All of these anecdotes demonstrate Kahn's most important writing skill: the ability to describe, (in fairly short, and splendidly illustrated chapters) that bookend the history of the recording sessions Davis's career, and its meteoric rise prior to Kind of Blue, and that album's impact on the jazz world as a whole, both in the 1960s, and today, as it sells an astonishing 5000 copies a week.
Kahn's effortless style belays the intense research and reporting that makes it possible. To describe the actual recording session, Kahn uses a remarkable collection of skills as a combination historian, detective, and musicologist. He combines material gleaned from existing interviews with Davis and his band members and the album's producer, Irving Townsend, new interviews with Jimmy Cobb, the last surviving member of that session, photographs of the session (ironically, Cobb was never clearly photographed, since he spent most of the session behind his kit), and numerous quotes transcribed from the band's own comments recorded onto the studio session tapes. His best detective work is determining, with a fairly high degree of certitude, that Gil Evans (no relation to Bill Evans) wrote the introduction to the first track of the album, "So What", perhaps the most beautiful 30 seconds or so in all of jazz.
Kahn also describes the careers of Davis and his band members immediately after Kind of Blue, including Davis' epochal concert at Carnegie Hall, with his five piece band, and the Gil Evans Orchestra backing him on one of the great live recordings in all of jazz.
Kind of Blue is an album that simultaneously evokes an era, while remaining timeless. Ashley Kahn does a masterful job of both explaining that era, and why Davis' music from it remains astonishingly popular today.
Article comments
1 - Keivn Corren
Thanks for the Inspiration Miles...
2 - Chris Rich
Did it occur to anyone that the whole premise of writing a book about one release in the life of Miles Davis is utterly ridiculous, glib and stupid?
Kind of Blue is one of dozens of equally compelling works Davis nade in his long tenure at Columbia and that hardly even touches amazing work he did as a kid with Charlie Parker for the Dial label.
Then there are years of stuff he did for Capitol, Prestige and Bluenote, all perfectly compelling.
The very notion that one can apply some notion of 'quintessence' to someone of this stature is deeply flawed, but then Kahn lacks any real credentials as a jazz scholar beyond amateur enthusiasm and a potential jazz fan hardly needs him to mediate their experience.
I hate to rain on your parade but most books about jazz are terrible and useless as I soon discovered as a kid in the 70's trying to learn about an idiom I deeply love that changed my life for the better.
May I suggest the work of Lewis Porter, Gary Giddins or Ross Russells tour de force, 'Bird Lives' as far more compelling reads than this shallow thing and beyond that, just buy the music and realize that your own insight will be every bit as meaningful as anything Kahn will ever write.
After all, one of his main prior fame claims was promoting Brittany Spears. Need I say more?
3 - Chris Bich
Hey Chrissy baby,
what have you done in your miserable life that could possibly compare with Miles, or Ashley Khan for that matter? How can you be so negative, it is patently obvious that nothing, especially jazz, has changed your sad existance.
Come back and flame when you are better intellectually armed with something other than a glib comment about his promoting Ms. Spears. Business is one thing, making music is quite another