ODE TO DAVIS, COLTRANE AND EVANS
3 Shades of Blue focuses on a pivotal moment in modern music
3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans and the Lost Empire of Cool
In this ode to Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans and more, James Kaplan evokes a pivotal moment in modern music.
It was modern jazz's annus mirabilis. As Kaplan writes in his book about trumpeter Davis, saxophonist Coltrane and pianist Evans — three mid-century geniuses — 1959 brought on “jazz's future with ruthless speed.” No sooner had Davis and his sidemen opened new vistas with their experiments in what came to be known as “modal” jazz than Ornette Coleman, a Texan steeped in the rural blues, announced a revolution of his own, changing the face of the music forever.
It all began in the spring of 1959, when bassist and composer Charles Mingus entered Columbia Records' 30th Street studio in New York and recorded a tribute to the great tenor saxophonist Lester Young, who had died at the age of 49. That tune became the second cut on Mingus Ah Um, an album that its producer feared was “too far ahead of the consumer” such were its weak initial sales, but which went on to become Mingus's bestselling LP.
Around the same time, Coltrane began recording an album titled Giant Steps, whose thrillingly exploratory title track remains an intimidating examination piece for aspiring jazz musicians to this day. And in November 1959, to a mixture of fanfare and consternation, Coleman released The Shape of Jazz to Come, a record that inaugurated so-called free jazz with its startling emphasis on melodic invention over set chord changes.
In 3 Shades of Blue, his entertaining (if somewhat uneven), new book, Kaplan, previously the author of a biography of Frank Sinatra, sets the scene vividly. He evokes the “hip and the wannabes” who converged in their droves on the Five Spot, a club in Lower Manhattan where Coleman's quartet played a now celebrated two-anda-half-month residency.
The crowd here was a mixture of the saxophonist's peers, many of whom, like Coltrane, were fascinated by Coleman's innovations, and predominantly white intellectuals, artists and bohemians.
The British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, who was at the time moonlighting as The New Statesman's jazz critic, was unmoved, finding musicians like Coleman to be “cut off from the common listeners among their people” and dependent, for their audience, on those “who are themselves alienated, the internal emigrants of America.”
As for Davis, the “presiding genius” of Kaplan's book, he “(wrote) off Ornette as a musician.” And indeed it is another record, Davis's ethereal and uncannily limpid Kind of Blue, on which Coltrane and Evans both play sublimely, that is Kaplan's principal focus.
It is, in his view, the pinnacle of what jazz in America achieved in 1959.
It was also the bestselling LP Davis ever made, making this Black son of a dentist from East St. Louis an exceptionally wealthy man, and one of the bestselling jazz albums of all time.
But, as Kaplan rightly insists, the significance of Kind of Blue doesn't lie only in its striking commercial success. Musically, it was, in its much quieter way, every bit as revolutionary, or at least as consequential, as The Shape of Jazz to Come. The chapter in which Kaplan tries to get to the bottom of how the band assembled by Davis (Coltrane; Evans; drummer Jimmy Cobb; bassist Paul Chambers; and alto saxophonist Julian `Cannonball' Adderley) managed to create a beguiling “island of quiet mystery” in just two short sessions at the 30th Street studio is by some distance the best chapter in the book.
When he put the band together, Davis said he wanted the music it made to be “freer, more modal, more African or eastern and less western.” Less western here meant less tethered to the chord structures derived from the Great American Songbook on which jazz players had hitherto based their improvisations. Evans, the only white musician in the group, who had had classical training, was central to this conception. His suggestive touch and what Davis called his “quiet fire” helped to give Kind of Blue its highly distinctive atmosphere.
In a revealing afterword, Kaplan says his original ambition had been to tell a bigger story about how, in his view, jazz became an “art music,” as opposed to a popular one, in the second half of the 20th century. It's not obvious that he has succeeded in that aim here.
But one thing at least is certain: where Kaplan's sympathies lie. Kind of Blue, he writes, sits at the “hinge between jazz's 1950s glories” and what he disdains as its subsequent “slide into esotericism.” If this gorgeous record is, as he puts it, the sound of Davis, Coltrane and Evans “leaving the blues behind and heading for parts unknown,” it is clear that he doesn't care for the direction in which they, and jazz as a whole, were going.