January 2023 Vol. 4, No.1
Round About Midnight – with Paul Klee
Music is a painting you can hear and a painting is music that you can see
Author’s Preface
The whole world knows that Paul Klee was a painter and Miles Davis a jazz trumpeter. Yet, the story does not end there, because both had creative dualities. Davis was also a painter and Klee was a musician. Both exude music and visual art in their respective work.
This self-revelatory, personal essay explores a writer’s feeling of connectivity between a musical album ‘Round About Midnight’ and Klee’s visual work, a realm where music and art are inseparable and interconnected in a deeply intrinsic personal space. This essay is not scientific, nor an academic study. It’s just one writer’s perception, a feeling. I was listening to the seminal jazz album ‘Round About Midnight’ by Miles Davis, in bed late one night, a little high, wrapped into my blanket, one with the music. I kept seeing Paul Klee’s late-in-life paintings in the art gallery of my mind, as if the music was the soundtrack to an exhibit. It was wonderful. When reading this, try to enhance the experience by listening to the album. It’s easily found on all music streaming platforms. Unfortunately, I was only able to include very few illustrations of Paul Klee’s work due to copyright limitations. Please refer to any of Paul Klee’s art in books or online.
Art and Music dance together
There are some musical performances that transcend space and time. When you become one with music, it lifts you into a mystic, virtual mind-out-of-body feeling, a soul cleansing auditory journey. Music and spirituality intertwine. The music elevates you into a higher plane of consciousness. It’s something indescribably metaphysical, something heavy, something that rips into you and releases endorphins, pheromones and seduces soul orgasms. It’s an untamable beast that takes a hold of you and twangs your soul until the vibrations shake you into aural ecstasy. It’s whatever music gets deep inside of you. Visual art can have the same effect. Neuroscience shows that art enhances brain function by positively impacting brain wave patterns, emotions, and the nervous system. Simply said, art and music are good for your mind and they fit together perfectly to bring you happiness.
True appreciators of art know that the same powerful emotion can be evoked by gazing upon a painting. We can be moved to tears of joy, sometimes just by seeing a work of art live in a gallery that we may have loved in a book or an art class.
There is often no separation of the muses for visual artists and musicians. Many are both musicians and painters. Take musicians Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, John Lennon, Paul Simon, David Bowie, Paul McCartney, Stevie Nicks, Cat Stevens and countless others. Photographer Ansel Adams was a great pianist. Visual artists like Marcel Duchamp, Yoko Ono, John Cage and Laurie Anderson are also accomplished musicians.
Round About Midnight
The immortal trumpeter Miles Davis, the ultimate genius of the genre, has made numerous albums that have been widely accepted among worldwide jazz fans as some of very best. Soon after his triumphant performance at the 1955 Newport Jazz Festival, Columbia Records planned to sign the ascending Davis with his legendary first quintet, featuring John Coltrane (tenor), Red Garland (piano), Paul Chambers (bass), and Philly Joe Jones (drums) – one of the great working bands in jazz history. The seminal album titled Round About Midnight, Davis’s debut on Columbia, was recorded in 1955 and ’56 and released to critical acclaim in 1957. The original vinyl album spanned only six tunes and 39 minutes[1]. The title cut of the album ‘Round Midnight was written by pianist Thelonious Monk.
The first, deep-blue notes on Round About Midnight hook you in immediately. On the opening title cut, Miles starts out slowly and gently, stretching each note long and languid, holding his notes with that incomparable ethereal, cool tone – mournful, sad, yet emancipatory, raspy, airy and melodic with his characteristic ease. Later in the album, Davis shakes it up with his trademark fast improvisational style, augmented by the brilliant saxophonist John Coltrane. Miles used the Harmon mute often, a device that added otherworldly quality to his tone, coaxing a soft, cold and intimate sound from his trumpet. Right from the title cut, as Klee’s images dance with Davis, the similarities become clear. Both were anomalous, lyrical, restless and free, melodic, unencumbered by external stylistic limitations. Both burst with color, shape and form – emotive and dexterous.
Miles Davis, the painter
The Swiss/German visual artist Paul Klee had never heard of Miles Davis. Klee was born in 1879 and died in 1940, when Davis was just 14 years old. The iconic trumpeter Davis had a lifelong love for visual art, but it would really gain significance in the early 1970s after he suffered a terrible car crash and broke both legs. Davis once said: “Painting is like therapy for me, and keeps my mind occupied with something positive when I’m not playing music.” He told his musical director Robert Irving III, “Music is a painting you can hear and a painting is music that you can see.” After the crash, visual art became his main focus. After he recovered and resumed recording and touring, Davis would become an avid artist, honing his own distinct style, which was colorful, vivid and bold.
