It may seem quite irrelevant to speak about latter-day remakes of classic movies , and all the more so given that Van Sant ’ s Psycho isn ’ t quite the one-for-one copy that people – mostly people who haven ’ t seen it – are apt to claim . So here ’ s the thing . In 2014 , a punk-jazz group called Mostly Other People Do the Killing made a new version of Kind of Blue . Fifty-five years after Miles Davis and his great ( est ?) group recorded “ So What ”, “ Freddie Freeloader ”, “ All Blues ”, “ Blue in Green ” and “ Flamenco Sketches ”, MOPDTK made it all over again . They didn ’ t work new variations on the themes . They didn ’ t “ deconstruct ” a masterpiece or attempt to “ detourn ” it in the fashionable modern way . They made it note for note , as close as possible to the original recording . They even named it Blue , as if any uncertainty and ambiguity in the title had been removed for good . Hearing Blue is like visiting a familiar place from your past life that has been changed little and subtly over the years . It isn ’ t quite right , but it ’ s not entirely wrong either . Sometimes people note this effect when listening to the original mono version of an album that has also been released in the clunky stereo of the time . Kind of Blue exists in both versions and one does feel a certain oddness when exposed to the mono after years and years of stereo conditioning . It ’ s perhaps a little like going back for a moment to monochrome rather than full-colour footage . There was a time when documentary makers looking at the Second World War deliberately eschewed a plentiful archive of colour footage in favour of shaky , grainy black and white . It seems perverse now to opt for a lower-quality and resolution actuality , but the logic was that we thought of the past as being in black and white and that the use of colour would convince viewers that they were watching a latter-day dramatic reconstruction , not the real thing . Listening in mono is analogous to that . Just as we assume the classical world was cool and quiet and artfully distressed , a missing limb here , a mere torso there , and not the brightly painted , gaudy , Playboy-mansion reality of Imperial
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