Porgy and Bess (Columbia)

Porgy and Bess boldly took ideas that reversed the bebop esthetic—instead of navigating one’s solo with rapid-fire assuredness from one chord to the next and next, Evans’ approach to the harmonies of Porgy and Bess was to slow down the rate of those shifts—the “changes” jazz musicians often speak of—and allow the soloist to stay on one modality (hence “modal jazz”) and invent his own melody and mood.

To Miles’ ears, by the late 1950s, the “music [had] gotten thick. Guys give me tunes and they’re full of chords. I can’t play them.” Miles was talking to the jazz journalist Nat Hentoff, for the short-lived Jazz Journal magazine. It was 1958 and the article was titled “An Afternoon with Miles”—but it could be called “A Modal Manifesto.” The trumpeter explained why this new way of playing held a fresh, uncluttered appeal.

When Gil [Evans] wrote the arrangement of “I Loves You, Porgy,” he only wrote a scale for me to play. No chords. [It] gives you a lot more freedom and space to hear things . . . I wrote a tune recently that’s more a scale than a [melodic] line . . . when you go this way, you can go on forever. You don’t have to worry about changes [chords] and you can do more with the line [melody]. It becomes a challenge to see how melodically inventive you are.

This was a rare instance of a musician describing not just the how of a new musical style, but the why, which is more often left unexplained. Modal jazz, restful and relaxing, swept away the clichés that Miles disliked, while still holding challenge for soloists. Kind of Blue, built on the same foundational idea, was just around the corner.