No amount of con­tin­u­ous repeats in cof­feeshops around the world can dull the crys­talline bril­liance of Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue one bit. The album turned 60 three days ago, and it still stands as one of the most influ­en­tial albums, jazz or oth­er­wise, of all time… indeed, as “one of the sin­gle great­est achieve­ments in Amer­i­can music.”

So says one of sev­er­al crit­ics prais­ing the album in the intro­duc­tion to an inter­view with Ash­ley Kahn, author of Kind of Blue: The Mak­ing of the Miles Davis Mas­ter­piece. Kind of Blue is a “cor­ner­stone record, not only for jazz. It’s a cor­ner­stone record for music,” anoth­er voice com­ments. It “cap­tures the essence of jazz.” It’s “sort of like the Bible, in a way. You know, you just have one in your house.”

This would make Davis not only the com­pos­er of a new jazz Bible, but also a Bible sales­man. He had no doubt his prod­uct would sell. “Davis was a can­ny mon­ey man and pro­mot­er of his own image,” wrote David Years­ley on the album’s anniver­sary. One 1960 record com­pa­ny memo stat­ed he “’was pri­mar­i­ly con­cerned with the amount of jazz now on juke­box­es in many areas of the coun­try while he is not rep­re­sent­ed.’”

Colum­bia respond­ed, and as a result, many peo­ple around the U.S. “first heard this music in din­ers and bars over the juke­box.” The cre­ative ten­sions in the Birth of the Cool record­ings, made ten years ear­li­er, announced a new kind of jazz with their full release in 1957. The cool had matured in Kind of Blue’s ful­ly modal turn. “Its icy hau­teur sets the stan­dard for art that draws you in by pre­tend­ing it doesn’t need any­one or any­thing but itself.” It’s quite a con­fi­dent appeal.

Sales are nei­ther nec­es­sary nor suf­fi­cient to make a clas­sic album, but in the case of Kind of Blue, all of the stars aligned: crit­ics uni­ver­sal­ly praise it, musi­cians uni­ver­sal­ly love it, and record buy­ers uni­ver­sal­ly buy it. “The thing about this album,” says Kahn, “that’s dif­fer­ent from what hap­pened with some oth­er well-cel­e­brat­ed albums… is that it became an icon­ic album not when it came out but long after because peo­ple kept buy­ing it. Peo­ple would not let it go out of print.”

Davis knew how to get his work before the pub­lic, but he also knew it deserved to be heard by mil­lions both inside and out­side jazz. Beloved in the jazz world right away, it was the “vox pop­uli” that spread the album’s fame every­where else. Drum­mer Jim­my Cobb talks in the clip at the top about how Davis “fell a lit­tle bit into [the] con­cept” of Bill Evans, the pianist who played a sig­nif­i­cant role in the music’s con­struc­tion. “To me,” says Cobb, the gig was “just anoth­er Miles Davis ses­sion,” with an Evans twist.

None of the musi­cians in the sex­tet had any idea the record would get as big as it did. Yet as Davis him­self said, in a clas­sic line from an ear­li­er record­ing ses­sion, “I’m gonna play it first, and tell you what it is lat­er.” We look back on 1959 as a water­shed year in jazz, thanks in large part to the impact of Kind of Blue. Maybe we still haven’t fig­ured out, 60 years lat­er, what it is. Learn more about the crit­i­cal, musi­cal, and com­mer­cial impor­tance of Kind of Blue in the Poly­phon­ic video explain­er above, “How Miles Davis Changed Jazz.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1959: The Year That Changed Jazz

Kind of Blue: How Miles Davis Changed Jazz

Her­bie Han­cock Explains the Big Les­son He Learned From Miles Davis: Every Mis­take in Music, as in Life, Is an Oppor­tu­ni­ty

The Influ­ence of Miles Davis Revealed with Data Visu­al­iza­tion: For His 90th Birth­day Today

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

At her site Ari’s Bass Blog, bass play­er and teacher Ari­ane Cap shoots down many of the argu­ments against solo bass music—that is, music played sole­ly on bass gui­tar. To the objec­tion that “bass­es have a job to do in a band con­text,” she writes, “what this ‘job’ is can vary great­ly!” To anoth­er com­plaint, she responds, “even when imi­tat­ing gui­tar tech­niques on the bass, it is still bass play­ing.” Her defens­es of solo bass (and her fine instruc­tions on how to play it well) work equal­ly for the bass solo, when the often least-noticed mem­ber of the band steps out and takes the lead for a few moments.

