Hardly Blue Anymore

File this one under "Surprised, Pleasantly."

I neglected to blog about the 50th anniversary edition of Kind of Blue by Miles Davis when it came out last year. Mostly, because I was kind of pissed at Columbia for releasing YET ANOTHER version of this album without much new content, but with a hefty price tag. (And because the 50th anniversary edition came out a year early. Come on, guys. If you're going to do this, do it right.) As I wrote earlier about Bob Dylan's Tell Tale Signs, these special editions are a great way of squeezing more money out of an artist's devoted fans, bundling limited new content with lots of older or otherwise available content, and charging a fortune for the whole thing. That seemed to be the case with the Kind of Blue 50th anniversary edition. The new content was limited to some relatively unenlightening studio outtakes (which are described in Ashley Kahn's book, anyway). And Columbia tried to pass off recordings of the same band from 1958 as "new" when in fact they had been available on '58 Sessions for quite a while. ('58 Sessions, by the way, is brilliant. Maybe even as good as Kind of Blue itself.)

So it was nice to see that Columbia wised up a little bit and released a 2-CD set with the studio outtakes, the '58 Sessions recordings, along with the original album for a far more reasonable price. And it was especially nice to hear something else they included with this 2-CD set: a 17-minute live version of "So What" from Miles's Spring 1960 European tour. This is definitely worth the price of admission (especially if somehow you don't already own Kind of Blue). And the good news is that even if you do, you can buy the live version of "So What" from the Amazon music store for 99 cents.

And seriously, you owe it to yourself to listen to this track any way you can. Coltrane plays his ass off on this version. Really, it's one of his best solos on record to my ears, on par with his solos on "Someday My Prince Will Come," "Stella by Starlight," and "India," to name just a few of my favorite solos of his off the top of my head. If you've listened to the Live at Birdland album or Impressions (or any one of many other Coltrane live recordings now available), you know that Coltrane live can be a revelation. His solo on this track definitely qualifies on that front.