Miles Davis - Kind of Blue [Paperback]

Miles Davis (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 2000

Regarded by experts as "the best jazz recording of all time," the 1959 release Kind of Blue is one of the most influential albums in the history of jazz. This exceptional book features transcriptions of all the improvised solos as well as sketch scores for all the songs from this landmark release. This includes Miles' trumpet parts, the brilliant sax work of John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderly, and rhythm section parts to use as guides for the feel of each composition. Songs include: So What * Freddie Freeloader * Blue in Green * All Blues * and Flamenco Sketches. Also includes background information on the album and notes on the folio. Essential for all jazz fans!

Product Details

Sample Music Notation [48kb PDF]

• Paperback: 64 pages
• Publisher: Hal Leonard Corporation (April 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0634011693
• ISBN-13: 978-0634011696
• Product Dimensions: 11.9 x 9 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #628,801 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Horn Centric, Not as Useful as it Could Be, August 3, 2006

By 

K. Harby "LocustTrees" - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Miles Davis - Kind of Blue: Deluxe Edition (Hardcover)

Sure, we're glad to have this, but -- please note, it is not a complete transcription as claimed; the drum part is not transcribed. Instead the transcribers fink out by writing "Drums play time" -- uh, yeah, that's what jazz drummers do all right. But there's a good reason why jazz drummers spend a lot of time with this recording. The transcribers don't know about that, apparently.

The bass part also gets neglected in some areas with a just "bass walks." Again, yes, but serious students of these instruments and of ensemble interaction would like to see the actual notes and rhythms. There are many different ways to walk a bass, and there can be genius in this too. What a horn player plays can be affected by what the bass player is doing.

My other beef with this book is that it is not in concert pitch, except for the piano and bass parts (when provided, see above). Sure hope you're good at sight-transposing from Bb and Eb, or perhaps you play saxes in various keys. For the rest of us it's a big bother. It would have been much better to put the whole thing in C, as most serious instrumentalists who play a transposing instrument can read C music.

Overall accuracy seems solid.

So, better than nothing but somewhat disappointing.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good resource, but far from perfect, November 9, 2005

By 

Maurice Micklewhite - See all my reviews

This review is from: Miles Davis - Kind of Blue (Paperback)

This is the whole Kind of Blue album, transcribed.

I've (painstakingly) transcribed all the horn solos on So What, and I can safely say there are a lot of mistakes in the book. The Davis solo is accurate, being slower, I suppose, but the others have wrong notes and missing notes. Maybe not a tremendous amount, perhaps 5% of the notes or less, but still, when you pay the money for someone else to transcribe it ...

But it is a good starting point for your own transcriptions, if nothing else. And maybe 95% accuracy is close enough for you.

11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Can one map out the heavens?, August 4, 2006

By 

Edward Tambling (London, England) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Miles Davis - Kind of Blue: Deluxe Edition (Hardcover)

This is an unfortunately poor attempt to transcribe the music of "Kind of Blue", the world's favourite jazz album. Full of incredibly careless and basic errors, this edition of transcriptions really marrs the celestial and transcendent glory of the recordings.

Many of the melodic transcriptions of the horn solos are passable (although based much around what is likely to have been played rather than what was) but the piano transcriptions are pretty useless. On the whole, the score is pretty minimal on the page: the piano and bass parts are often omitted, even at the head of a piece: this is extremely counter-productive to the purpose of the book - to provide the music in a form as "study scores for small group jazz" (thus the horns are all notated as transposing instruments to this purpose), even if such performances would produce as erroneous a rendition that these scores would inevitably instigate.

Despite all of this, a substantial introduction by Bill Kirchner, the author of "A Miles Davis Reader", is the redemption to this ill-fated endeavour: a thouroughly interesting and illuminating insight is given here to the album that this edition fails to capture on paper. Even down to a contribution to the debate on the authorship of "Blue in Green" does this discourse fathom.

However, this has failed to distract me from the fact that good, solid transcriptions are not difficult to make these days, and that a lot more care could have been injected into the production of this book. Do not buy this if you can help it - make your own transcriptions if you really want them.

But, with all this said, can one really put such a beautiful masterpiece into notated form? Can one effectively render poetry into prose? Can one map out the heavens?