59. Kind of Blue by Miles Davis

 59. Kind of Blue by Miles Davis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gK_Tmcrv6cg&list=OLAK5uy_nNowSDRXeotBWkCyljP2pnYkLOvj9CMnA

Miles Davis on trumpet and Bill Evans on piano and John Coltrane on the saxophone. If that sentence didn't make your ears perk up in joyous anticipation, then you're not a Jazz fan (of the music genre, not the basketball team). It is a jazz masterpiece, and playing it in surround sound stereo while you're relaxing at home by the fire with the lights turned low and drinking a cold but ice-less drink is one of the nicest things you can ever do for your ears. 

There is no single stand-out song on this album. They're all practically perfect in every way--like a musical Mary Poppins. When most people think of trumpet jazz, they think of loud high notes and blistering fast runs up and down the scale that speed past your ears like a freight train about to run off the track. But Miles would have none of that on Kind of Blue. It's slow and soft (mostly) and controlled. Being a trumpet player myself, I am amazed at what Miles accomplished with this album. I think Jazz is the greatest artistic contribution that America has made to world culture, and this album in particular is one of the best jazz recordings ever made, an opinion shared by many others, as it is often cited as the best-selling jazz album of all time. 

Even though I learned to love jazz trumpet in middle school and high school--having taken many trumpet lessons from that great jazz trumpet player Tom Banyas--I will admit that I discovered this album later on in life during grad school at Utah State. I'd listen to this album repeatedly for hours at a time whenever I had to do HTML coding or other routine tasks in at work. Strangely enough, this "blue" music made me feel happy enough to keep churning away at the mindless computer work until it got done. I think the happy feeling may come from the way it kind of connects up with the jazz of my childhood--the Charlie Brown TV special piano jazz by Vince Guaraldi, which is the music they play in heaven whenever the angels take a break to clean out the trumpets (angel spit is seriously corrosive) and tune the harps (because angel fingernails are harder than diamonds).

If I ever pick up the trumpet again and relearn how to play it, this is the kind of trumpet music I'd want to play. (Because my old lips wouldn't be able to handle the high-note pep band songs.) And when I die, if they hand me a trumpet, I hope that this is the kind of music they want to hear...in hell. Because that's where I figure I'm headed. But as long as I'm still above ground, to be honest, I'd rather listen to this album than any church music any day. In fact, if they started playing "Flamenco Sketches" during sacrament, I'd be tempted to plunk my sinner's butt down on the back row each Sunday, even though we're currently smack dab in the middle of a get-out-of-church-free pandemic. Do you think Chris could use his bishoply powers to make that happen? He probably could. Once. 

"Welcome, brothers and sisters, to the House of Jazz!"