The Blue Moment Miles Davis

Hardcover
309 pgs.
W.W. Norton & Co., Publisher

Miles Davis's "Kind of Blue" is the best-selling piece of music in the history of jazz, and for many listeners among the most haunting in all of twentieth-century music. Telling the story of the album's creation--recorded in nine miraculous hours in a converted Manhattan church in 1959--Richard Williams offers an extraordinary history of this meditative, melancholy masterpiece, its enigmatic composer, and the innovative cast of musicians who performed it. Williams reveals how this album emerged from rich intellectual movements in art and philosophy, and tracing strains of the album through a five-decade labyrinth of sound, looks at jazz greats like John Coltrane, Keith Jarrett, and Chick Corea; avant-garde composers like Steve Reich, Terry Riley and LaMonte Young; rock legends like the Velvet underground and Brian Eno, as well as James Brown--each one heavily influenced in his own way by the indelible presence of "Kind of Blue".