Miles Davis stays cool, taking a couple of seconds more to run down the solo order for Cannonball Adderley: “Him, me, him, you . . . .”
Paul Chambers does not ask about a bass solo— if the horns take the melody out after Cannonball’s alto solo, then there obviously won’t be a bass solo. Experienced players like Chambers can deduce important information from what is not said.
“Here we go. C-O-62290, no title, take one.” The producer talks over Miles in a friendly yet insistent time-is-money way. Nonetheless, Davis continues to tweak the solo structure. “Hey, Wynton,” he says to pianist Wynton Kelly. “After Cannonball, you play again and then we’ll come in and end it.”
That settles it—no bass solo. Miles taps off the tempo with his foot—precisely but almost inaudibly—and Chambers locks in with Jimmy Cobb’s gently persistent quarter-note ridecymbal pattern and trademark rimshot on beat four. After eight measures Miles whistles loudly to stop the take, startling P.C. out of his zone. “It was too fast,” Davis says.
The bandleader has an intimidating voice. He would yell if he could, but he permanently damaged his vocal cords years earlier in a shouting match with a club owner. Even so, Miles’s voice projects his don’t-mess-with-me attitude.
On the second take, the band makes it through the two 12-bar melody choruses and into Kelly’s piano solo. The form of “Freddie Freeloader” is deceptive, as the rhythm section discovers at the end of the first piano chorus. It feels like a simple blues in Bb up to the last two bars, but then comes the surprise—two measures of Ab7. In the first chorus of his solo, Kelly goes first to the Bb7 chord before hitting the Ab7.
Miles whistles again. “Hey, look, Wynton, don’t play no chord going into the Ab.” Miles wants a first take, and he also wants everyone concentrating—this is it, this is now, this is a new way to play the blues.
The band nails the next take—the only complete take of “Freddie Freeloader”—with a relaxed rhythm-section vibe and swinging solos. After Cannonball’s solo, Kelly—despite Davis’s instructions—doesn’t jump in, choosing rather to keep the tippin’ groove moving along with chordal comping. Chambers moves to the foreground, proffering a half-walking, half-solo combination for 24 bars that leads into a slightly sloppy but swinging out-chorus.
It wasn’t discussed much—it just happened. And now it’s jazz history.
CELEBRATING A MILESTONE
The studio chatter comes from Kind of Blue: 50th Anniversary Collector’s Edition, a two-CD/ DVD/LP/book set. The new reissue celebrates the best-selling jazz record ever, one that still sets a high standard for musicians and fans alike.
The recording took place on March 2 and April 22, 1959. The band consisted of Miles Davis on trumpet, John Coltrane on tenor saxophone, Julian “Cannonball” Adderley on alto saxophone, Wynton Kelly or Bill Evans on piano, Jimmy Cobb on drums, and Paul Chambers on bass. Kelly played on “Freddie Freeloader” at the first session while Evans, who would soon leave his regular gig in the Miles Davis Sextet, played on all other tracks.
For Paul Chambers, in his early 20s at the time, the Kind of Blue sessions marked a career high point. His relationship with Davis had begun when Paul was still in his teens.
“Because of the players Chambers aligned himself with, the world got to know about him pretty quickly,” notes bassist John Clayton. “He was playing with Miles and Wynton Kelly and Red Garland and Hank Mobley and John Coltrane, but his own contribution was so huge and so important and so intense that people couldn’t ignore it.”
Jazz educator Jamey Aebersold recalls not liking Kind of Blue at first because of the lack of harmonic movement. But, as with most musicians, he grew to love the record and recognized that it changed the way jazz is played. “Kind of Blue was the record of the times,” Aebersold says. “Paul Chambers’s bass lines were striking and perfect for the long, one-chord phrases. He knew how to play over Dorian minor chords and make them swing.” Aebersold was also impressed that Miles let P.C. play the melody on “So What.” “That was the first time I’d heard the melody to a song be given to a bass player. This was revolutionary.”
MOTOR CITY MOFO
Born in Pittsburgh on April 22, 1935, Paul Chambers moved to Detroit at an early age. There he trained on the baritone horn and tuba before taking up the string bass at age 14. Detroit was fertile ground for jazz musicians at that time, producing such notable bassists as Doug Watkins (Chambers’s cousin) and Ron Carter.
