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Nice Jazz Recommendations.....you know, a bit like Kind Of Blue
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Dog 3000
Dog 3000
4611 posts

That's not cool, it's modal!
Dec 02, 2009, 23:18
Sorry to get pedantic, but what yer talking about is properly called MODAL jazz.

"Cool" jazz was a movement from the end of the 1940's that peaked in the early 1950's. Miles and Gil Evans were the primary innovators ("Birth Of The Cool"), but Chet Baker was probably the most popular musician associated with the movement. Frankly I find this era to be dull -- mainly detective movie soundtrack music and melancholy love ballads.

MODAL jazz was an innovation from the mid-50's (they say Mingus' 1955 LP "Pithecanthropus Erectus" was the start) -- Miles got heavily into modal playing later in the 50's, peaking with . . . KIND OF BLUE, which is the ultimate modal jazz album.

Coltrane took the modal thing and ran with it in the first half of the 1960's (until he went "free jazz"), while Miles went in an entirely different direction for awhile (I'm not even sure how to describe his mid-60's quintet -- they were like a group with a style all their own.)

This isn't a "genre" thing so much as it is based on the actual way they play the instruments and organize the notes -- as Wikipedia puts it, "Modal jazz is jazz that uses musical modes rather than chord progressions as a harmonic framework."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_jazz

The electric "fusion" jazz of the late 1960's is rooted in the modal style (particularly Miles' loose-funky version), as is the faux-raga style of ACID ROCK that you hear in songs such as "Light My Fire", "Eight Miles High" and "Dark Star".

MODAL JAZZ IS SUPER IMPORTANT IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF HEAD MUSIC!
In reply to:
Re: Nice Jazz Recommendations.....you know, a bit like Kind Of Blue (dave clarkson)		 Replies:
Re: That's not cool, it's modal! (Deepinder Cheema)
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