Kind of Blue

Here, Fred Kaplan lays out the musical language presented by Kind of Blue, and why it was so landmark. While he does an excellent job of describing that newness in the album, I'm going to find the fault in the article...it's what I do (shrugs).

Says Kaplan: "The album's legacy is mixed, precisely for this reason. It opened up a whole new path of freedom to jazz musicians: Those who had something to say thrived; those who didn't, noodled. That's the dark side of what Miles Davis and George Russell (and, a few months later, Ornette Coleman, in his own even-freer style of jazz) wrought: a lot of noodling—New Age noodling, jazz-rock-fusion noodling, blaring-and-squealing noodling—all of it baleful, boring, and deadly (literally deadly, given the rise of tight and riveting rock 'n' roll). Some of their successors confused freedom with just blowing whatever came into their heads, and it turned out there wasn't much there."

This statement betrays the overall biases in the article. Where is the attention to musical detail that allows him to dismiss noodling as an art form (or maybe just specific types of noodling)? Why isn't Miles Davis' style included in noodling? While he spends a couple of pages and several musical examples on convincing us that Kind of Blue is transcendent, he sweeps an entire generation of musicians into the trash can with this nebulous word, "noodling". I might also note that he is just wrong to call this deadly, as the noodling he is referring to became the best selling jazz music to date. Jazz was dead in term's of sales long a decade prior to the release of Kind of Blue.

This type of dismissal leaves me scratching my head: Why is it that people despise so-called "smooth jazz" so much? Where's the argument to back up such passionate hatred