1001 Albums: #12. Miles Davis - Birth of the Cool

Miles Davis - Birth of the Cool
Capitol, 1957

Jazz still has that foreign film without the subtitles feel for me, and I reckon it will for a while. I would probably need a semester long How to Listen to Jazz class to truly get it. That would honestly probably do the trick. I took a class on Film Music through the music department at KU during my undergrad and it absolutely blew my mind. Not only did I gain a greater appreciation for film scores and how they did a lot of heavy lifting in delivering a film's emotional impact, but I learned a ton about timbres and orchestrations and all that musicology stuff. The final in that class involved picking a movie from a list--I chose Bernard Herrmann's score for Citizen Kane--and identifying every music cue in the film. I watched Citizen Kane five or six times, IDed the cues, the instruments involved, how they worked in the greater cinematic landscape, and I feel like I learned more about film in that class than any of the classes from the film department proper (I did take a film music class through the film department from the legendary Chuck Berg, but like all of his classes it was a sumptuous softball of film (music) appreciation than it was a scholarly powerhouse). That's as close as I can get to jazz, and while that class was helpful for like, identifying oboes and bassoons, there's so much social and cultural history to jazz that it is tough to properly assess without a 700 page book on the subject. 

But here we are, listening to one of the most famous jazz records of all time and it's still essentially pearls before swine. It's lovely to listen to, and I wish I had more context for how this fit into jazz as a whole. The book provides a little context, and there's a nice little trivia bit that reminded me he did the score for Louis Malle's excellent Elevator to the Gallows, which I now need to revisit, but there's just so much history. In my waning days at KC Public Library I visited Kansas City's American Jazz Museum as research for a breakout box (think a breakout room, but self contained in a lockbox for teenagers to figure out how to break into, which shouldn't it be called a break-in box? I digress) about Kansas City's music history. I left before the project reached completion, but it was fun to hang out in that space. Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, Miles Davis, Birth of the Cool, another record I can see myself randomly throwing on while cooking dinner.