“He was totally dedicated to music,” recounts Chambers’s widow, Ann Chambers Chandler. “We went to school together, and I used to carry his books so he could carry his instrument. After I married him it was an everyday thing—he practiced all the time.”
Chambers left Detroit in 1954 at age 19 to make his move to New York City, where he freelanced for several months before saxophonist Jackie McLean introduced him to Miles. The charismatic trumpeter soon hired Chambers for his quintet, which included Coltrane, pianist Red Garland, and drummer Philly Joe Jones.
In his autobiography Miles [Simon & Schuster, 1990], Davis recalled, “Paul had been in New York for only a couple of months and had already worked with J.J. Johnson and Kai Winding in the new group that they had formed. Everybody was raving about Paul, who was from Detroit. When I heard him, I knew he was a bad motherfucker.”
The Miles Davis Quintet made its mark as one of the greatest small groups of the time. While he was beginning his relationship with Columbia Records, Davis fulfilled his Prestige contract by recording several albums’ worth of material in a short period. The music from those 1955–56 sessions was originally released as a famous foursome of vinyl: Workin’, Steamin’, Relaxin’, and Cookin’.
Chambers’s work on the Prestige sessions was intense and highly creative, his walking lines frequently embellished with countermelodies that responded to the soloist. The group was playing straightahead bebop and standards—nothing like the groundbreaking material that would appear just a few years later on Kind of Blue. “Paul Chambers was the baby in the group, being only 20,” Davis wrote, “but he was playing like he had been around forever.”
Notes Ron McClure, who would eventually fill Chambers’s bass chair in the Wynton Kelly Trio: “Workin’, which came out in 1956, might be the best recorded example of Paul’s time feel. Paul’s playing was so strong and so smooth. His flowing bass lines, coupled with his precise intonation and impeccable technique, set him apart from everyone else and made him the role model for bassists from then on.” Bass players of all pedigrees did indeed check out the young Paul Chambers with Miles Davis’s groups. Miles was becoming a huge celebrity, and his sidemen were achieving stardom as well.
The rhythm section on the Prestige dates— Chambers, Jones, and Garland—was the hot section of the mid ’50s. Their combination of bebop and blues, fire and cool, was the magic potion that propelled the group to the forefront of the jazz scene. Says Dr. Todd Coolman, jazz professor at S.U.N.Y. Purchase College: “When one thinks of the rhythm sections that Paul was part of with Miles’s bands, one thinks of energy. There is a vitality and an urgency to the role Miles allowed his rhythm sections to play. The word that I often come back to when considering Paul’s most outstanding characteristic is buoyancy.”
Bassist/bandleader Rufus Reid agrees: “He had a buoyancy and a hookup with drummers that would make you smile. His choice of notes was different; his lines seemed to sing. When he soloed, he really scampered like a horn player. And he had a great sound.”
Like all great jazz bass players, Chambers had a sound that was personal—we know it’s P.C. after hearing just a few notes. “His sound was right,” says Marcus Miller, who collaborated with Miles throughout the ’80s and ’90s (and is a cousin of Wynton Kelly’s). “To me it was the standard— everything else had to sound like that. It was full, it was deep—his sound was incredible.”
Unfortunately, the origin and specs of Chambers’s bass—with its famous woman’s-head scroll—remain unknown in the bass community [see sidebar, above]. However, master luthier David Gage and others agree that Chambers used Golden Spiral gut strings, which have a warm fundamental and rich overtone series. P.C. made his lines bounce and speak with no pickup or amp, drawing his sound out the gut strings with sheer power and musicality.
“You have to do everything more with gut strings,” says Clayton. “If you’re playing with a bow, you have to use more bow. If you’re plucking, you have to give a little more energy for the clarity of the notes. Your strings can’t be as close to the fingerboard, which means that guys who freedom in his concept of the bass function.
“It was a God-given talent he had,” says Kind of Blue drummer Jimmy Cobb. “He could do anything he thought about—anything in his mind he could bring out on the bass, pizzicato or with the bow. He was gifted like that.”
“He had what I call a thang,” says John Clayton. “It’s inexplicable—you can’t define it, you can’t put words to it, but you feel it and you notice it obviously. That’s what affected not only the musicians around him but was communicated to every listener.”
Kind of Blue was the first jam-band record. It was a concept album, a moody group of tone poems, a Zen watercolor caught on tape. The musicians went into the studio with sketches of tunes, some basic harmonic structures, and a lot of blues feeling and cool jazz confidence.
