IGX

Among my favorite Miles Davis:

Miles & Coltrane

In a Silent Way (Herbie Hancock, Chick Korea, Wayne Shorter)

Compact Jazz (Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Max Roach)

Porgy and Bess (Gil Evans Orchestra)

Garbage.

Right at the top.

I tend to go for the post Bitches Brew stuff, Jack Johnson, Dark Magus etc...But nothing like KOB for a dinner party.

I love Kind of Blue, but always preferred Sketches of Spain. No longer own either, though. Lost em in one of my moves.

No thanky. Jazz started getting weird around 1955. Stick with Ellington, Django, Armstrong, Basie, Muggsy Spanier, etc.

It's terrible, boring music.

Fat Cat wrote:It's terrible, boring music.

Kind of Blue.

Listen to it. Carefully. One of the great albums, truly.

Please believe me when I say I have listened to many Miles Davis albums and I hated every minute of it. Can't stand jazz in general, which is odd because I love blues. But then blues is man's music, jazz is dull nerd music.

Charles Mingus is my favorite, but Miles Davis is fantastic. As Ab God mentioned, Bitches Brew is also great.

Grandpa's Spells wrote:No thanky. Jazz started getting weird around 1955. Stick with Ellington, Django, Armstrong, Basie, Muggsy Spanier, etc.

So you're not a regular at Ken Vandermark's shows?

I drank for several yrs, and worked for several months, at the 55 Bar in NYC. Mike Stern, who played guitar for MD, used to gig there every Mon and Fri night when he was in town. There was a difficult- to- enforce two drink minimum, and I will always remember one of the bartenders there lamenting how "the music of sweaty black men on heroin ever became the music of diet coke drinking jewish grad students."
Stern, btw, was a complete douchebag.
Jazz ain't what it used to be.

You can go to this site to listen to anything on Kind of Blue:

http://www.last.fm/music/Miles+Davis/Kind+of+Blue

From http://www.npr.org/programs/jazzprofile ... s_kob.html

The best selling jazz record of all time was released 40 years ago and it still sells 5,000 copies a week. It is a universally acknowledged masterpiece, revered as much by rock and classical music fans as by jazz lovers. The album is Miles Davis' Kind of Blue.


Kind of Blue brought together seven now-legendary musicians in the prime of their careers: tenor saxophonist John Coltrane, alto saxophonist Julian "Cannonball" Adderley, pianists Bill Evans and Wynton Kelly, bassist Paul Chambers, drummer Jimmy Cobb and of course, trumpeter Miles Davis

And:

Even before Kind of Blue, Davis was experimenting with "modal" jazz, keeping the background of a tune simple while solists played a melody over one or two "modes," or scales, instead of busy chord progressions -- the usual harmonic foundation of jazz.

In addition, Bill Evans introduced Miles to classical composers, such as Bela Bartok and Maurice Ravel, who used modalities in their compositions. Davis also drew on his knowledge of the modal qualties in the blues.

With Evans, Miles worked up a few basic compositional sketches, and when the musicians arrived at the studio on March 2, 1959, they were given these outlines. Davis wanted to capture the musicians' spontaneity -- and he wanted to capture it on the first take.

Of coarse, it you don't like it, you just don't. Some people won't eat a steak.

I'm with Grim. Sketches of Spain, bichos!

Miles Davis is popular for the simple reason that his material is lightweight entry-level McPablum. The older big band stuff is even worse, of course. Bebop and Parker are the starting point, but if you follow from there to Davis the next node in the thread is elevator music. FYI.

Jack wrote:Whacked out BS. Miles is very good.

So is whoever is the most popular of all time in any genre. He's right up there with Brittney Spears.

Robert Johnson or GTFO.

Garm wrote:Miles Davis is popular for the simple reason that his material is lightweight entry-level McPablum. The older big band stuff is even worse, of course. Bebop and Parker are the starting point, but if you follow from there to Davis the next node in the thread is elevator music. FYI.

For some reason, I prefer "Miles Smiles" to KOB. Doesn't the classic/landmark status, but it's pretty hardcore bop (as I understand the term) and still has some nice texture and variety. Even Garm might like it.

KOB fades in and out of my listening habits . About 1/3 of it is snores-ville to me, but I still like his versions of "Freddy Freeloader", "So What" and "All Blues".