Sam Barrett

Kind of Blue and the economy of modal jazz

Kind of Blue has been misrepresented by its promoters. The roots in the blues of the best-selling jazz album have repeatedly been obscured in favour of modal features whose associations are less problematic for those coping with the realities of racial injustice. The case that the blues underpins the modal language of the album is made through reconsideration of the claims made for compositional features of individual tracks. Recognition of the transformed blues language that lies at the heart of the album places questions of its significance on a new footing, opening up the mix of musical languages on the album to interpretation within the context of integrationist ideals of the late 1950s. A critical reading of the album against this backdrop leads to the suggestion that the ongoing commercial success of the album can be partly attributed to a retention of integrationist ideals that masks the reality of persistent inequalities in race relations. On its latest cover, Kind of Blue is pronounced ‘perhaps the most influential and best selling jazz album of all time’. The sales figures for the album support at least the second part of this claim: latest estimates provided by Sony Music put total sales at about 4.5–5 million units, with the majority being sold during the last six years – only the record sales of Louis Armstrong are thought to be remotely comparable among recognised jazz artists. 1 As for ‘influence’, jazz historians have attributed the seminal status of the album to its exploration of innovative modal techniques as subsequently used in a wide variety of popular music. The relation between the album’s musical techniques and its popular reception, however, has never been directly addressed. As aresult,mostcriticshavetakenthealbum’sownpromotionalmaterialatfacevaluein attempting to explain its success, i.e. the formal characteristics of the tracks as explainedinthelinernotesbyBillEvanshavebeentakenasthedefiningfeatureofthe album:

Music and writing: On the compilation of Paris Bibliothèque Nationale lat. 1154

For a large part of Western music history we are forced to interpret in the absence of signs. The appearance in the ninth century of a system of signs to represent music thus not only comes as something of a relief but also raises certain questions. How would the signs have been understood? How would something with no immediate history have been comprehended? Recent answers to such questions have placed notational signs within the context of oral history, positing a degree of continuity and interaction across oral and literate domains.3 Much insight has been gained through

Performing Medieval Music

INTEREST in the performance of medieval music is nothing new. From the 1830s onwards, Dom Guéranger sought to restore plainchant, Roman liturgy and Benedictine monasticism at the abbey of Solesmes. In seeking to restore pure Gregorian forms of plainchant, Guéranger turned to modern philology, inaugurating the study of medieval manuscripts that motivated subsequent scholarship at the abbey. By the closing decades of the nineteenth century two books that would be instrumental in spreading the scholarship and performing practice of Solesmes had been published: Les mélodies grégoriennes d’après la tradition (1880), a treatise on performing chant; and the Liber gradualis (1883), the first authoritative edition of plainchant based on palaeographical research. A similar alignment of scholarship with performance of medieval music took place at the turn of the twentieth century when musicologists in German universities founded collegia musica to perform the music that they studied. Although performances were open to the public, they were mostly attended by academics, while performers were drawn from a mix of musicologists and dedicated amateurs. The first collegium musicum was established at the University of Leipzig by Hugo Riemann in 1908, and it was his protégé Wilibald Gurlitt