The making of Kind of Blue, the iconic jazz album by American trumpeter Miles Davis, contains a rich seam of lessons about innovation — how to structure and enable it to thrive.
The lessons from the making of the best-selling jazz album of all time, and Davis’s overall approach to music making, include the need for an idea upon which innovation will be built, and the selection of the right team to turn that idea into something workable. The right team must also be given a relatively free hand, a notable Davis trait. He would give his band a few pointers and expect it to get on with it.
The lessons from Davis’s approach to music making are relevant for the public and private sectors. Tradition or culture is the mortal enemy of innovation. “This is how we have been doing things here for years” is the often-heard refrain of “old-timers” in institutions. That’s why, for example, companies often place innovation projects outside their day-to-day management structures, only bringing them in once they have been tried and tested.
Kind of Blue was one major milestone in Davis’s musical journey. It started with an idea aimed at loosening the harnesses of tight harmony on melody and therefore enabling better improvisation. These harnesses had been most pronounced in the Bebop genre, which involved fast-changing harmonies (chords), with a different chord every two beats. This constrained improvisation, including the length of phrases improvisers could play. As Davis would explain in an interview a year before he recorded Kind of Blue: “The music has gotten thick. Guys give me tunes and they’re full of chords.”
Davis’s friend, George Russell, a pianist and composer, developed the theory on how to loosen up the harmonic harnesses. Russell’s idea was outlined in a book, The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization. Key to Russell’s concept is that the Lydian scale has one tonal centre, whereas the traditional major scale has two (hence it’s also referred as the diatonic scale). This means the major scale, with its two tonics, “is in a state of resolving” to one of the two tonics, which explains the need for a song’s harmonic structure that requires musicians to play, including improvisation, in a manner that travels (resolves) towards one of the tonal centres.
The Lydian scale, on the other hand, “is in a state of unity with itself”, allowing musicians greater melodic and rhythmic freedom because they don’t have to reach a tonal centre as often as the music built on a major scale would demand. Classical composers had for years composed music this way.
To turn Russell’s insights into an album, Davis needed a good team. First, pianist Bill Evans, who had played in Russell’s band but had also introduced Davis to numerous classical composers, was key. So was John Coltrane, a man in search of a new direction but one for whom long phrases, which is what modal jazz enabled, were a staple. Then there was innovative altoist Julian “Cannonball” Adderley, bassist Paul Chambers and drummer Jimmy Cobb. Cobb would later recall in an interview that the only guidance he got from Davis was: “Jimmy, you know what to do. Just make it sound like it’s floating.” And he did make Kind of Blue feel like it was floating. Evans also said the same, describing Davis’s “leadership genius” as “not saying very much” but getting things done.
For Chambers, who was immortalised in a Coltrane song, Mr PC, the challenge was great. So What, the album’s opening track, is based on two Dorian chords, D and Eb, with D taking up the first 16 bars of the song, Eb the next eight, and then returning to D for the remaining eight bars to make a 32-bar song. But when you loosen up the harmonic structure this way, you run the risk of the song’s harmonic and rhythmic foundations becoming boring quickly. So Chambers had to lay down a relaxed walking bassline but do so in a manner that made it all interesting to the listener, which he achieved admirably.
Davis — never a prisoner to “this is how we have always done it here” — would continue to take music in new directions, building on other influences and giving his chosen band the relative freedom to make it all work. That’s why he remains one of the most innovative jazz musicians of all time.
• Sikhakhane, a former spokesperson for the finance minister, National Treasury and SA Reserve Bank, is editor of The Conversation Africa. He writes in his personal capacity.
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