Birth of the cool

Everyone seems to be taking historical stock this year, though not, it must be said, of the thousand years that have gone. We've been content merely to glance back at the century that's almost over, sifting the good from the bad, the important from the trivial, in a forlorn attempt to reassure ourselves that it hasn't all been in vain.

And so we turn especially to crucial moments that not just defined the arts of our age but that seemed to change forever the way we saw, or read, or heard, from those moments onwards: the first publication of Prufrock and Ulysses, the first sightings of Guernica and Lavender Mist, the first screenings of Battleship Potemkin, Nosferatu, Breathless and Psycho.

Of the key moments that shaped and changed music, some are obvious - the 1913 premiere of The Rite of Spring, the 1924 premiere of Rhapsody In Blue, the 1925 Hot Five sessions, Billie Holiday's 1935-6 dates with Teddy Wilson, Sinatra's first Capitol recordings, Presley's 1954 Sun Sessions, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, the Beatles' first LP - and some are less so, and perhaps depend on the subjectivity of taste: Crosby's early recordings, say, Ella Fitzgerald's Songbook series, Getz's Jazz Samba, the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds, Van Morrison's Astral Weeks, The Clash's London Calling.

It's notable how many of these musical moments are inextricably linked to one of our century's greatest technological developments, recorded sound, and how they would have been inconceivable without it. More particularly, Sinatra's mature achievement was inseparable from the creation of the LP, which allowed him to construct a mood far different and richer from that permitted by a recording of a single song. So, too, was that of Miles Davis, whose 1959 Kind of Blue achieved legendary status from the moment it was released. Nine years earlier Davis had made an album called Birth of the Cool, but for millions of listeners throughout the world that title has always seemed more applicable to Kind of Blue, which offers music still so startling in its purity of intent and economy of execution that each time you hear it, you think it has been newly made.

At the time it was revolutionary, though has there ever been a revolution so Zen-like in its effects and impact? With its insistence on modal rather than chordal structures, on scales rather than conventional melody-lines, it conjured up a mood that pianist Bill Evans, in the liner notes to the US release, compared to Japanese art and that led Benny Green, on the sleeve of the UK pressing, to speak of Ming vases. That's not to say that it doesn't swing, but it swings to a different beat.

And though ultimately it was Davis's album, Evans (along with his namesake, arranger Gil Evans, whose textural innovations so influenced the trumpeter) was a crucial figure in its making. The only white man in the ensemble, he was chosen, against protests by some of Davis's black friends, for his understanding of the qualities, simultaneously precise and elusive, that have made the record such a landmark.

IT'S his piano that sets in motion four of the five tracks, it's his tune that informs the middle track, Blue in Green (though Davis claimed it as his own), and it was he who took the same motif he'd already used in Some Other Time and Peace Piece and made it the basis of what many consider to be the album's greatest achievement, the concluding Flamenco Sketches.

After Kind of Blue, jazz had to be redefined. Indeed, was it jazz at all or was it some chamber hybrid? And did Davis and the rest of his brilliant sextet - John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Paul Chambers, Jimmy Cobb, Wynton Kelly (on one track only) and Evans - know that they were changing the face of music when they entered Columbia's 30th Street studio in New York on that day in March 1959 to record the first three tracks, and on another day a month later to record the last two?

Probably not. On each of the two days, when Davis handed his colleagues the outline sketches and told them simply to improvise, they were undoubtedly intent on making music rather than history.

That's how it should be. It's our response that makes such music history, even if it now turns out that we weren't responding to what had actually been played - the master tape machine recording the first three tracks in March 1959 had been running slow, so that when the tapes were played back at the correct speed, the music came out slightly faster and sharper than it should have, and that's the version we've been listening to for most of the last 40 years. On the most recent remastering, this fault has been rectified, and a hitherto unheard alternate take of Flamenco Sketches has been added.

That's the version to buy, and if you're fortunate enough to be coming to Kind of Blue for the first time, you're about to hear something that will stay with you for the rest of your life, just as it has done for millions over the last 40 years.

Miles Davis's King of Blue is available on the Columbia label.