Miles Davis’s album A Kind of Blue has probably brought more people into the jazz fold than any other. Its open and accessible melodies were recorded in just two days with Coltrane and Adderley. The music’s lack of complexity also means that it has been mauled and massacred by students of jazz. Consequently it was a risk on the part of the Spin to programme a special tribute evening to this extraordinarily magnetic but much overused music. The fact that it was recorded 50 years ago almost to the day is a good reason. Getting a couple of musicians on the front line who really can do the music justice is an even stronger one.

With the opening chorus of So What, when Dave O’Higgins on tenor and Quentin Collins on trumpet brought in the familiar two-note harmonised phrase, there was an audible hush of satisfaction. We knew the tune and it sounded right. It may not have been Miles and Coltrane on the stand yet it was a crisp imitation. But that was just the tune and it’s really not tough. It was the soloing from Collins and O’Higgins that really made the evening fly. Although both several times opened with a few notes from the recorded solos, from then on they took the long, open chords to make their own interpretations of history. Collins played wonderfully sparse phrases with long Davis-like pauses, colouring his tone and inserting sudden dramatic bursts. O’Higgins, well-known for the virtuosity of his playing, managed to sound like early Coltrane without giving way to imitation. He has a full rich tone and had very clearly absorbed the somewhat eccentric structure of Miles’s tunes so that he was able to give his solos a shape and intensity that eludes the rest of us mauling imitators.

With the addition of original material from O’Higgins, whose In the Zone was a particularly bright driving piece, and Oxley’s old favourite, The Purple Panther, this was an evening that showed how well Miles Davis’s first exposition of ‘cool jazz’