How three jazz tones came together in 1959 to create 'Kind of Blue'

You know exactly where “3 Shades of Blue” is going from the first page, even from the cover. You anticipate the point at which its three hues will blend and blur and, for an incandescent moment, become one. But the anticipation and excitement never wanes.

Frank Sinatra biographer James Kaplan has set his sights on three jazz giants, Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Bill Evans, as their lives and their art lead to the recording of “Kind of Blue,” Davis' landmark album from 1959 that featured Coltrane on tenor saxophone and Evans on piano. The album marked a commercial and creative peak in jazz, the pinnacle of what Kaplan, in the book's subtitle, calls “The Lost Empire of Cool.”

Along the way we met a support group made up of some of the greatest minds and talents in 20th century music.

There's Charlie Parker, the sax virtuoso who, along with trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, practically created bebop and who left many fans scrambling to emulate his every move, including, tragically, his insatiable heroin addiction.

There's Thelonious Monk, the bear-like composer and pianist who thought of rhythms others couldn't understand.

There's Ornette Coleman, the Texas-born saxophonist whose experiments went further than even Coltrane (for a while, at least) and left many listeners and peers bewildered and even angry.

In a sense, “3 Shades” is an ode to a time when people cared enough about jazz to get angry. As Kaplan writes: “Today, jazz, when it is not completely ignored, is not very popular for a variety of reasons: because it is old, bland, or difficult to understand. Jazz is out of fashion. Jazz is a niche. Jazz is the soft soundtrack of polite lunches in restaurants with ferns and bananas in Foster pots and smart young waiters.”

James Kaplan, author of “3 Shades of Blue.”

(Avery Kaplan)

It wasn't always like this. Kaplan's book is a bracing reminder of when jazz represented a highly relevant culture, when New York's 52nd Street was filled with new crowded places and new sounds, when the faces of Davis and Monk appeared in mass-circulation magazines. (remember them?) and on Columbia Records. We could promote Miles not just as a jazz artist but as an artist, period, who appealed to anyone looking for great, adventurous music.

Still one of those artists who deserves the treatment just by his first name, Miles is at the center of it all, simultaneously hot and incredibly cool, seemingly always one step ahead of everyone else.

Kaplan himself interviewed Miles for Vanity Fair back in 1989, an encounter that provides an entertaining opening to the book. But for this book, the author relies heavily on the attractive, if not always reliable, 1989 autobiography “Miles” (written with Quincy Troupe), which describes Miles as a painter constantly seeking to add the right sonic colors to the paddle on his head.

Miles idolized Parker and Gillespie, sought them out in New York and joined the bop revolution, eventually becoming disillusioned, like so many others, with Parker's addiction and the chronic unreliability it fostered. Kaplan has no qualms about showing how the great Parker could be a selfish jerk, usually using the words and memories of his teammates to do so.

Teaming with composer-arranger Gil Evans (no relation to Bill) on the groundbreaking nonet sessions that became “The Birth of the Cool,” Miles blazed a trail through hard bop with his first major quintet of the 1950s. , pioneered modal jazz with “Kind of Blue,” started an entirely new quintet in the '60s, and continued to innovate (and self-destruct) through fusion and beyond.

As Kaplan writes of young Miles: “He was a prince and a genius; he knew it”. He could also be ruthless in switching between collaborators and styles.

The book weaves together Miles' stories; Soft-spoken, spiritually searching Coltrane; and Evans, the classically trained pianist who stood out as much for his blinding talent as for his dazzling whiteness. Philadelphia saxophonist Benny Golson, Coltrane's classmate, recalls his first impression of Evans: “he looked like a college student, perhaps majoring in archeology or advanced botany.”

There is also a fourth main character, more destroyer than creator: the heroine. All three men were addicts at one time or another and paid many prices. Their game was affected, as was their health and livelihood.

Parker's shadow looms large here; He had a reputation for playing high, so others assumed they could do it too. Miles and Coltrane quit heroin early on, although Miles continued to compensate with cocaine and alcohol. Coltrane's recovery took him to the spiritual heights of 1965's “A Love Supreme” before he died of liver failure in 1967 at the age of 40.

Evans remained a user for much of his short life, and died in 1980 at the age of 51. Here Kaplan quotes jazz historian and critic Gene Lees: “Bill Evans committed the longest, slowest suicide in the history of music.” Miles remained until 1991, when he died of pneumonia at age 65.

Kaplan knows some music theory, enough to conjure up the ideas behind specific styles and sounds without becoming inaccessible. But above all, he is a master biographer, a tenacious researcher and shaper of narratives, and this is his most ambitious book to date. His two-volume biography of Sinatra is certainly longer, but here he shows his instinct for juggling and connecting multiple stories and characters without losing sight of the bigger picture of how jazz interacted with art and culture in the second half of the century. XX.

There have been some good jazz books in recent years, including Robin DG Kelley's biography of Monk, “Thelonious Monk”; Aidan Levy’s biography of Sonny Rollins, “Saxophone Colossus”; and “Becoming Ella Fitzgerald” by Judith Tick. “3 Shades of Blue” is playing with higher stakes.

It is a compulsively readable work of fine synthesis and perspective, drawing on earlier works by others and the author's own interviews (particularly generous were Miles' trumpet protégé Wallace Roney, who died of complications from COVID-19 in 2020; and Rollins, who continues to defy jazz's actuarial odds at age 93).

There's so much going on in jazz history that the “Kind of Blue” moment seems a little anticlimactic, another high point in a story full of peaks and valleys. A handful of musicians, including Davis, Coltrane and Evans, went into a studio, played around with some modal ideas outlined by Miles, and created a musical ambrosia. Then they went their separate ways and never played as a group again. What they left behind is the stuff of legend and, now, a magnificent book.

Chris Vognar is a freelance cultural writer.