50 years ago this week, Miles Davis’ landmark album Kind of Blue was released. Fred Kaplan at Slate has written an excellent piece on the significance of Davis’ seminal work.
The best-selling jazz album of all time, Kind of Blue, is 50.
In 1959 I was a mere four years old and it would be 15 more years before I’d hear the recording for the first time, while working nights as a photographer for the
Arlington Citizen-Journal. Those were late nights that involved shooting countless handshake and check-presentation photos with the occasional Texas Rangers game thrown in. It was the Rangers games and the lure of a lifestyle assignment from one of the greats of local journalism, Margaret Galloway, that kept me coming to work. Those handshake photos that the publisher and his brother, the editor, craved were mind-numbing. Suffice to say that anyone who worked for a small daily still has recurring nightmares about the “grip-and-grin” assignment.
But once the evening’s shooting was done I could wrap myself in the cool black womb of the darkroom and make prints. It was there that I heard Kind of Blue for the first time. Local PBS station, KERA, had a late-night jazz program called “Flight Time” and it was all classic jazz and little talk. Jean Fugett, the dj and a Dallas Cowboys tight end, had an encyclopedic knowledge of jazz and a velvet-smooth voice and delivery that oozed cool. Fugett, an Amherst grad, went on to become a hugely successful attorney and head of TLC Beatrice International Foods. I started my jazz education under his tutelage.
I still recall the moment I heard All Blues for the first time. I stopped printing and stood motionless for the entire 11:33-minute track. I haven’t had a religious experience, but if I ever do, it’s gonna be a close second to that first listen. I was at the local Peaches Records store the next morning to buy the album and the cassette tape.
In the ensuing 34 years, I’ve worn out countless versions: vinyl, cassette, CD and each day, seven days a week, here in the studio, I queue it up in the late afternoon as a segue to cocktail hour. But I enjoy it most when it’s late night and I’m here working on images in the wee hours. The ambulances and cop cars that race up and down Lancaster Avenue are mostly still and it’s just me and Miles.
