The Tale of the Unwilling High Notes - Why I love Kind of Blue (Miles Davis)

The internet can tell you what Kind of Blue means to jazz, to music and to seedy, smoke-lit rooms. It can tell you a gazillion times and with the type of metaphor that means just enough to leave you wondering whether it means anything at all.  But it can't tell you what Kind of Blue means to me. Well, it can now. But it couldn't before. Damn you internet.

I first started playing trumpet when I was about 9. I didn't want to. I wanted to play the saxophone. If you played the saxophone you could at least be in bands like The Police and Dire Straights. But that dark-glassed, baggy-suit-pantsed, shoulder-padded future was buzzed out of existence when during instrument trials I was one of the few able to get any sound at all out of the trumpet.

"You, Davies. You're playing trumpet." Said the music teacher whose name I can't remember but whose shouting-based method of teaching (we'll call it yell-ed) is still an irregular feature of my nightmares.

Thus my fate was sealed. I would be a trumpet player.

Of course I was bummed. I didn't know any trumpet players and the only music my Mum could play me initially was classical, which didn't exactly improve my nine-year-old outlook on the whole situation.

In my lessons my teacher would play me Glenn Miller - Little Brown Jug and that haunting ever-tune In The Mood. Great, I'd think, I can play old-people music.

Eventually someone played me some James Morrison, which was better. He played loud, he played fast and he played high. He even played music I knew! This was an improvement, now I had something to aspire to. The problem was, my fart-based musical exposition bore little resemblance to the joyful ditties Mr. Morrison could pump out.

As I practised I got better. My Camptown Races evolved into When the Saints Go Marching In, which lead to closed-eyed renditions of Moon Dance. I was learning to love the horn. But no matter how hard I practised or how tight I squeezed, I could not find the squeaky heights of Mr Morrison.

Somewhere along the way I picked up some Maynard Ferguson and Arturo Sandoval, nether of whom did anything for my growing feelings of high-note inadequacy. The very definition of trumpet success was increasingly defined by ear splitting, cranium bulging high notes. And I was falling well short of that definition.

It was around this time that a friend gave me a copy of Kind of Blue on cassette. At first I was unimpressed, but then I'd been led to believe that to be any good you had to play loud, high and fast. With a few listens it started to grow on me - the horn lines became familiar. They weren't loud, they weren't fast and they weren't high, but for the first time I felt like I was listening to someone play the trumpet like they were trying to say something.

Link: https://youtu.be/kbxtYqA6ypM

(Note, with the chatter about the TPP I'm not inclined to share an actual copy of the album, especially when it's freely available.)

Listening to Miles Davis helped me find Freddie Hubbard, Chet Baker, and eventually Dizzy Gillespie. That album took me in a completely different direction with my horn playing, not a particularly successful one mind you, but certainly one that was a lot more fun.

For many years I idolised Miles Davis because of that album. Then I read his autobiography and I learnt to love that album in spite of Miles Davis (I mean, what a tool). But that album will always be the reason I learnt to love playing the trumpet without the high notes, which has meant a lot to me.

Kind of Blue is often called the greatest jazz album of all time. I wouldn't know about that - I haven't listened to them all - but it's definitely one of my favourite and one I can listen to over and over again.