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

[Williams'] approach balances technical explanation, historical detail and critical assessment – the chapters on jazz lineage could stand alone as an incisive, concise history of modern jazz leading up to the Davis recording.

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LibraryThing member djalchemi

Not an exhaustive review of Miles Davis' Kind of Blue (that occupies just one chapter), so much as a tracing of --and meditation on -- a loose school of music from the 1940s to the present day. The line starts with Gil Evans, George Russell and the "birth of the cool" in jazz, makes its way through

Kind of Blue and Miles' second great quintet to Coltrane, minimalism, the Velvet Underground, Soft Machine, Brian Eno and ECM. It's a line, not a story -- and not a particularly straight line at that. Williams gives himself freedom to go off on extended riffs that relate little, if at all, back to Kind of Blue. In particular his treatment of Terry Riley is extended, and fascinating stuff. Williams' account of Brian Eno is as authoritative as you'd expect from someone who's championed Eno's work from the very beginning. My enjoyment of jazz is pretty superficial. This book (in a similar way to Geoff Dyer's But Beautiful) both showed me the direction to deeper appreciation and reconciled me to remaining forever pretty shallow.

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LibraryThing member BillPilgrim

This book explores the development of Miles Davis as a jazz artist that lead to his seminal album of 1959, Kind of Blue, which is routinely voted “the best jazz album of all time” when those types of lists are put together. I am a jazz fan who does not understand or particularly care about the

technical, theoretical aspects of the music, and this book goes into that in great detail. I often found myself skimming over some of this exposition, which often read like gibberish to me. A little of it did sink in nonetheless, but only on a superficial level. A great part of the book talks about the effect that Kind of Blue had on jazz and other musical forms, from 1959 up to the present. I mostly enjoyed that; I like all forms of music. Reading this part of the book did make me want to explore some of the music that is discussed, which I have not paid much attention to before, particularly that of the minimalists, such as John Cage, Phillip Glass, and Steven Reich.

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LibraryThing member freelancer_frank

This is a book about the art of making music. It takes the 'Kind of Blue' creative sessions as a focus and expands out around them. Williams understands the rhizomatic nature of art and is happy to include an extended disquisition on the history of the color blue for this reason. Sometimes his

exposition is little more than a list but Williams can really write about the subjective appeal of music and the nature of original creativity. The thread drawn from 'Kind of Blue' through minimalism, the Velvet Underground and Brian Eno is fascinatingly under-explained, leaving the reader to fill in any blanks, which is as it should be.

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LibraryThing member Opinionated

A very fine narrative on how Kind of Blue was made - and what a digression from Miles' progression it actually is - and how it resonates and influences the next 20 years of popular music. How well you like this depends on what your musical tastes are - for me the sections following the natural path

through Coltrane and freeer forms of jazz was fascinating as were the chapters on The Velvet Underground and Brian Eno. For me, I'm not so big on Terry Riley and Steve Reich so those chapters were of less interest. But its beautifully done

And its still amazing to me that 6 musicians walked into a small midtown Manhatten studio for 2 x 3 hour sessions in 1959 and without any rehearsal casually created a timeless masterpiece before sloping off to their day jobs, and in most cases, never playing the music again. Remarkable

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