Customer Reviews

Miles Davis - Kind of Blue

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

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?

This book is really great. It's in-depth, and even has the heads for all the songs for all the parts. Because all the parts for the songs are there (drums, trumpet, saxes, piano, and bass) we were able to perform some of the songs, even using some of the solos from them. Great book! Also includes some background info from the songs too.

this is a great book for the advanced jazz student to learn about the best selling jazz albumn of all time.

understand the melodies and thier relationship to the chords from this monumental recording.

learn about miles, coltranes and the gangs improvisational techniques...

a m ust have for the serious student...

Over the last few years I've wasted too much money on Hal Leonard publications only to find them incomplete and full of errors. The people doing the transcriptions seem to be lazy and careless but not nearly so much as the so-called "editors" who let this amateurish work go into print. Better to sit down with the recording and sharpen your own ears through careful listening.

OK, getting this transcription book is a no brainer. Kind of Blue is as close to being part of every jazz musicians education as anything ever will be.

So--here's the question: Why isn't there a complete score for this album, with all parts (comping, bass, drums--not just the solos) transcribed and presented in score format, the same way that classical masterpieces are? There is a Gil Evans/Miles Davis book like this, but not one for Kind of Blue, as far as I know.
Somebody needs to collect the separate transcriptions that I know are out there, and put this thing together! Every student of jazz on the planet would buy it, if it were reasonably priced at say $30.

Here's an example of what can be learned from this kind of book: Every jazz piano student learns Bill Evans' comping voicings for All Blues, but how many learn it the way Evans actually played it--using 2 notes per hand--not all 4 notes in one hand?