“There wasn’t no music written for me,” Cobb recalls. “I don’t think there was that much written for them. Miles had a few pieces of paper with chord changes—there weren’t many chord changes in those tunes, anyway—and he would probably just tell them what the tempo was and what the time signature was, and we went into it.”
Davis trusted his musicians’ instincts and musicality to make the simple structures live and breathe. Says Cobb: “I remember hearing him say about one of those slow tunes, ‘Blue in Green’ or the other one [‘Flamenco Sketches’], ‘You play these chords for as long as you want to, and then you play the second group of chords, and when you play the second group of chords you can call that the middle of the song. You can play that as long as you want and change it back when you want.’ So he gave them total freedom.”
As Miller imagines the “So What” sessions, “Miles says, ‘Look, it’s just a scale, and you can choose any note in the scale—D Dorian, all the white notes on the piano.’ That’s a nice concept, but you have to figure out: How do I walk on a scale? Paul treated it like it was Dminor, but you can hear him working it around and turning around different sides of it. He really formed the foundation of that thing, along with Jimmy Cobb.”
As a sideman on a recording session, a musician usually has a handworker’s attitude— do the job and make the bandleader happy. So Cobb and the others took Davis’s unorthodox approach in stride. “We probably thought, Well—that’s Miles,” Cobb recalls.
Davis’s innovations notwithstanding, “Kind of Blue is one of the most listenable recordings in jazz history,” contends McClure. “So much jazz comes across as a protest or a search for the miraculous. Here, the focus wasn’t on breaking the sound barrier or setting world records. It was just beautiful music played beautifully by six master musicians.”
Says Miller, “My favorite Miles album is Kind of Blue—that’s probably a lot of people’s favorite album.”
Musicians can still learn a lot from Kind of Blue, now 50 years old. [See Lesson, page 46.] Says McClure: “What I take away from the compositions is that simple writing enables jazz players more freedom. I like to write jazz vehicles that allow the soloists to bring the complexity to the music, rather than having to wind their way through a maze of difficult forms and harmonies.”
Adds Aebersold: “Kind of Blue came at a time when everyone was chasing the changes. Jazz needed some relief, and it got it with Miles’s new ideas.”
THE LEGACY
Chambers played on many other important jazz records, including Coltrane’s Giant Steps, Davis’s “at the Blackhawk” recordings, and his own projects as a leader. He also worked with a who’s-who of the hard-bop scene, most notably Hank Mobley, Wes Montgomery, Sonny Rollins, Kenny Dorham, and Wynton Kelly.
Many brilliant young bassists have orchestrated their own demise with excesses of drugs and alcohol, and Chambers unfortunately provides us with another high-profile example. Paul Chambers died in 1969 from tuberculosis brought on by the ravages of heroin addiction and alcohol abuse. He was only 34.
“His personal problems most likely kept him from developing as a musician, not to mention as a human being, much like Jaco Pastorius,” says McClure. “I can only marvel at their genius and imagine how much more they could have and should have been able to contribute.”
Though his time was brief, Chambers’s legacy lives on, as a musician and as a person. “He was a fun-loving guy, very playful, crazy,” recalls son Pierre Chambers. “My mother still talks about him with a lot of fond memories, and I have to yet meet a musician who has said anything negative about my father.”
“He was a lovable person,” says Ann Chambers Chandler. “When he would practice his instrument—he took classical lessons in New York—the children used to play around him, and he would make up all kinds of songs for them. They were all small when he went his way and I went mine. He was a musician, like most musicians— they played around on the street and didn’t do what they were supposed to do at home, and I had to look after the children. But I don’t hold anything against him.”
As for his musical legacy, says McClure, “There are still cats everywhere trying to play like Paul. He set the standard when he was only 19 years old, and his influence on bassists is massive to this day.”
“Every upright player who came after him had to study and acknowledge him,” adds Miller. “You can hear a little bit of P.C. in everybody who plays upright bass.”
Says Cobb: “Most bass players I’ve run across love Paul Chambers. There was Ray Brown, and before that Oscar Pettiford, and before that Jimmy Blanton. Everybody came from those players, and Paul Chambers was the youngest one from that tree. He had it all.”
Fifty years ago, Paul Chambers laid down bass lines, melodies, and solos on Kind of Blue that have become part of the jazz tradition. Kind of Blue will remain the ultimate jazz record, powered by one of the greatest and most influential bassists in the history of the music.
