American jazz has travelled a rocky trajectory from the Ragtime of the early 20th century to ’20s Dixieland to the ’30s Big Band Era to post-war Bebop to ’50s Cool Jazz to late ’60s Fusion to Whatever It Is Now. Along the way rockers attached a caboose to the main engine and picked up on what the jazz guys were laying down. Miles Davis’ 1959 “Kind of Blue” album was one of those transitional routes, taming the frenetic solo instrumentality of Bebop and unifying it with the Cool Jazz modality of the West Coast, typified by Chet Baker. Many of the young blues players and rockers of the ’60s and ’70s picked up on this New Cool and appropriated it to their own styles before Miles nabbed guitarist John McLaughlin, pianist Chick Corea and saxman Wayne Shorter and forged his own path in Jazz/Rock Fusion with “Bitches Brew” in 1970. Here’s the seminal “All Blues” track from Davis’ landmark “Kind of Blue” featuring John Coltrane on tenor sax, Cannonball Adderley on alto sax, Bill Evans on piano, Jimmy Cobb on drums, and Paul Chambers on bass.
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