Numerous art critics have pointed out that his use of bright colors and geometric shapes seems to have been influenced by Kandinsky, Basquiat, Picasso and African tribal art. Surely, he must have also admired Paul Klee, a peer of Kandinsky, since both are symbolic of classical modernism and part of important avant-garde movements, such as the Blue Rider and the Bauhaus, that were instrumental in the rise of abstract art.
Paul Klee, the musician
Whereas Miles Davis was a musician/painter, Paul Klee was a painter/musician, skilled in drawing, printmaking, and painting. Klee’s early years were spent preparing for a career as a violinist. He came from a musical family and his father was a music teacher. Klee was so serious and accomplished that he even performed in the Bern Philharmonic when he was just 20 years old. Nonetheless, he made a career-change in his late teens, deciding to study fine art and becoming a painter. Throughout his life, he loved music and continued to play the violin. Musically he was rather conservative, preferring the classics of Mozart and Bach over the music of his own time. He once said, “I didn’t find the idea of going in for music creatively particularly attractive in view of the decline in the history of musical achievement.” [2] Artistically, Klee held on to the interrelationship of music to art. His bright colors and shapes interplay almost as movements that interact with one another with dynamic transitions.
Kelly Richman-Abdou, an art historian and Contributing Writer at My Modern Met, best explored Klee’s musicality as it relates to visual art:
This enduring connection to his earliest craft manifests as paintings that directly reference music. In the Style of Bach (1919), for example, Klee reimagines a musical score as an arrangement of graphic symbols like foliage, a crescent moon, and stars. In addition to deciphering the structural similarities between music and art, however, Klee discovered a more profound connection between the disciplines when he began to explore color theory…It is when Klee mixed his unique approach to color with his musical background that he was able to establish a style that was entirely his own…”
Dr.Georg Predota wrote in the music magazine Interlude [3]:
Klee craved the freedom to explore radical and modernist experimentations in his paintings. In music, however, he could never come to terms with contemporary works of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern. In fact, he even disliked the compositions of Wagner, Bruckner and Mahler… For Klee, modern music lacked meaning, and he believed that the ultimate greatness of Bach and Mozart could never be reproduced.
Klee suffered from the rare and debilitating autoimmune connective tissue and rheumatic disease scleroderma, which caused him great pain. As the disease progressed in Klee’s later years, this forced him to make larger brush strokes and less of them, sort of as an involuntary move toward simplicity. Klee’s late-in-life work, perhaps his strongest and most expressive, was as powerful as seemingly simple. It was during that period that he created a compelling series of work which inspired this essay.
The beauty of freedom
Ironically, Klee was as adventurous, radical and daring in his art as he was conservative in music. Miles Davis, ever the innovator, was the epitome of musical freedom, experimentation and boundary stretching. Both men’s muses were unchained. Miles was totally free musically, and Klee visually. Miles styled his visual art after the modernists and expressionists, and Klee’s unencumbered convergence between music and painting was paramount. He said,“…rhythm was an important link between the two genres, capable of illustrating temporal movements in both.[4]”
If music is a painting you can hear, hear Klee’s Insula dulcamara (1938) sing to you. If a painting is music that you can see, see Round About Midnight, each phrase as a vivid color and freeform shape.
Each set you free.
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FM Jan. 13, 2023
[1] Sony’s Legacy Edition released in 2002 and 2005 add four outtakes and live recordings at Newport Jazz Festival.
[2] How Music Played a Pivotal Role in the Colorful Avant-Garde Direction of Modern Art. https://mymodernmet.com/paul-klee-art-and-music/By Kelly Richman-Abdou, September 18, 2019..
[3] Paul Klee. Fugue in Red. Dr.Georg Predota. Interlude. Nov. 15, 2014. https://interlude.hk/paul-klee-fugue-red/
[4] Paul Klee. Fugue in Red. Dr.Georg Predota. Interlude. Nov. 15, 2014. https://interlude.hk/paul-klee-fugue-red/
Frank Matheis, Writer
Frank Matheis is a music, arts and culture writer and a contributing writer to the Inspiration Art Group International. His latest project was the book ‘Sweet Bitter Blues’ co-written with National Heritage Fellow Phil Wiggins (University Press of Mississippi, 2020). His column ‘In Other Words’ features member artists in all disciplines and general arts essays. He is also a contributing writer to Living Blues magazine (Center for Southern Culture Studies) and the publisher/editor of thecountryblues.com. Frank was formerly an award-winning radio and music producer whose radio documentaries were heard on three continents in two languages. He is also a published photographer, curator and video producer.