On The Bookshelf
3 SHADES OF BLUE | JAMES KAPLAN
Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans And The Lost Empire Of Cool
1959 saw Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans and the other members of Miles’s sextet come together to record the best selling jazz album of all time: Kind of Blue. That year, America’s great indigenous art form, jazz, reached the height of its power and popularity. Black geniuses, so legendary that they go by one name – Mingus, Monk, Rollins, Ornette, Blakey, Cannonball, Brubeck and Miles. They changed the music landscape and introduced a new sound. Kind of Blue is widely considered the most iconic jazz album of all time and certainly the bestselling.
3 Shades of Blue follows the paths of Miles, Coltrane and Evans to the mountaintop of 1959 and their roads on from there. It’s a book about music and business, race and heroin, and an astonishing meditation on creativity and the strange hothouses that can produce its full flowering. But above all this is the story of three very different men – their struggles, their choices, their inspiration. The tapestry of their lives is, in James Kaplan’s hands, an American Odyssey.
