ABSTRACT
Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, from 1959, is one of the most famous recordings in jazz. The pianist on the date was Bill Evans. In his sleevenote to the album, Evans drew a comparison with a Japanese school of painting on parchment, where change or erasing is impossible without damage to the parchment:
the artist is forced to be spontaneous … These artists must practise a particular discipline, that of allowing the idea to express itself in communication with their hands in such a direct way that deliberation cannot interfere. The resulting pictures lack the complex composition and textures of ordinary painting, but it is said that those who see well find something captured that escapes explanation.1
