Kind of Bluepedia
| 1959 | John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and Miles Davis at Columbia Records' 30th Street Studio in New York City. |
Kind of Bluepedia is a fan-operated database of information on the best-selling jazz album of all time. This is not an official resource, it is simply a passion project created by a music student with lots of stories and images surrounding something I really care about! I created this site with only the hope of both keeping track of this information and making it accessible to others (all in one place). Hopefully this site helps to guide you to some of the primary sources that focus around the making of a very special album. If you have any questions, corrections, or comments, please dm me at @billevansfan on Discord.
In Bill Evans's liner notes of Kind of Blue, he details the importance of the band's spontaneity in the album's end result, detailing the delicate frameworks Miles Davis presented to the rest of his sextet to record five polished vignettes in the work's shifting emotional atmosphere. Davis achieves this in part through his use of modes: a term used here to refer loosely to alterations on a major scale, starting on different degrees as its tonic, as well as Evans's stacked quartal voicings (as often associated with French composers Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy) on the piano to build and release the tension of the compositions. Kind of Blue is often praised for it's European Impressionist-classical influence, while often neglecting the importance of Black American jazz composers on the album: Bud Powell, who was cited by Bill Evans as his most prominent musical influence, provides some of the earliest examples of both an expansion of the Lydian mode and as a unique stacked polytonal voicing in his 1951 composition "Un Poco Loco." The album, how it came to be, and its influences are widely discussed among its listeners today, but I hope to provide both some context and share some of my own perspectives.
With this site, I intend to archive some of the stories, articles, interviews, pictures, videos, and more that I have collected over my time as a fan and provide some of my thoughts (when appropriate). This wiki is a work in progress.