Wynton Kelly

Kind of Blue

Miles Davis · 1959

Wynton KellyWynton Kellyウィントン・ケリー appears on only one track from Kind of BlueKind of BlueMiles Davis · 1959 — 'Freddie Freeloader' — while Bill EvansBill Evansビル・エヴァンス played the rest. Kelly's blues-drenched phrasing offers a vivid contrast to Evans's impressionism, and that single track remains one of his most celebrated performances.

— Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece, Ashley Kahn, 2000

Kind of Blue

Miles Davis · 1959

Kelly Blue

Wynton Kelly · 1959

Giant Steps

John Coltrane · 1960

Blue Spring

Kenny Dorham Septet Featuring Cannonball Adderley · 1959

Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers and Jimmy Cobb played as one of the great piano trios. But the bond ran deeper than the bandstand: when Chambers died in 1969, Cobb recalled, Kelly sank into heavy drinking — he had loved Paul — and Kelly himself was gone by 1971.

— Statement stmt-jimmy-cobb-on-paul-chambers-2

Kind of Blue

Miles Davis · 1959

Giant Steps

John Coltrane · 1960

Kelly Blue

Wynton Kelly · 1959

A.T.'s Delight

Art Taylor · 1960

Kind of Blue is remembered for its pianist's modal chords, but the one blues track was actually played by someone else, Wynton Kelly. That same year, Kelly also turns up on Coltrane's harmonically brutal Giant Steps — not on the punishing title track, but on the album's one quiet ballad, 'Naima.'

Percy Heath is remembered as the bassist anchoring the Modern Jazz Quartet, but before he ever picked up an instrument he trained as a pilot with the Tuskegee Airmen during World War II. The war ended before he saw combat; back home, urged by his brothers, he picked up the bass instead — the same hands heard here on the 1954 session for Roses Of Picardy.

The titles of World Statesman (1956) and Dizzy In Greece (1957) are not travel whimsy. Gillespie's big band was the first jazz orchestra the US State Department sent abroad as cultural diplomacy, in 1956, and both records are by-products of that assignment — the place names are an itinerary, not a mood.

In 1958, the same year Coleman Hawkins cut his own showcase album The Genius of Coleman Hawkins, he also backed a blues record titled after the hit Broadway character from South Pacific — a founding father of jazz tenor sax turning up on session work far outside his usual world.