hinted in the titles “All Blues” and “Blue in Green.” Contemporary audiences sometimes forget that musical culture and the recording industry were highly segregated between music aimed at whites and African-Americans (so-called “race records”). This has justified the significance of the album for many players and aficionados. The modal approach to jazz became so popular it changed the way jazz was taught and analyzed. Davis and Evans’s “cooler” approach shifts the musical emphasis from “harmonic rhythm” of post-bop jazz, toward the melodic inventiveness of individual players. As this detailed video on modal jazz by Polyphonic explains, this creates a more open network of harmonic relationships. “Modes” maintain the basic intervals of an underlying major or minor scale, but move the tonic (first note) to one of its other notes, creating different moods or coloration. Rather than basing its five tunes on a rigid framework of changing chords, as was conventional for post-bop music, Davis and Evans wrote pieces with a more limited set of scales in different modes. Kind of Blue popularized a new approach to improvisation. Its unforgettable solos by Davis, tenor saxophonist John Coltrane, alto saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, and pianist Bill Evans create an ethereal atmosphere the album continues to be one of the most beloved records in jazz. It remains the best-selling jazz album of all time. Legendary jazz trumpeter Miles Davis recorded the second and final session of his seminal album Kind of Blue on April 22nd, 1959.