Three Shades of Blue:: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool

Jazz is a world unto itself, a world of oral traditions, insider knowledge, nightclubs, drugs, and the constant struggle to earn a living playing music that very few people like—but some people adore. The Golden Age of the art-form stretches from t  he Swing era, when Broadway musicals, movies, dance bands, and ballroom orchestras flooded the theaters and radio waves, to the small-group scene that followed, during which the most gifted of the musicians who had cut their teeth in the big bands formed small combos within which they could "stretch out" and "strut their stuff" in more intimate environments.

In 3 Shades of Blue James Kaplan has chosen the ideal form for exploring this world, drawing on established narratives, interviews, and previously unpublished oral histories to convey the uncertainties, inspirations, marketing challenges, personality clashes, and dumb luck, both good and bad, that fueled this remarkable burst of creativity. He defends his chosen point of focus in the introduction as follows:

Other categories would follow, but I confess that in the genres of bebop and hard bop, jazz created, in the quarter century between, roughly, 1942 and 1967, I find almost all of the jazz I want and need.

That's not a good sentence grammatically, but it conveys the author's personal enthusiasm, and that's what keeps the narrative rolling.

Kaplan relishes the gossip, the stories, and he knows how to milk the material. For example, he offers an extended quote by trumpeter Wallace Roney about how Miles got Coltrane to come back to his band. At the time, Miles had just returned to the States from Paris, and he wanted to form a new band. Coltrane was just finishing up a gig at the Five Spot with Thelonious Monk, and Miles wanted Coltrane back. Here is Roney's version:

One night he comes to Trane and says, 'Trane, come on back in the band, man.' Trane said, 'No, Miles—I like it here. I’m havin’ fun.' Miles said, 'You don’t want to play this shit—we playing some different shitl' Coltrane said, 'No, Miles, I’m enjoying this.'

Miles said, 'Come on. Come on back home.' He said, 'Philly’s back. Red’s back. And we got a little boy, Cannonball.' He said, “Just come on and play some with us.' 

In Roney's version, Miles hires Sonny Rollins on tenor and books a gig at Cafe Bohemia. Then one night Coltrane shows up, carrying his horn. Cutting a solo short, Miles goes off the bandstand to talk to him. Sonny takes the next solo, and then, as Miles later tells the story to Roney, “Wally—Trane got up there and played so much shit, took the championship belt away from Sonny. Made Sonny go to the bridge!”

It's a fine tale, the kind of insider scuttlebutt that those who love the music relish, Kaplan among them. But he prudently adds:

If the account is taken literally, it has a couple of chronological issues. For one thing, Sonny Rollins had left Miles’s band in September, while the Monk-Coltrane stand at the Five Spot was still in full bloom. For an­other, Rollins’s famous sabbatical from jazz, during which he practiced every day on the walkway of the Williamsburg Bridge, didn’t happen until the summer of 1959, and by his own account, a cutting contest with Coltrane had nothing to do with it. And Red Garland didn’t rejoin Miles until late December, at which point Rollins was long gone. 

But the spirit of the legend is intact in Roney’s telling. Coltrane’s play­ing had developed exponentially during his time with Monk: “Working with Monk brought me close to a musical architect of the highest order," lie told Down Beat editor Don DeMicheal in August 1960. “I felt I learned from him in every way—through the senses, theoretically, technically....

Kaplan not only loves the stories and the music, he also possesses the technical smarts to explain, in layman's terms, what was novel about the new paths these musicians were charting. For example, he makes an effort to explain what the shift from "playing the changes" to modal jazz was all about by a brief reference to Miles' tune "Milestones."

The tune was the first full example of the change in musical direction Coltrane referred to in that 1960 interview, Miles’s moving to the use of fewer and fewer chord changes in songs. “Milestones” is based on just two changes, focusing on modes rather than chords: the heart-racing opening section, with the three horns puffing its familiar staccato four-note figure, bop-bop-BOP-bop, is in G Dorian (you can find it yourself by playing a white-keys-only scale from G to G on a piano); the tune then shifts to A Aeolian (white keys from A to A), then back to Dorian before repeating the progression.

No one else in jazz was doing this then.

I'm not sure how interesting any of this would be to someone who isn't already familiar with the music, but Kaplan does the reader a favor by devoting a good deal of his time to a single LP, Kind of Blue, widely considered to be the greatest work of the post-bop era. That album is unquestionably great, and very easy to like, because all of the tracks are slow, quiet, moody, and brilliantly executed. But due to that very fact,  it doesn't really exemplify the era, which spanned from hard bop and bossa nova to dreamy West Coast cool. Then again, no single LP possibly could.

I had the good fortune to take to jazz at an early age, and I heard the second legendary Miles Davis Quintet--the one that included Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter--twice within the intimate confines of the old Guthrie Theater. But by this time, the late 60s, Miles and his band were well down the road into edgy modal compositions. Sure, I liked Kind of Blue. But I liked Sorcerer, Nefertiti, and Filles de Kilimanjaro better.

Which raises the question Kaplan presents in the subtitle of his book. "The Lost Empire of Cool." One of his themes is that jazz lost its audience because it got too far out, too cool, too something. You could no longer dance to it.    

Well, every book needs a one-line "hook," I guess, as a gift to reviewers and publishers' reps. Kaplan spends little time defending it. He toys in one chapter with the phrase "Jazz Died in 1959," but  neither he nor anyone else believes it. No one could listen to pianists Red Garland or Wynton Kelly today, for example, without being reminded of how much Bill Evans, Herbie Hancock, and Chick Corea brought to jazz in the 1960s. 

Kaplan himself obviously loves the music of the era he's describing and he wouldn't have it any other way. Maybe Jazz died in 1970, when Miles released Bitches Brew? 

Well, no one paints like Giotto these days, either.