Nick Hoad

We’ve come to the first of two albums containing music which was on the GCSE or A-Level syllabus when I was studying for those particular exams. The other one is Kate Bush’s Hounds Of Love, but that’s not until we get to number 46 on the list. If you’d talked to me in 2015, I could have told you everything there was to know about the track All Blue, partly because I was a studious little nerd but mainly because it was my favourite of the selection we’d been given to dissect. (Grace by Jeff Buckley has grown on me in recent years, but that’s by the by.) I’m a pianist/clarinettist without the attention span to study classical performance properly, I like a bit of jazz.

Kind Of Blue was much as I remembered it being back in school, even the tracks I hadn’t looked at in any detail. This is because So What and Freddie Freeloader are cut from exactly the same cloth as All Blue, and the remaining two tracks, Blue In Green and Flamenco Sketches are cut from the same cloth as each other, which is in turn quite similar to the cloth from which the first three were cut. A clunkier sentence has rarely been written.

“Only five tracks?” I hear you ask. Yes, and the album’s over forty-five minutes long. The average track length is 9:09, and you’d imagine from the disdain I’ve had in the past for songs which go on too long that this would be a bad thing. I don’t actually dislike long songs as a rule, I dislike long songs that fail to justify their length, and the thing about jazz is it has a wonderful source of variety practically baked into its very DNA: improvisation. A collection of jazz musicians at the top of their game can easily hold an audience’s attention for a good while, even over the top of an accompaniment which doesn’t change much, as in the case of the laid-back grooves of Kind Of Blue. I do feel sorry for the drummer and bassist though, they never get a chance to take centre stage here. The music faded into the background of my focus at times, but never to the point where I was actively tuning it out or ignoring it. I think that could even be looked at as a good thing; the space where listening in the background is just as good as listening actively is a difficult balance to hit and Kind Of Blue manages it nicely.

However, the improvisatory nature is a bit of a double-edged sword. The facts that A) the band very rarely all plays at once, B) the pieces are almost being written as they’re performed, and C) the subgenre of modal jazz is dedicated to the exploration of a relatively constrained harmonic world, means there’s a distinct lack of standout moments or surprises to stick in my head after listening.

It’s at this point that the five-star rating system in place begins to fall apart slightly. It’s perfect for judging various different products trying to accomplish the same goal, but that’s arguably not the case when looking at music from a wide range of genres as I’m doing now. My verdict on this will be four stars, but for very different reasons to both The Dark Side Of The Moon and Saturday Night Fever. I’m sure there are some albums on the list whose ratings I’ll agonise over for a long time. Indeed, we’re only a twentieth of the way through and I’ve amended one rating already (I deducted half a star from Metallica). It’s also come to my attention that there are a good number of hip-hop albums to come later down the line, and I *really* don’t know what to expect from that. The verdicts I give to the first few may change as the later ones arrive and I get more of a feel for what they’re going for.

That was a good little distraction from the topic at hand wasn’t it? It’s possibly because I can sense the project growing into something a little bit bigger than a simple series of reviews, or maybe just because I haven’t got much more to say about Kind Of Blue. It has neither the highs nor the lows of Saturday Night Fever, and wanders around a comfortable middle ground which happens to appeal to me.

Next Time: The Beatles – Abbey Road