The idea that bass play­ers are all wall­flow­ers or invis­i­ble, less-tal­ent­ed mem­bers of the band is, of course, a bad rock and roll stereo­type. Nat­u­ral­ly, the best bass soloists in rock are some of the play­ers who have drawn the most atten­tion to the instru­ment and shown how crit­i­cal it is.

But not all great bass play­ers are great soloists. The solo requires a par­tic­u­lar com­bi­na­tion of pow­er and agili­ty. The bass soloist is some­thing of a musi­cal ath­lete.

A gui­tar solo can coast, so to speak, on tone, on per­fect­ly-cho­sen notes played with just the right vibra­to and sus­tain. A bass solo is anoth­er mon­ster. Whether plucked, picked, or slapped, bass solos usu­al­ly involve a lot of notes attacked very hard and very fast, up and down the neck—a feat any­one who’s held a bass gui­tar will know requires a lot of dex­ter­i­ty and strength.

Mar­vel as you watch the shoul­ders, arms, and fin­gers on left and right hands of these play­ers move with uncan­ny pre­ci­sion, in clips from some of the all-time bass solo greats here. At the top, John Entwistle wins top prize for suc­cinct­ness. His bored expres­sion may seem to give away the pre-record­ed TV game, but even live onstage he nev­er seemed to raise an eye­brow when pulling off licks like these.

Below him, Ged­dy Lee stretch­es out, and makes your arms tired from watch­ing him move all over the fret­board, build­ing from one fig­ure to anoth­er before a final explo­sive shred. Fur­ther up, Stu­art Hamm, onstage with Joe Satri­ani in 1988, gives a solo bass per­for­mance at the Mon­treux Jazz Fes­ti­val, mov­ing effort­less­ly from Beethoven’s “Moon­light Sonata” to a series of gor­geous arpeg­gios to some genre-hop­ping the­atrics the crowd devours.

Though he made his bones as one of the fastest bass soloists on the block, Fleas’s solo bass per­for­mance uses delay and echo effects to slow things down sig­nif­i­cant­ly and expand the pos­si­bil­i­ties of solo bass, bring­ing it into the tonal realm of the gui­tar while still demon­strat­ing the tremen­dous phys­i­cal­i­ty bass play­ing requires. Just above, see Boot­sy Collins pull off a sim­i­lar feat in a full band con­text, prov­ing that bass solos can be made of slow, soul­ful melod­i­cism and heavy, fuzzed-out licks.

Collin’s tour-de-force per­for­mance is hard to top, but for con­trast, and to reem­pha­size the ver­sa­til­i­ty of the bass as a solo instru­ment, whether play­ing all alone or tak­ing a brief turn in the spot­light, see Queen’s John Dea­con pull out a flaw­less, short and seri­ous­ly sweet bass solo live on “Liar,” just above, looped for ten min­utes straight so you can mem­o­rize every note.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Sto­ry of the Bass: New Video Gives Us 500 Years of Music His­to­ry in 8 Min­utes

What Makes Flea Such an Amaz­ing Bass Play­er? A Video Essay Breaks Down His Style

Who Are the Best Drum Soloists in Rock? See Leg­endary Per­for­mances by John Bon­ham, Kei­th Moon, Neil Peart, Ter­ry Bozzio & More

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Among the slew of icon­ic late-60s acts who played Wood­stock 50 years ago, one name stands out con­spic­u­ous­ly for her absence: Joni Mitchell. Was she not invit­ed? Did she decline? Was she dou­ble-booked? Mitchell was, of course, invit­ed, and eager­ly want­ed to be there. The sto­ry of her non-appear­ance involves alarm­ing head­lines in The New York Times and an appear­ance on The Dick Cavett Show the day after the fes­ti­val that her man­ag­er, Elliot Roberts and label head David Gef­fen, decid­ed she sim­ply couldn’t miss.

