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Love It Into Existence: Miles Davis And The Kind Of Blue Alchemy of Collaboration
Miles teaching us how to be self-improving and self-critical
Matt Zeigler
January 24, 2025
When Miles Davis publicly admitted he missed what he was aiming for on Kind of Blue - one of the most important and influential albums ever recorded - he taught us something profound about the creative process.
It’s OK to always want to be better. It’s OK to be self-critical. But it’s important to also note how a master self-improves and self-criticizes (I’m working on this too).
Read the way Miles describes chasing a feeling, and searching out a memory he realized had burrowed deeply into his creative DNA (his words, my emphasis):
Kind of Blue also came out of the modal thing I started on Milestones. This time I added some other kind of sound I remembered from being back in Arkansas, when we were walking home from church and they were playing these bad gospels. So that kind of feeling came back to me and I started remembering what that music sounded like and felt like. That feeling is what I was trying to close to. That feeling had got in my creative blood, my imagination, and I had forgotten it was there. I wrote this blues that tried to get back to that feeling I had when I was six years old, walking with my cousin along that dark Arkansas road. So I wrote about five bars of that and I recorded it and added a kind of running sound into the mix, because that was the only way I could get in the sound of the finger piano.
Here’s where the magic happens. He started with his feeling, his memories, his perspective. And then, well, let the master explain:
But you write something and then guys play off it and take it someplace else through their creativity and imagination, and you just miss where you thought you wanted to go. I was trying to do one thing and ended up doing something else.
I didn’t write out the music for Kind of Blue, but brought in sketches for what everybody was supposed to play because I wanted a lot of spontaneity in the playing, just like I thought was in the interplay between those dancers and those drummers and that finger piano player with the Ballet Africaine. Everything was a first take, which indicated the level everyone was playing on. It was beautiful.
This is where the most profound lesson of being self-improving and self-critical in the name of creative growth lives:
Great artists know the feeling they’re chasing, but never forget the alchemy of collaboration. The fact that every first take on Kind of Blue was kept - a testament to the level of the players but also a testament to Davis’s willingness to let the music find its own path - is humbling.
The key is to understand what you’re making, respect who you’re making it with, and know who you’re making it for. Then, trust it. Love it into existence and let the universe do the rest.
Your perfectly executed initial vision might evolve into something you never imagined - something that grows beyond your original dream, shaped by the collective spirit of creation.
You can still acknowledge the gap between outcome and expectation, but never lose your love for what emerges when individual vision meets collective creativity. That's where the real magic lives.