SITTING IN FOR GOD
Ron McClure was in the right place at the right time one night in Atlantic City, when Paul Chambers did not show up to play with Wynton Kelly. “It was a double bill of Wes Montgomery with the Wynton Kelly Trio opposite Maynard Ferguson’s big band, and I was Maynard’s bassist at the time,” says McClure. “Everyone in Maynard’s band was sitting in the audience waiting to hear these guys when suddenly Jimmy Cobb smacked a couple rim-shots and gestured for me to come up and play bass in lieu of Paul.”
Of course, McClure knew all the tunes, and he was asked to play again with the group at New York City’s Village Gate, this time subbing for Ron Carter: “Ron called me to sub for him the next night, since everyone was satisfied with my playing, but this time they took my phone number, and in July 1965 Wynton hired me for a tour. I did two recordings with Wynton—one with George Coleman on Vee- Jay [Live at the Left Bank Jazz Society, 1967, Fresh Sounds] and Full View [Milestone].
McClure—whose five-decade career has included work with a long list of jazz greats as well as 16 CDs as a bandleader—was just starting out when Kind of Blue turned the jazz community on its ear. “I learned and played the tunes on Kind of Blue when the LP came out,” he notes, “and I still play them to this day.”
As McClure’s career developed, he crossed paths occasionally with Chambers. “I had the opportunity to meet Paul on a gig we shared in New York City,” McClure recounts. “Unfortunately, he was depressed and ill and died soon afterward. I introduced myself to him, but he just said, ‘You’re the cat,’ and walked away. So I left him alone and just listened to him play for the duration of our six-week, six-nights-per-week gig.”
“Paul Chambers was god to me,” McClure sums up. “His time and solos were amazing, and his bowed solos were so clean. And ‘So What’ is the bass player’s national anthem—our biggest, all-time hit. However, it is the memory of Paul’s time feel that gets me through the night on a majority of the work I do to this very day. Thank you, Brother Chambers.”
SO WHAT ABOUT THE BASS?
The bass world has long been rife with rumors and speculation about the fate of Paul Chambers’s famous “woman-head” bass, but the question now can be put to rest. The instrument resides with Chambers’s family. “The boys have it,” reports Ann Chambers Chandler. “I turned it over to them because they needed something to hang onto from their father.”
“I don’t talk about his bass a lot,” says younger son Pierre Chambers. “But it’s well taken care of; it’s being preserved. It’s a great legacy, a gift he’s given us through his music.”
Notes Chandler: “[Paul] was still in school when he got that instrument—that was his first love. It didn’t have that head on it when he got it. Somebody carved it for him and sent it from Germany, and he had it put on in New York. The stone in the lady’s head is a button off a dress of mine.”
Whatever the instrument’s exact origins, what matters is how Chambers handled it. Says John Clayton: “In the videos I’ve seen of Paul playing, his bass doesn’t stand out as a killer Italian instrument or something like that. On recordings the quality of the bass isn’t as in my face as his playing.”
SELECTED DISCOGRAPHY
As a leader (on Vee-Jay) 1st Bassman; Go; (on Blue Note) Bass on Top; Paul Chambers Quintet; Whims of Chambers; Chambers’ Music. As a co-leader We Three w/Roy Haynes & Phineas Newborn Jr., Prestige; High Step w/John Coltrane, Blue Note. With Miles Davis Sketches of Spain, Columbia; (on Columbia/Legacy) Kind of Blue; Milestones; (on Prestige/OJC) Cookin’; Relaxin’; Steamin’; Workin’. With Wynton Kelly Kelly Blue, Fan/OJC; Piano, Riverside; (on Vee-Jay) Wynton Kelly!; Kelly at Midnight; Kelly Great. With John Coltrane Giant Steps, Atlantic; Blue Train, Blue Note. With Red Garland A Garland of Red, Prestige/OJC. With Wes Montgomery Smokin’ at the Half Note, Verve. With Hank Mobley (on Blue Note) Roll Call, Soul Station. With Sonny Rollins The Sound of Sonny, Riverside/OJC; Tenor Madness, Prestige/OJC. With Art Pepper Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section, Contemporary/OJC. With Lee Morgan The Cooker, Blue Note. With Sonny Clark (on Blue Note) Sonny’s Crib; Cool Struttin’. With Milt Jackson Bags & Trane, Atlantic. With Kenny Dorham Whistle Stop, Blue Note.
