James Kaplan – 3 Shades of Blue

Collective biographies should happen more often than they do. They afford escape from fetishising individual achievement, a richer portrayal of a milieu. And they demand a discipline that biographers of individuals – serving up doorstep-sized volumes stuffed with detail in hope of being “definitive” – often lack.

They appear rarely, I suppose, partly because publishers don’t know how to market them, and because they require a prodigious amount of work. Then there are the technical challenges of weaving together multiple narratives in a way that hangs together.

James Kaplan’s sensibly proportioned (400 pages) look at three pillars of modern jazz – Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Bill Evans – exemplifies most of the pros and cons. As his title suggests, he builds out from the single celebrated recording, along with Cannonball Adderley, Paul Chambers, Jimmy Cobb and Wynton Kelly: Miles’ Kind of Blue. The brace of studio sessions that gave us the album consistently rated the top jazz release ever are a nodal point in an examination of how jazz moved beyond bebop, not long before its wider popularity was swept away by rock and pop.

That overall story is pieced together readably enough, and it’s fair to insist that after the early 1960s jazz became what Kaplan terms a niche music. There is also enduring interest in the special moment when Miles’ set up a finely judged combination of voices to create modal magic.

Still, it gives an odd tilt to the book. Making that single, great record a biographical highpoint distorts all three careers, to my mind. The years before, when Davis, Coltrane and Evans were all seeking ways into new sounds, in a scene that included musical thinkers like Gil Evans and George Russell, make sense when seen as leading up to That Record. And perhaps 1959 was a kind of highpoint for important new jazz in general, with landmark recordings from Brubeck, Mingus and Ornette Coleman as well as Davis. Coltrane’s Giant Steps and Davis and Gil Evans’ Sketches of Spain were also at least part recorded in that annus mirabilis, though not released until 1960. Kaplan covers all these too, but much more sketchily than Kind of Blue. That is the one that brought his three main subjects together. Yet, sales aside, it’s not obviously the most important of these records. And the years after 1959 sit less easily in this frame. The paths Davis, Evans and Coltrane took after Kind of Blue were very different. The three didn’t really work together again, and it arguably isn’t the most significant thing any of them did in terms of influence.

None of that may matter to the general browser the book is aimed at (though there may be a little too much about dates and personnel here for them). But there’s a further drawback for the jazz-informed reader. This is very well-trodden ground. There are numerous books about Miles and Coltrane, a very thorough biography of Evans, and even a couple that just focus on the making of Kind of Blue – Kaplan acknowledges Ashley Kahn’s fine volume which takes the same title.

This lightens an author’s load. Kaplan has certainly put the work in, but has many existing books to draw on. That’s helpful as most potential informants are long gone now, although he does get some new stories from associates of Evans (his last drummer Joe LaBarbera, and his last girlfriend) and Davis (mainly Davis-inspired trumpeter the late Wallace Roney). It does mean, though, that for some almost everything in the book will feel familiar.

As the story starts in the bebop era, there’s a great deal about drug use as part of the life. This is justified in Evans case, no doubt, but nevertheless tends to reinforce a dated stereotype. In common with other portraits of Davis, we hear a much more about his use of illegal drugs than the addiction to painkillers that was partly induced by his lifelong affliction with sickle-cell anaemia.

Another small drawback is that while Kaplan is obviously a keen listener, and quotes reviews adroitly, he is somehow a shade reticent about the music. That applies especially to the wealth of work that came after Kind of Blue, even from Coltrane, who died a mere eight years later. It’s a little disappointing to read, 350 pages in, “the music has been described many times, but words lead to a place of more words, a territory hemmed by the writer’s abilities or inabilities and falsely illuminated by the writer’s vanity. The thing to do is listen.” Hard to disagree when he is commenting on Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, but still, in a book about three towering musical creators one may ask for more. That could be musical analysis or, perhaps, a deeper look at music by others that the pivotal work he features fed into.

That’s something Kaplan’s insistence that jazz after Kind of Blue became largely cut off from the main streams of rock and popular music tends to obscure. It is noticeable that Richard Williams’ impressively wide-ranging The Blue Moment: Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue and the Remaking of Modern Music from 2009 is one of the few relevant books Kaplan fails to cite. Williams’ book gives many of the details about the 1959 recording found here, then follows a wealth of artistic trails to build a satisfying picture of the cross-fertilising power of artistic and aesthetic inspiration. Kaplan, following life stories more strictly, has other ambitions. But his execution, while very professional, delivers a book that ends up as less than the sum of its parts.

Publication: 8 March / RRP: £25

Jon Turney writes about jazz, and other things, from Bristol.