It is a cliché that Miles Davis was a virtuoso of change , quickchange artist , a shape-shifter who , in the words of his one-time antagonist Norman Mailer ( speaking of himself , of course ) described his own art as trapping “ the Prince of Truth in the act of switching a style ”. It ’ s less often apparent how clear a line runs through his work from the early , slightly awkward bebop recordings to the often-dismissed hip-hop experiments of his last days . Kind of Blue seems to come in the middle of his career , a summit that fulfils our deep and unshakable conviction that creative lives invariably form a distinct arc , rising out of derivative prentice work in which the artist works through his influences and awkwardly resists the prevailing critical fashions of his time , peaking with some summit performance and then declining into self-pastiche . This is a very convenient model for those who prefer to think of Miles Davis ’ career as having reached a peak with Kind of Blue before moving into more ambiguous and even suspect territory with the next great quartet of the mid 1960s and then going over some kind of aesthetic edge with the rock / funk / Stockhausen-influenced works that ended that decade . Such listeners might make a case for In a Silent Way as a brief return to melody , rationality , beauty , but they can ’ t go with Miles into Bitches Brew , Live Evil , On the Corner , Agharta , Dark Magus . . .
All very convenient , but summits are strange places to be and as Tenzing Norgay and Sir Edmund Hillary would have confirmed , you don ’ t spend a great deal of time there , even if it is a crowning achievement . In the same way , we now rather skip past Kind of Blue in our admiration of it , preferring to dust it and put it back on the shelf , always careful , though , to have the latest remastering or version in our collections . Is that an argument for not buying this version ? Quite the reverse . Instead , it ’ s a strong call for not just buying it , but also listening to it with fresh ears , as if it had just been
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