by James Kaplan (Music 781.65 Kap)
Among all of the classic albums in the jazz canon, Kind of Blue by Miles Davis has gradually risen to become the best-selling jazz album of all time, and one of the most critically-acclaimed as well. It’s a remarkable album, and it also features several of the most iconic jazz musicians of all time, such as pianist Bill Evans, saxophonist John Coltrane, and of course trumpeter and bandleader Miles Davis himself. While much has been written about all of these artists, there is a great new book by James Kaplan called 3 Shades of Blue that talks about these three artists and their confluence around the Kind of Blue album in depth, and you can borrow it from the Polley Music Library.
Author James Kaplan starts the book
with a great personal anecdote — one of his early nonfiction writing
assignments was for Vanity Fair magazine, who wanted to run an interview with
Miles to coincide with the publication of his massive autobiography in 1989. At
the time, Kaplan was only a casual fan of jazz, and had only heard a couple of
Miles albums, but once he got the gig, he bought a bunch of CDs and crammed for
the interview. Although he was initially allotted only one hour, they ended up
chatting for two, and Miles invited him back for another hour the following
day. He reflects that it ended up being a fairly superficial piece, but Kaplan
got it published, and the experience started him down a path of getting more
into jazz.
The overall structure of this book
feels almost like a novel at times, which makes some sense considering that
Kaplan is also a published novelist. The biographies of Miles, Coltrane, and
Evans are introduced, he follows their early careers as though they’re main
characters in the broader world of jazz, the climax of the book is the
recording of Kind of Blue, and then substantial sections follow their
careers as they went on to become independent bandleaders. The history of jazz
immediately before and after Kind of Blue is discussed in relative detail, which is an
interesting story unto itself for those who aren’t super familiar with the
history of the record. Besides simply being interesting reading,
it gives us a deeper context for the significance of the album, or perhaps a
better sense of the interconnected working lives of jazz artists in the 1950s.
Now that we regard Kind of Blue as such a legendary, historically significant
album, we lose some of that perspective. But at the time of its release, it
wasn’t a mega-seller, and for the artists who performed on it, making records
was a common occurrence, and it’s unlikely they felt like they were making
history on those sessions.
Jazz was evolving quickly in the
late 1950s, and Kaplan provides lots of context for how musicians found
themselves working in various small combos, as well as how the music started to
change. Kind of Blue is now regarded both as the pinnacle of the
“cool jazz” movement, generally mellower music than some of the preceding
styles of jazz, as well as an example of the move away from traditional chord
changes. In the case of the Miles Davis Quintet, new modal approaches to music
became their focus, and are especially apparent on tunes like “So What.” There
is still plenty of harmonic function in these songs, but the focus narrows to
fewer chords harmonically, and more sophisticated thinking in terms of scales.
Interestingly, while we think of cool jazz as a 50s phenomenon and “free jazz”
as more of a 60s movement, they were in fact developing simultaneously: in the
chapter immediately following the recording of Kind of Blue, Kaplan looks at the career of Ornette
Coleman, whose breakthrough album The Shape of Jazz to Come arrived within a few months of Kind of Blue.
In a way, these differing styles
are a great way to show how the major performers in the Miles Davis Quintet
grew and evolved in subsequent years. Miles had a standoffish relationship with
Ornette, and while his style dramatically evolved in the 60s and 70s, it was
more toward further distillations of modal playing in new electrified contexts,
informed by rock and funk music. Coltrane saw new kinds of melodic freedom in
Ornette’s work, and through relationships with other free jazz-leaning players
like Eric Dolphy and Albert Ayler, his later work gradually moved in their
direction in the years after his own landmark album A Love Supreme. Pianist Bill Evans, who originally fit with
Miles’ cool jazz vibes and modal approaches, continued to develop his work in a
manner that hewed closer to the “cool” sound, though he’s also one of the more
harmonically sophisticated jazz thinkers of his time. And to mention another
performer on Kind of Blue, saxophonist Cannonball Adderly maybe even
stepped backward a little stylistically in his post-Miles career, playing a lot
of soul, blues, and more harmonically traditional bebop.
Though Miles, Coltrane and Evans
ended up in different musical places, 3 Shades of Blue is also an unflinching look at
some of the things they had in common: all 3 struggled with addictions, and all
3 died fairly young. Rock music, which took over the popular consciousness not
long after Kind of Blue,” has generally become the genre where we read
the most about legendary musicians leading lives of addictions and excess, but
these most respected jazz artists were victims of the same kinds of lifestyles.
Despite it all, though, all three remained dedicated musicians through their
final days, and they all changed the direction of music in their own way. It’s
impossible to imagine what modern music would look like, jazz or otherwise,
without Coltrane and Miles in particular, who truly explored music inside and
out, incorporating influences from all around the world, always evolving.
While I knew most of the
information discussed in this book already, it’s never been presented in such a
perfectly intertwined and readable manner before. Perhaps my biggest takeaway
from the book was really getting a feel for the intense speed with which jazz
evolved in the late 50s. Musicians have had decades to unravel this music, live
with it, be inspired by it, and the traditions spawned by just a handful of
musicians in a couple of years of the late 1950s have carried on for
generations now. But what feels like a mythical tradition today can really be
attributed to just a few years of explosive creativity among a dozen or so
musicians. But it’s been hard to find the story of these years from such a
personable perspective–after all, the main protagonists of the story are all
gone, and they all kept looking forward with little interest in nostalgia. If
you’re into any kind of modern jazz, I think that you’ll find 3 Shades of Blue to be one of the best documents
of the period that’s been written yet.
(If you enjoy this, you may also
wish to try The Making of Kind of Blue: Miles Davis and his Masterpiece
by Eric Nisenson, Miles, the Autobiography by Miles Davis, John Coltrane: His Life and Music by Lewis Porter, or Bill Evans: How My Heart Sings by Peter Pettinger.)
( official James Kaplan web
site )
See
Jeremiah J.’s review of Kind of Blue by Miles Davis in the December 2012
Staff Recommendations here on BookGuide!
Recommended
by Scott S.
Polley Music Library
Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?
New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!
Check out this, and all the other great music resources, at the Polley Music Library, located on the 2nd floor of the Bennett Martin Public Library at 14th & "N" St. in downtown Lincoln. You'll find biographies of musicians, books about music history, instructional books, sheet music, CDs, music-related magazines, and much more. Also check out Polley Music Library Picks, the Polley Music Library's e-mail newsletter, and follow them on Facebook!
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