COMPILATIONS & BOX SETS
Kind of Blue: 50th Anniversary Collectors Edition, Columbia/Legacy. The two-CD/DVD/LP/book set includes outtakes, false starts, bonus tracks, and studio chatter from the Columbia vaults. The DVD documentary contains interviews with Jimmy Cobb, Ron Carter, Herbie Hancock, Shirley Horn, Q-Tip, and others. The Complete Vee-Jay Paul Chambers–Wynton Kelly Sessions 1954–1961, Mosaic. The six-CD set contains material from Go!, 1st Bassman, Kelly Great, Wynton Kelly!, Kelly at Midnight, and Fantastic Frank Strozier. In Person Friday and Saturday Nights at the Blackhawk, Complete, Sony Legacy. A four-CD set of the legendary performance by Miles Davis with Chambers, Kelly, Jimmy Cobb, and Hank Mobley.
YOUTUBE PICK
www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4TbrgIdm0E Chambers, Davis, Coltrane, and a big band perform an intense version of “So What.” Check for links to videos of Chambers, Kelly, and Cobb playing with Coltrane.
BLUE NOTES
“Freddie Freeloader” speaks the durable language of the blues, but with a special set of changes Miles insisted the musicians follow. In his accompaniment (Ex. 1), P.C. plays a lot of triplet fills behind the melody. Note that in bars 9–10, and again in bars 21–22, P.C. plays the 5th of each chord first, on beats one and three. This implies an extra IIm–V that the other players are not outlining: Cm7–F7 in bars 9 and 21 (instead of going directly to F7) and Bbm7–Eb7 in bars 10 and 22 (instead of going directly to Eb7). To get the signature bounce in his lines he used a one-finger right-hand technique.
“Blue in Green” is a ten-measure miniature played with varied harmonic rhythms. The chords have an endless floating feeling because of the uneven form, the lack of a real turnaround to a tonic chord, and the romantic, classically influenced piano voicings realized by Bill Evans. The groundbreaking factor on “Blue in Green” was the doubling and redoubling of the harmonic motion. Ex. 2 outlines the changes; listen to the track and see if you can hear when the bass and piano change the harmonic rhythm—the speed at which the chords move. The tempo is a composure-testing 54 bpm. Miles plays the original changes in the ballad tempo. For the piano solo, Bill Evans doubles the harmonic rhythm beginning in the first measure, and Chambers follows him. Ex. 3 shows the double-time version. This has the effect of making the tune only five bars long—if you’re counting the original quarter-note tempo. This form continues for John Coltrane’s tenor solo, but the harmonic rhythm then doubles again for a brief two-chorus piano solo. If you count in the original ballad tempo, this makes the form only two-and-a-half bars long! When Miles enters again, Chambers and Evans revert to the original long-meter harmonic motion.
One of the most-covered jazz standards of the past 50 years, “All Blues” boasts a bass line that should lie under the fingers of every bass player. The secret to this track is the hypnotic rhythm-section groove P.C. latches onto in his line, shown in Ex. 4. Make sure the low G and high F are accented and held for their full values. The 16th-notes can be lightly ghosted to give the line a flowing feel.
“Flamenco Sketches” is probably the least-played tune from Kind of Blue, for the very reason that it has the most open form—it’s only five chords, with no set form and no melody (Ex. 5). Chambers usually plays a 5th down to the root on every chord, sometimes playing a double-stop 5th or adding a little fill into the root. The soloists, Evans, and Chambers cued each chord change, either in eight-bar, four-bar, or irregular sections. Their main goal was to watch and listen, and what they produced was the ultimate interactive musical statement. Creating this delicate musical mood on the bass demands composure and concentration. The key to playing the bass line is to breathe, relax, focus, and play only what is absolutely necessary for the music to blossom.
SO WHAT DID IT PAY?
In an online interview, Ashley Kahn—author of Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece [Da Capo, 2000]—reported that the sidemen on the sessions made $130 for two days of recording. Citing Columbia Records memos, Kahn also mentions a $100 bonus for the date paid to Chambers, Coltrane, and Adderley. For the musicians, it was another decent paycheck (in 1959 dollars) for a studio gig.
Kind of Blue has been certified triple-platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America, having sold over three million copies to date. The lesson: It’s not how much the gig pays; it’s what you leave on tape before you go home.