Kind of Blue: The Making of Miles Davis Masterpiece Book

Kind of Blue is now seen as one of the leading and most influential jazz albums. Released in the very late 1950s, its simple motifs and playing, the timbre and talent that Miles Davis put into the writing of the album, and the cast of musicians involved in its creation meant that jazz and modal music would be changed forever.

Using simple chordal structures, and the most rudimentary of musical notations, Miles Davis on Trumpet, saxophonists Julian Cannonball Adderley and John Coltrane, pianists Wynton Kelly and Bill Evans, bassist Paul Chambers and Jimmy Cobb on drums created a masterpiece, with such tracks as So What, Blue in Green, Freddie Freeloader and All Blues which are still seen as study pieces for serious music students.

The forensic attention that the author Ashley Kahn brings to the writing of the book looks at the technical aspects of the recording, and the musicianship, as well as putting the album into a historical context, of what it meant at the time of its release. The music was written, and recorded in less than nine hours, and the prose takes on something of a fast nature when describing how the music was recorded, and the minimal direction that musicians were given before and during the rehearsals.

There are many interviews in the book, with musicians who were present, as well as the many musicians who have been influenced by the work. We hear from the studio staff and engineers to look into what for some people was just another day in the office, only becoming more and more important as time passed.

Listening to the music many decades after it was first recorded is a lesson in how little time talented musicians need to work in a studio, to create something that still stands up to scrutiny by serious jazz students, and people who just appreciate good tunes well played by some of the leading jazz musicians in New York at the tail end of the 1950s.
Ben Macnair