Copenhagen Jazz Orchestra: Kind of Blue – Revisited
Join us on a journey to Miles Davis' legendary 1959 album Kind of Blue with the Copenhagen Jazz Orchestra.
Programme
Miles Davis (1926-1991): Kind of Blue (1959) arr. Lars Møller.
Miles Davis' original Kind of Blue album has rightly been called jazz's greatest work of art. The 1959 album, which featured Cannonball Adderly, John Coltrane, and Bill Evans, became not only Davis' best-selling album, but the best-selling jazz album of all time. The album is the first album in history to focus primarily on the genre of modal jazz, and has inspired generations of musicians across all genres. Although Miles Davis had released the album Milestones the year before, the true milestone of the era is actually Kind of Blue.
With this concert, Copenhagen Jazz Orchestra invites the audience right into the holiest chambers of jazz, where Kind of Blue is reinterpreted in a large jazz orchestra format, and with the orchestra's excellent soloists directly in the footsteps of Coltrane, Miles, Evans and Cannonball.
Participants
Copenhagen Jazz Orchestra
Copenhagen Jazz Orchestra's mission is to be the major jazz orchestra in Denmark, which combines, at a high artistic level, a foundation in jazz and Western music traditions with a global outlook and inspiration from other parts of the world. Since the mid-1990s, the band has had a flexible chamber music ensemble sound with the best jazz musicians/composers of the generation, and innovative creative projects have been defining the modern big band sound in Denmark and Scandinavia.
Modal Jazz
Modal jazz was a reaction to the chord-heavy bebop and hard bop, where the chord, instead of a few-beat chord change, could last for eight bars or more. It led to a more horizontal (scale-based) than vertical (chord-based) approach to improvisation, and it led to a different approach to dissonance and the use of chords.
Incidentally, Miles Davis himself came from bebop and hardbop.
Good examples are So What or Flamenco Sketches, both from Kind of Blue.
The concert is part of the Copenhagen Jazz Festival.
