7.2. Miles Davis and modal jazz

By the 50s, jazz was in its fifth decade of existence and had already gone through a myriad of changes. One of the trendsetters of the current period was Miles Davis. By the late 50s, he had already achieved success with Birth Of The Cool, ‘Round About Midnight, Miles Ahead and Milestones. His style had gone from cool jazz, typified by laid-back rhythms and generally softer melodies in stark contrast to bebop and its post-war variants, back to hard bop before experimenting with modal jazz. Up until the 50s, jazz had generally been played through chord progressions and scales but Miles began using modes to dictate the harmonic and melodic progressions in his compositions, starting on Milestones. John Coltrane was the other major advocate of this style, moving it further with Eastern influences and increased dissonance, on albums like Om. This style became known as modal jazz. In 1959, Miles Davis released Kind Of Blue, now seen as the epitome of modal jazz and one of the greatest jazz albums ever recorded. So What was the most famous composition from the album, made up of 16 bars in D minor, 8 in E-flat major and finally 8 more in D minor again. Austin and Størmer made an interesting observation that the opening melody of the bass and the horns acted in a similar way to call and response (Austin, Størmer, 2008). “All Blues” featured an early example of “vamping”, which would later become a significant element of funk music (Austin, Størmer, 2008)

Jazz has been the subject of racial tension from the days when critics described it as “devil music” to the exploitation of black jazz musicians by white promoters, according to Miles Davis (Davis, 1990). Musicians, critics and listeners alike marvelled at the way these black musicians composed jazz, with the unique forms of syncopation, improvisation, dissonance and, later, completely different harmonic structures. This perpetuated the notion of some kind of “innate ability”, but this was far from the truth. Black jazz musicians had to work twice as hard to be heard, some at the cost of their racial integrity and financial strain. Studying in between working job was paramount; after all, you couldn’t make up jazz music from thin air. Many of jazz’s finest composers went over to Europe to evade racial discrimination and criticism for their craft and were surprised at the unwavering reception they received. Their attitudes were that of awe and wonder as opposed to scorn for dismantling classical music in the eyes of the white Americans, but they appreciate the craft and embraced what they heard. If negro spirituals and the blues were representative of the black struggle post-Abolition, jazz was an attempt to pull musicians onto a new plateau of self-expression, the precursor for bigger and better things