3 Shades of Blue

Informationen zum Autor 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. Klappentext "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 famous and bestselling 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, the great indigenous art form, jazz, reached the height of its power and popularity, led there by a number of Black geniuses so iconic they go by one name-Monk, Mingus, Rollins, Coltrane, and above all, Miles. 1959 saw Miles, Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the other members of Miles's sextet come together to record what is widely considered the greatest jazz album of all time, and certainly the best-selling: Kind of Blue. 3 Shades of Blue is James Kaplan's magnificent account of the paths of the three giants Miles, Coltrane and Evans to the mountaintop of 1959 and their path on from there. It's a book about music, and business, and race, and heroin, and the towns that gave jazz its home, from New York and LA to Philadelphia, Chicago and Kansas City. 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 the people, like Ornette Coleman, who would take the music down strange new paths. And it's about why this period has never been replicated, why the world of jazz most people visit is a museum to it. But above all this 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"-- Leseprobe 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 Char...

Autorentext

James Kaplan

Klappentext

*The National Bestseller • One of The Minneapolis Star Tribune*'s Best Books of the Year

“A superb book...[Kaplan is] a master biographer, a dogged researcher and shaper of narrative, and this is his most ambitious book to date.” —Los Angeles Times

From the author of the definitive biography of Frank Sinatra, the story of three towering artists—Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Bill Evans—and how they came together to create the most iconic jazz album of all time, *Kind of Blue**

• In 1959, America’s great indigenous art form, jazz, reached the height of its power and popularity. James Kaplan’s magnificent 3 Shades of Blue captures how that golden era came to be, and its pinnacle with the recording of Kind of Blue. It’s a book about music, and business, and race, and heroin, and the cities that gave jazz its home, and the Black geniuses behind its rise. It’s an astonishing meditation on creativity and the strange environments where it can flourish most. It’s a book about the great forebears and founders of a lost era, and the disrupters 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—the greatness and varied fortunes of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Bill Evans. The tapestry of their lives is, in Kaplan’s hands, a national odyssey with no direction home. It is also a masterpiece, a book about jazz that is as big as America.

  Leseprobe
  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 si…