3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool
by James Kaplan
Penguin Press, 2024
[Publication date: March 5, 2024]
From
the author of the definitive biography of Frank Sinatra, the story of
how jazz arrived at the pinnacle of American culture in 1959, told
through the journey of three towering artists—Miles Davis, John
Coltrane, and Bill Evans—who came together to create the most iconic
jazz album of all time, Kind of Blue
The myth of the ’60s depends on the 1950s being the “before times” of conformity, segregation, straightness—The Lonely Crowd and The Organization Man.
This all carries some truth, but it does nothing to explain how, in
1959, America’s great indigenous art form, jazz, reached the height of
its power and popularity, thanks to a number of Black geniuses so
legendary they go by one name—Monk, Mingus, Rollins, Coltrane, and,
above all, Miles. Nineteen fifty-nine saw Miles, Coltrane, Bill Evans,
and more come together to record what is widely considered the greatest
jazz album of all time, and certainly the bestselling: Kind of Blue.
3 Shades of Blue
is James Kaplan’s magnificent account of the paths of the three giants
to the mountaintop of 1959 and beyond. It’s a book about music, and
business, and race, and heroin, and the towns that gave jazz its home,
from New Orleans and New York to Kansas City, Philadelphia, Chicago, and
LA. It’s an astonishing meditation on creativity and the strange
hothouses that can produce its full flowering. It’s a book about the
great forebears of this golden age, particularly Charlie Parker and
Dizzy Gillespie, and the disrupters, like Ornette Coleman, who would
take the music down truly new paths. And it’s about why the world of
jazz most people know is a museum to this never-replicated period.
But above all, 3 Shades of Blue
is a book about three very different men—their struggles, their
choices, their tragedies, their greatness. Bill Evans had a gruesome
downward spiral; John Coltrane took the mystic’s path into a space far
away from mainstream concerns. Miles had three or four sea changes in
him before the end. The tapestry of their lives is, in Kaplan’s hands,
an American odyssey with no direction home. It is also a masterpiece, a
book about jazz that is as big as America.
REVIEWS:
“‘This
is the story of the three geniuses who joined forces to create one of
the great classics in Western music,’ Mr. Kaplan writes . . . Kaplan
does a wonderful job synthesizing sources to produce a compelling
narrative history. His own interviews add a lot as well. His technical
descriptions of the music are accessible and useful.” —Wall Street Journal
“Fascinating,
detailed and comprehensive . . . Kaplan—who also penned the two-volume
definitive look at the life of one Francis Albert Sinatra—goes into
similar depth here . . . 3 Shades of Blue—like the best of music books—just sends you back to the source.” —Houston Press
“Elegant and elegiac, 3 Shades of Blue tells stories of ambition and anxiety, collaborations and clashes, musical innovation and racial discrimination.” —The Minneapolis StarTribune
“[Kaplan] writes like a dream . . . As an overview of musical magnificence, this book cannot be bettered.” —Jazz Journal
“In
the ten years between 1955 and 1965, an American art form—jazz—reached
its peak . . . [Kaplan] has written the definitive book on how that
decade came to be . . . vital, marshalling with a light touch countless
snippets of material.” —London Sunday Times
“Kaplan,
author of a lauded two-volume biography of Frank Sinatra, tells the
stories of three jazz geniuses, offering new and revelatory perspectives
on Miles Davis, born to and repeatedly saved by privilege; John
Coltrane, whose 'watchful sadness' was rooted in an impoverished
childhood; and the less-known Bill Evans, 'an incessantly analytical
human being.' . . . Writing with acumen and lyricism, Kaplan conjures
the moods and milieus, breakthroughs and performances, temperaments and
drama that generated this endlessly enthralling music.” —Booklist (starred review)
“Kaplan,
the author of the definitive biography of Frank Sinatra, gives us a
peek inside group genius at work . . . Throughout this vibrant text, the
author captures the time and atmosphere perfectly—the music, the
personalities, the fragrant aroma of weed in the air—and he brings us
right into the performances . . . A marvelous must-read for jazz fans
and anyone interested in this dynamic period of American music.” —Kirkus (starred review)
“A
compulsively readable book about three jazz legends who came together
for one glorious moment to produce one of the best, most influential
jazz records ever.” —Library Journal (starred review)
“3 Shades of Blue
is an instant classic, one that both jazz fanatics and casual fans will
love. James Kaplan sweeps us into the dazzling world of Swing Street
after World War II, a scene as mythical and magical as Pablo Picasso’s
Paris, Timothy Leary’s San Francisco, or Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Concord.
It is an intimate, enthralling portrait of the titans of 20th-century
music—‘friends and geniuses together’—and the revolution they created.” —Debby Applegate, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Madam: The Biography of Polly Adler, Icon of the Jazz Age
“James Kaplan proves again that he is not only a penetrating
commentator on American music, but also a compelling storyteller. In his
new book, Kaplan writes about a decisive moment in modern jazz, and
turns it into a genuine page-turner.” —Ted Gioia, author of The History of Jazz
“James Kaplan once more combines his formidable skill as an
electrifying storyteller of the history of American music with a true
depth of understanding of the art form itself—this time through the eyes
of three jazz legends. This book reads like music. Don’t miss it.” —Seth MacFarlane, creator and executive producer, Family Guy and The Orville
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
James Kaplan’s essays, stories, reviews, and profiles have appeared in numerous magazines, including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Esquire, and New York. His novels include Pearl’s Progress and Two Guys from Verona, a New York Times Notable Book for 1998. His nonfiction works include The Airport, You Cannot Be Serious (coauthored with John McEnroe), Dean & Me: A Love Story (with Jerry Lewis), Frank: The Voice,and Sinatra: The Chairman. He is a 2012 Guggenheim Fellow. He lives in Westchester, New York.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1
The blue trumpet
Thirty years later to the month, in March 1989, I found myself riding
an elevator, heart knocking, to the fourteenth floor of the Essex House
on Central Park South to interview Miles Davis. It was an assignment I'd
lucked into through my magazine-editor brother, who knew a Vanity Fair
editor who'd said he needed a profile of Miles to accompany an excerpt
from the trumpet legend's forthcoming memoir, coauthored by Quincy
Troupe. The writer, the Vanity Fair editor
told my brother, should know jazz. My brother, Peter W. Kaplan, told
him that I didn't just know jazz; I knew everything there was to know
about it.
This was hyperbolic, to put it mildly. I liked
jazz-liked it a lot, what little I knew of it. My record collection,
just beginning to shift from LPs to CDs, was primarily rock and blues,
with a bit of classical and a smattering of jazz. I was in the process
of educating my ears-still am-but it was and is a long, slow process. I
knew Miles Davis was a titan in his field; I knew he'd played with
Charlie Parker in the 1940s. That was about it. I owned exactly two
Miles albums: 1969's Filles de Kilimanjaro,
which I'd bought simply because I heard it in a friend's dorm room and
it was quietly beautiful, and the dark and menacing 1970 Bitches Brew, which I'd bought because, when it was issued, buying it felt vaguely compulsory.
When I complained to my brother that I was very far from knowing all there was to know about jazz, he stopped me. This was Vanity Fair, he said, with some italicized heat.
I took his meaning. The magazine, then under the leadership of
legend-under-construction Tina Brown, was the magazine to write for in
those days. And I had a wife and an infant son and a mortgage in
Westchester, and a chance to get in the door at Vanity Fair would be a plum. One heard they were issuing fat contracts to writers they liked.
I called my brother's editor acquaintance there, and, after
surprisingly little discussion of my putative jazz expertise, got the
assignment. I promptly went to Tower Records and bought every Miles
Davis CD they had, not thinking about when I might have time to actually
listen to all of them. Then I phoned Miles's publicist and proudly
announced myself as The Writer from Vanity Fair.
It was only on that elevator at the Essex House, with the publicist by
my side, that the full weight of my fraudulence began to sink in on me. I
was nobody! I knew nothing! No Google then, no Wikipedia; no facile way
to pose as an instant authority. I'd leafed through the advance copy of
Miles's memoir that the publisher had sent me, intimidated by its heft,
not to mention its general tone of darkness and anger, not to mention
the masses of jazz names I knew little or nothing about. I'd written up a
too short and shallow list of questions for him, naïvely hoping that
once a flow of conversation was established, further thoughts would
occur to me. In my backpack I had my Soviet-style Radio Shack cassette
recorder, the size and weight of a dense college textbook (it ran on
five C batteries). I also had extra batteries and a half dozen blank
cassettes. The backpack was heavy. The publicist had promised me one
meeting of one hour, no more. How could I possibly get all I needed in
an hour? And what did I need, anyway?
I often think of the line attributed, in various forms, to Mike Tyson: Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.
Every interview is a kind of punch in the mouth. You walk in with
certain expectations about the person you're about to talk to, and bang,
the person is inevitably somebody different from the person you
expected, and everything you'd anticipated evaporates. Wise interviewers
learn to roll with the punches, to bob and weave and temporize on the
spur of the moment. I was anything but wise in those days. In addition, I
was thoroughly pre-intimidated by the time we arrived and Miles Davis
opened his apartment door, a small but startling presence: dark eyes
glittering, naked to the waist, wearing black pajama pants and what
looked like an extravagant wig of brown curls.
We settled down to talk. "Now," he said. "What you want to know?"
What did I know? Nothing. What did I want to know? Everything.
But Miles Davis wasn’t about to tell me everything. He couldn’t tell me
one percent of one percent of everything in our allotted hour-though
the one hour turned into almost two, at the end of which I asked
timorously if I might have some more time, and Miles rasped, “Come back
tomorrow.”
Of course I returned the next day, without the
publicist this time, and the second session went much like the first,
full of Miles's sentence fragments about tangential topics; further
discussion about his artwork; stories about matters and people I hadn't
the wherewithal to understand; and minimalist, wandering answers to my
jazz questions. At the time I had the sinking feeling that I would draw
little of substance from him, even over the course of three hours,
certainly not enough to make a piece that would satisfy what I imagined
were the Olympian standards of Vanity Fair.
But the musical standards of Vanity Fair
in 1989 were far from Olympian. Music was scarcely the point. What the
magazine was interested in was celebrity, and style and buzz and dirt,
and with Miles and his frequently scabrous memoir, Vanity Fair
had all of this in abundance. His status as a personage, an icon, had
always vied with his stature as a musician. That was the way he wanted
it; that was the way he designed it: from the moment he dropped out of
Juilliard and joined Charlie Parker's band in 1945, he was an energetic
shaper of his own image. He was a visual as well as a sonic phenomenon.
He had a lot to work with. He was beautiful and dark, literally and
figuratively; he was angry, tempestuous, and always stylish, whether in
the Ivy League-bespoke look he favored in the fifties and early sixties
or the outer-space outfits of the mid- to late eighties. He was a Black
man who lacked any hint of the ingratiation that the white world
preferred (or demanded) from its Negro entertainers, and that the
entertainers sometimes, doubtless with irony or fury in their hearts,
supplied. He wore shades onstage. He didn't announce tunes-he didn't
speak at all. He famously turned his back to his audiences, both while
playing and laying out.
This was Miles Davis the celebrity. The
question of Miles the musician in 1989 was a more complicated matter.
