The Blue Moment: Miles Davis's Kind of Blue and the Remaking of Modern Music

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Date: October-December 2011
From: Fontes Artis Musicae(Vol. 58, Issue 4)
Publisher: International Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centres
Document Type: Book review
Length: 1,088 words

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The Blue Moment: Miles Davis's Kind of Blue and the Remaking of Modern Music. By Richard Williams. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2010. [309 p. ISBN 978-0393-07663-9. $25.95]

In Spring 1959, in three three-hour sessions on two recording dates in March and April, the trumpeter Miles Davis led a sextet in recording what was to become the best-selling jazz album of all time, Kind of Blue. As Gerald Early noted in his book Miles Davis and American Culture (Missouri History Museum Press, 2001), "Davis had the three instincts necessary for genius: he was an opportunist; he was not afraid of talented people, even if ... they were more talented than he; and he had supreme confidence in his ability to make anything he'd try work." (p. 18) He had certainly assembled some of the most brilliant players in 1950s jazz: saxophonists John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley, pianist Bill Evans (on four of the album's five tracks), bassist Paul Chambers, and the drummer Jimmy Cobb.

In writing this volume, Richard Williams knew that the story of the making of Kind of Blue has already been told, in great detail, in previous volumes: Ashley Kahn's Kind of Blue: The Making of Miles Davis's Masterpiece (Da Capo Press, 2000), and Eric Nisenson's The Making of Kind of Blue: Miles Davis and His Masterpiece (St. Martin's Press, 2000). Consequently, he has here quite different intentions: to describe the context in which the album had its origins, to offer the reader his own musical insights into the album, and, for the largest part of the book, to "find connections, identify direct influences, tease out correspondences and locate interesting pre-echoes and intriguing coincidences." (p. 7) The resulting volume is in part a reflection on the culture of the 1950s, in part personal memoir, and, in part, a fascinating reflection on the ways Kind of Blue has made its influence felt, on musicians as disparate as Steve Reich, Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, and Brian Eno.

Williams is a sports writer for the English newspaper The Guardian. He is the author of several books, including The Death of Ayrton Senna, the Brazilian racing driver, and a study of the Polish film director Krzysztof Kieslowski. Music has long been a part of his professional life, first as writer and deputy editor for the British jazz and rock magazine Melody Maker, and later as head of the A & R Department for Island Records. He is the author of books on Bob Dylan and Miles Davis, and a collection of essays entitled Long Distance Call: Writings on Music (Aurum Press, 2000).

The central chapters of The Blue Moment give the backstory to the recording of Kind of Blue, and a concise account of its recording. "Blue Moods: Conversations behind a Chinese Laundry" introduces us to Gil Evans, who, after an unsuccessful career in California as a bandleader, became a successful arranger, first with the Claude Thornhill band, and later for some of Miles Davis's most successful albums (including Porgy and Bess, recorded just before Kind of Blue). Along with George Russell, he also established himself as one of experimental jazz's leading theoretical minds. It was at Evans' apartment, behind a Chinese laundry, that Davis became exposed to the kind of modal thinking, the notion that improvisation could be scale-based, rather than based on the chord changes of popular song, that was to serve as the basis for Kind of Blue. It was also where Davis became exposed to French composers such as Ravel and Faure, the more radical ideas of John Cage and Harry Partch, the work of the pianists Ahmad Jamal and Lennie Tristano, and Gunther Schuller's experiments in melding jazz and twelve-tone techniques in "Third Stream" music.

Chapter 8 describes the music of Kind of Blue while at the same time giving us a narrative of the recording process. Williams has a keen ear, and the ability to transpose what he hears into engaging prose. His description of "So What" is typical: "Davis's solo begins against an apparently inadvertent but superbly appropriate crash from Cobb's cymbal--perhaps the most famous cymbal crash in all of jazz history--as the drummer switches from brushes to sticks; hanging and decaying over the first two bars of the improvisation, the shimmering sound provides a perfect platform for the trumpeter, who prowls the scales like a cat picking its way between windowsill ornaments, his peerless lyricism in full bloom." (p. 112-113)

Later chapters describe, first, the paths that the various participants in Kind of Blue took after their participation in this seminal recording, and then the influences that Williams sees the album having over a wide variety of musical styles--classic minimalism, rock, the jazz recordings ECM put out under Manfred Eicher, and Brian Eno's ambient music (Music for Airports). For Williams, Kind of Blue was the equivalent of throwing a stone into a lake and watching the ripples spread further and further again from the point where the stone landed. He concludes with a visit to the Dream House in New York City's Tribeca neighborhood, which houses an audio installation by La Monte Young, one of the earliest (and most extreme) minimalists, entitled " The Base 9:7:4 Symmetry in Prime Time When Centered Above and Below the Lowest Term Primes in the Range 288 to 224 ..." (this is roughly one third of the installation's title). Williams's discussions are not for the musicologically fastidious, but they are fascinating: his musical instincts are sound, he writes superbly, and his thinking about these repertoires has been shaped by the fact that he knows many of the musicians of whom he writes.

It is in the opening chapters, and the "interlude" of Chapter 7, that the author's idiosyncrasies come to the fore. This is especially true of Chapter 3, " The Sound of Blue: Blue valentines, Blue kisses. Blue velvet. Way to blue." As a short history of the word and color blue, from Goethe to F. Scott Fitzgerald to Picasso, it tells us very little. Williams overreaches in Chapter 7, "Outside in Blue": his attempt to link jazz, existential philosophy, and an advertising campaign for Strand cigarettes does not convince.

Not intended as a scholarly work, Williams has given us an affectionate account of a major artwork and its influence over half a century. The volume is well-written, free of technical jargon, and well-edited. Williams tells his story without a single footnote, although there is a bibliography for each chapter, and an index.

John Schuster-Craig

Hope College, Allendale, Michigan

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Gale Document Number: GALE|A279462520