Her sig­nif­i­cant oth­er at the time, Gra­ham Nash, reached the upstate New York fes­ti­val with CSNY, “by heli­copter and a stolen truck hot-wired by Neil Young,” reports the site Night­flight. But Gef­fen and Mitchell, see­ing the head­line “400,000 Peo­ple Sit­ting in Mud,” and a descrip­tion of the roads as “so clogged with cars that con­cert­go­ers were aban­don­ing them and walk­ing,” decid­ed they shouldn’t take the risk. (She described the scene as a “nation­al dis­as­ter area.”) Instead, they watched news about the mud-splat­tered event from Geffen’s New York City apart­ment (oth­er accounts say they holed up in the Plaza Hotel).

So how is it Mitchell came to write the defin­i­tive Wood­stock anthem, with its era-defin­ing lyric “we’ve got to get our­selves back to the gar­den”? In the way of all artists—she watched, lis­tened, and used her imag­i­na­tion to con­jure a scene she only knew of sec­ond­hand. CSNY’s ver­sion of “Wood­stock” (live, below, at Madi­son Square Gar­den in 2009) is the one we tend to hear most and remem­ber, but Mitchell’s—her voice soar­ing high above her piano—best con­veys the song’s sense of youth­ful hip­pie ide­al­ism, mys­ti­cal won­der, and just a touch of des­per­a­tion. (At the top, she plays the song live in Big Sur in 1969.) David Yaffe, author of Reck­less Daugh­ter: A Por­trait of Joni Mitchell describes the song as “pur­ga­tion. It is an omen that some­thing very, very bad will hap­pen with the mud dries and the hip­pies go home.”

Mitchell did make the Cavett Show gig, along­side Stephen Stills, David Cros­by, and Jef­fer­son Air­plane, all just return­ing from the fes­ti­val. But she didn’t have much to say. Instead, the gre­gar­i­ous Cros­by does most of the talk­ing, describ­ing Wood­stock as “incred­i­ble, prob­a­bly the strangest thing that’s ever hap­pened in the world.” Sur­vey­ing the scene from a heli­copter, he says, was like see­ing “an encamp­ment of a Mace­don­ian army on a Greek hill crossed with the biggest batch of gyp­sies you ever saw.” Lat­er on the show, Mitchell played “Chelsea Morn­ing” and oth­er songs, after per­for­mances by Jef­fer­son Air­plane.

“The depri­va­tion of not being able to go,” she remem­bered, “pro­vid­ed me with an intense angle” on the fes­ti­val. “Wood­stock, for some rea­son, impressed me as being a mod­ern mir­a­cle, like a mod­ern-day fish­es-and-loaves sto­ry. For a herd of peo­ple that large to coop­er­ate so well, it was pret­ty remark­able and there was tremen­dous opti­mism. So I wrote the song ‘Wood­stock’ out of these feel­ings, and the first three times I per­formed it in pub­lic, I burst into tears, because it brought back the inten­si­ty of the expe­ri­ence and was so mov­ing.”

She did final­ly get the chance to play “Wood­stock” at Wood­stock, in 1998 (above, on elec­tric gui­tar), for an appre­cia­tive long-haired, tie-dyed audience—many of them nos­tal­gic for a moment they missed or were too young to have expe­ri­enced. The per­for­mance high­lights the “sense of long­ing that became essen­tial to the song’s impact,” as Leah Rosen­zweig writes at Vinyl Me, Please. “Sure, it was the irony of the cen­tu­ry”: the song that best cap­tured Wood­stock for the peo­ple who weren’t there was writ­ten by some­one who wasn’t there. “But it was also a per­fect recipe for Mitchell to do what she did best: draw humans togeth­er while remain­ing com­plete­ly on the side­lines.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Joni Mitchell’s Clas­sic Per­for­mances of “Both Sides Now” & “The Cir­cle Game” (1968)

See Clas­sic Per­for­mances of Joni Mitchell from the Very Ear­ly Years–Before She Was Even Named Joni Mitchell (1965/66)

Young Joni Mitchell Per­forms a Hit-Filled Con­cert in Lon­don (1970)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness