Modal Jazz

By 1958, bebop had become so harmonically complex — so full of rapidly changing chords and substitutions — that improvisation had become an obstacle course. Miles Davis and his musical collaborator George Russell (who had been developing a “Lydian Chromatic Concept” of tonal organization) arrived at a solution: instead of many chords, use few or none. Give the improviser a single mode — a scale and its characteristic intervals — and let the melody develop at its own speed.

Kind of Blue (1959) — recorded in two sessions in March and April, with Davis, John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Bill Evans, Paul Chambers and Jimmy Cobb — was modal jazz’s founding document and the best-selling jazz album of all time. “So What” begins with a bass-and-piano dialogue, then a D Dorian mode for 16 bars, a half-step shift to E-flat Dorian for 8 bars, and back to D. That’s the entirety of the harmonic material. The rest is melody.

The liberation was profound. John Coltrane took it further with My Favorite Things (1960) — playing soprano saxophone on a single scale over long pedal-point vamps, spiraling through what he called “sheets of sound.” Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter and the Miles Davis second great quintet developed modal approaches through the mid-1960s. The spaciousness and melodic freedom of modal jazz influenced rock musicians as much as jazz: the Grateful Dead’s extended improvisations, Pink Floyd’s sustained modal explorations, and the entire psychedelic rock tradition of long-form jamming owe a debt to Davis’s 1959 sessions.