The Birth of the Cool

I’ve been listening to Miles Davis quite a bit lately. I’ve always regarded him as one of the most influential musicians in jazz and quite possibly music in general. I didn’t regard him as a terribly gifted trumpet player, but rather one who was ahead of or the progenitor for trends. Until this weekend. Reading Nat Hentoff’s liner notes while listening to “Miles Davis – The Columbia Years 1955 – 1985” I came across the following:

“Miles, as it happened, created his own sound. It was all coming together. The spareness, the evocative use of space, the intense lyricism and the deep fire underneath it all. And nothing was superfluous.”

It was at that moment that I realized the genius of Miles Davis; he was a master of using silence or space to create drama and tension. Communicating the mood through intervals between notes as well as with the notes resulting in a piece greater than the sum of its parts.

This is particularly apparent in the Birth of the Cool period – 1949 – 1950. Another quote:

“In contrast to the hot, urgent sound and drive of bop, these 1948 – 1949 sessions developed softer but still intense shadings of textures and a more supple flexible sense of jazz time.”

In other words, bops intensity derived from a strong rhythm accompanied by an avalanche of notes, whereas Miles kept the intensity by shifting the attention to what happened between the notes.

This brings me to the point I’m trying to make, that is Che Bella’s design approach resembles more Miles Davis than bee-bop. An important design element to us is the incorporation of negative space. To understand negative space, think of Miles’ use of intervals between notes. Negative space creates movement within an arrangement by drawing the eye towards it, through it and around it. By carefully implementing negative space, the florals within the arrangement have more impact. Negative space more accurately mimics nature in the design; think of the tips of tree branches spreading their fingers to the sky or the irregularity of how a plant grows, some parts densely packed other parts not.

To continue with the Miles metaphor, we tend to limit the amount of elements in an arrangement. By elements, I mean flowers and color. One way to think about these two elements in the broad sense is color as chords and flowers as notes. We chose a chord and fill the chord with notes. It can be a one chord/one note arrangement such as a vase filled with lilac, or a chord progression of complementary colors and a note/flower structure within each chord to create an arrangement of drama, or whimsy, sublime or extravagant, always carefully choosing our notes so that each rings clear and true.

Pick up a copy of Miles’ “Kind of Blue” and give it a serious listen, if this doesn’t make sense to you now, it will then.

UPDATE:

Give this a listen.