From the beginning, his musical life had been a series of restless
moltings: of collaborators, of styles, of lovers and friends. From
Juilliard to Bird to The Birth of the Cool to
the Blue Note and Prestige albums to a free fall into the hell of
heroin addiction to getting clean and coming back triumphantly in
Newport in 1955 to signing with Columbia, the Rolls-Royce of record
labels, to the first great quintet (Miles, John Coltrane, Paul Chambers,
Red Garland, Philly Joe Jones) to replacing Garland with Bill Evans, to
losing Evans, then bringing him back for Kind of Blue . . .
After Kind of Blue
Davis would continue to evolve incessantly, initially with that album's
sextet-minus Evans, who'd left to lead a trio of his own, and would
maintain that format for the remainder of his career, and then without
Coltrane, who became a leader and an artistic trailblazer in his own
right. Then, in the early sixties, Miles formed a second great quintet,
including saxophonist Wayne Shorter, pianist Herbie Hancock, drummer
Tony Williams, and bassist Ron Carter. And then, in the late sixties, he
abandoned acoustic jazz altogether, moving to the easy/uneasy blend of
jazz and rock that would cause consternation among jazz purists and come
to be known as fusion. Then, in 1975, plagued by profuse health
problems and addictions, he left music altogether, not to return until
1981.
Audiences and record buyers welcomed his comeback, though
jazz's zealous gatekeepers continued to fret about his stylistic
excursions and commercial aspirations. Ever since Bitches Brew,
jazz purists had been decrying what looked like naked commercialism on
Miles's part: many knives were sharpened for his every move. His 1985
Columbia album You're Under Arrest contained,
besides several original compositions, covers of two huge pop hits,
Cyndi Lauper and Rob Hyman's "Time After Time" and John Bettis and Steve
Porcaro's "Human Nature," from Michael Jackson's mega-selling album Thriller. Rolling Stone's decidedly mixed review of You're Under Arrest spoke of the CD's "instant notoriety" in jazz circles.
It didn't help matters that Miles was inevitably compared with his
"anointed heir and label mate, Wynton Marsalis." Marsalis, a mere
twenty-three but already world famous when You're Under Arrest was
released, was the purist-in-chief. A startlingly gifted trumpeter from a
brilliant New Orleans jazz family, he first came on the scene in the
late 1970s and immediately began making a splash, both with his
playing-not only of jazz but also the classical trumpet repertoire-and
his outspoken critiques of the contemporary jazz scene, most pointedly
of his former idol, Miles Davis.
The young trumpeter was highly
opinionated and highly quotable, and from the beginning the music press,
sniffing a possible feud, gave Marsalis's venting about Miles-he even
critiqued the outlandish outfits Miles had taken to wearing onstage,
calling them "dresses"-plenty of column inches. The first time the two
met, Miles said, "So here's the police."
Meanwhile, behind the
scenes, George Butler, the vice president for jazz A&R (artists and
repertoire) of Davis and Marsalis's mutual record label, Columbia, tried
vigorously to get Davis to bestow his blessing on the up-and-comer, to
little avail.
"George [kept] trying to make friends out of [me
and] Wynton Marsalis," Miles told me. "Like, I'd be sketching, right?
And the phone would ring. Cicely [Tyson] says, 'It's George.'
"So I said, 'What does he want? Can he tell you?' She said no. So I answer the phone. Say, 'George, what it is?'
"He says, 'Why don't you call Wynton up?'
"I say, 'For what?'
"He says, 'Because it's his birthday. He's in St. Louis.'
"I say, 'Oh, George-'"
I laughed.
"See, you laughing," Miles said. "But when that shit comes at you like that, you're like, What?
And Wynton and I get together and talk about music; he tells me he's
tired of playing classical. I said, 'But you're the only one playing it.
Of our race. And you play it good.'"
This is what Miles said
he said to Marsalis. But in various public contexts he'd also
potshotted right back, often asserting what he'd said after Marsalis
recorded his first baroque concerto album in 1982 (and would repeat for
posterity in his autobiography): "They got Wynton playing some old dead
European music."
And in June of 1986 there had been an incident.
