In my opinion, five songs isn’t really long enough for an album. Unless you’re Miles Davis. If you’re Miles Davis, it’s long enough for an epoch-defining tour de force.
It helps that the songs are pretty long – the album still comes out to around 45 minutes. But much more importantly, the songs are very, very good.
A lot of people use the phrase “dinner party jazz” derisively. Sebastian Wilder, La La Land‘s tragic jazz-obsessed antihero, would most certainly take issue with the phrase, particularly when applied to an album of such significance – and indeed quality – as Kind of Blue. But jazz and dinner parties are two of my favourite things, and as a combination, they are exceptional. In my perfect dinner party, Kind of Blue is how I start the evening. Not when people start arriving – the dinner party begins before then. Kind of Blue is for when I have a teatowel draped over my shoulder, a glass of wine in my left hand, and a pair of tongs in my right. (I haven’t quite decided what I’m doing with the tongs – my perfect dinner party menu is perhaps a blog post for another day.)
That’s because Kind of Blue is exciting. Live jazz has an energy that’s almost impossible to capture because of its improvisatinoal nature, because of the interplay between the musicians, the tension, and the focus of the audience – all of which I’ve found to be present in jazz clubs from Berlin to Oslo and in between. With Kind of Blue, Miles Davis managed it. From the opening bass notes of So What, I’m transported not to the studio where the album was recorded, but to a dingy, crowded jazz club. But at the same time, I’m right there in my kitchen, preparing to host.
At a time when dinner parties seem a distant memory (and indeed an imagined memory, considering that I’m yet to host many of the dinner parties I envisage), Kind of Blue has become an important album for me – even more so than it was before. The real problem with lockdown isn’t that I’m trapped inside, or even that I’m trapped in St Andrews – it’s that I’m trapped in my head. Anything that offers a bit of escapism, whether an album or a film, is therefore valuable and welcome. Kind of Blue does this better than almost anything I’ve found, because rather than taking me to a distant place (Rory Stewart’s The Places In Between took me to Afghanistan which, while fascinating, wasn’t somewhere I could really take up residence in my mind) it takes me to a familiar place – one which I can remember and imagine with relative ease.
Dinner party jazz isn’t just background music. Kind of Blue certainly isn’t – it’s an album that both deserves and demands your full attention. But sometimes, that attention isn’t best given in the form of sitting in an otherwise-silent room. There’s a danger, I think, that when things become “highbrow” they lose some of their magic, their charm. Classical music concerts, when it was modern music rather than “classical”, were full of applause. By putting classical music on a pedastal, classical concerts have become much more sober experiences, designed to appeal to the delicate sensibilities of intellectuals. There’s a danger that something similar will happen to jazz – even just associating it with dinner parties is a part of that, and maybe this process is irreversible. But by listening to it while I cook, I’m giving it the sort of attention that it truly deserves.
Kind of Blue is foot-tapping music, and as I slide around the kitchen in my socks, it’s part of the soundtrack to my life – not highbrow, not sober, not to be enjoyed in isolation. It should be interrupted, spoken over, and danced to. By listening to it in a time with a heartbreaking lack of interruptions, I find myself able to return to happier, livelier times – but rather than filling me with nostalgia or melancholy, it fills me with hope and excitement for the days when I’ll once again open the door and invite in the guests. The candles are lit, dinner is delayed, and Miles Davis’ saxophone sings from the kitchen speaker. Welcome home.