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MILES DAVIS
Seven Steps to Heaven



Ah, good ol' Miles Davis. I figure that if I'm introducing my crowd to my first selection of music, I might as well start out big. Plus, I'd rather not have any of you getting immediately lost in my posts, wandering aimlessly around a labyrinth of jazz and running into brick walls of the musical tongue.

Miles Davis was a trumpet player during the era of Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie and has somehow been able to rise above the all-stars of his time to become one of the most influential jazz musician and composer in our history. One of the most remarkable characteristics of Davis' playing was his clear, round tone. The sound that he produced was the result of years and years of focus and discipline based solely on the idea of producing a perfect sound. This sound, in my opinion, can be described as "clean, smooth, or as I put earlier, round." In any of his recordings his tone is incredibly obvious because of how beautiful he makes the trumpet sound.

Oddly enough, as much as Miles Davis provides to the album "Seven Steps to Heaven", the reason I love this album isn't for the trumpet. It's because of the rhythm section and how it fits together so perfectly with the talents of Davis. Specifically, the song Seven Steps to Heaven (mpeg-4 format) features the drumming of Tony Williams. The chorus of the song includes a small segment of a drum solo after every voice of the horn section. This type of progression is known as a "call-and-response" where one voice (the horn section) plays a melodic rhythm for a short duration, then the second voice (in this case, the drum set) repeats the rhythm and melody in their own language.

I use the word "language" because every instrument speaks in it's own different way. A scale doesn't sound the same on a trumpet as it does on a saxophone, and certainly is nothing like that of a drum set (though this. So if a call is made on a trumpet, the response is translated into the drummer's own interpretation of what the call would be on his own drum set. This creates an effect much more gratifying than listening to the "call" repeating itself over and over in a boring system that some bands like to call a "chorus".

Aside from the call-and-response section, this song also includes a full-length drum solo about halfway in. The reason I enjoy this solo over most other solos is the result of two criteria: Sound quality and spacing. Good sound quality requires concentration of (surprisingly) the quality of the sound. Any person can walk up to a drum and beat it with a drumstick, but to have good sound quality, a drummer must hit the drum with style and color. In a more applicable scenario, a novice may pick up a trumpet in produce a sound not distinguishable from a squeaky door or a dying cow, but Miles Davis could pick up a trumpet and produce one of the most beautiful, clear tone of all time. Obviously this is a very extreme example, but the point is that it takes years of practice to be able to produce a quality sound, and this is definitely apparent in the solo in "Seven Steps to Heaven."

Spacing is one of the most interesting concepts, yet one of the easiest to understand. If a musician fires away millions of notes in a blaring, mind-splitting solo, the audience will only be amazed by the fact that the musician is playing with speed and not be able to comprehend anything else. This is why spacing becomes important in a solo. If gaps are placed in a solo, even if they are very small, they give the listener a moment to process what they just heard before being ready to listen to anything else. The drum solo in this tune includes these gaps, intentionally placed for us to stand in awe of his grandeur.

The combination of the amazing trumpet playing of Miles Davis with the genius solo work of Tony Williams creates a jazz chart that is most definitely worth opening my stream of blogs with. I apologize for the extreme WALL OF TEXT (lots of words), but I believe I would not be able to describe this chart in fewer words without doing it justice.