ABSTRACT
When I was a teenager in the 1970s, I would occasionally listen to records from my parents’ LP collection (those were the plate-sized plastic disks in the colorful cardboard sleeves, sometimes accompanied by thin books of song lyrics, pictures of the musicians and other kinds of notes). While the scratchy old recordings of Spanish Civil War songs and the weighty dissonance of Igor Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring, 1913) didn’t interest me much, I was continuously drawn to an album entitled Kind of Blue by the jazz trumpeter Miles Davis. At the time, I didn’t know much about the social history of jazz and its complex relationship to slavery and racial segregation in the United States. I knew even less about the evolution of avant-garde art music and the interaction between classical and jazz forms of musical structure. I knew nothing about the recording industry or other social institutions and technologies responsible for producing this and other jazz albums. I was unaware of the demographics of the jazz audience or the sales of this sort of album (in fact, Kind of Blue, released by Columbia Records in 1959, achieved triple platinum status in 2008, and Columbia touts it as the best-selling jazz recording of all time). That this album could be understood as a window to history and society only occurred to me much later, after I began to study sociology. What I knew was that when I listened to Kind of Blue, I was transported to another kind of reality, dominated by haunting sounds, which inexplicably sparked off a range of intense and compelling emotions and sensations.
