If the best books indeed put readers in the mind’s eye of their authors, then James Kaplan’s 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans and the Lost Empire of Cool (Penguin Press) qualifies as an audiovisual masterwork.
That’s because the author also puts readers in the mind’s eye of the three great jazz figures present in the title and beyond. Kaplan (jameskaplan.net) did, after all, courageously interview Davis — a brilliant player yet often difficult conversationalist — in person at the trumpeter’s New York City apartment for a story that appeared in Vanity Fair in 1989, only two-and-a-half years before the jazz icon’s death at age 65.
Kaplan recalls his nervousness approaching Davis’s residence early in the book, before the aging trumpeter surprisingly softens, enjoys his company and invites him back. Yet the author doesn’t place overt focus on Davis, even if the book’s title and story line are references to his groundbreaking 1959 recording Kind of Blue (Columbia). That album also featured tenor saxophonist Coltrane, pianist Evans, alto saxophonist Julian “Cannonball” Adderley, bassist Paul Chambers, drummer Jimmy Cobb, and pianist Wynton Kelly on one selection, “Freddie Freeloader.”
Coltrane and Evans are the obvious second and third focal points, yet Kaplan (not a musician, but certainly able to express and explain like one) paints painstaking pictures of how all three of his book’s principals became the signature musicians they were. Specifically, and fascinatingly, it was by first figuring out what they wouldn’t become.
A fledgling Davis is indoctrinated into the bebop culture of fellow trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie during the 1940s. Yet Davis realizes that the soaring, rapid brass flights of Gillespie in the subgenre don’t come as easily or naturally to him, and eventually finds his footing in an economy of notes, more somber balladeering, and Harmon-muted playing and composing.
Coltrane’s iconic tenor saxophone phrasing and sound were likewise products of separating himself from alto sax and bebop master Charlie Parker. “Trane” veers between alto and tenor horns before settling on the latter, and a photo of him in the audience at a Parker concert displays the face of someone perplexed.
Parker was so naturally gifted as a musician that taking heroin seemed only to make him more creative, even as the drug had negative effects on every other aspect of his life. And Kaplan touches upon the heroin battles of Davis, Coltrane and Evans, who would die after a long downward drug spiral in 1980 at age 51. Coltrane, having recovered from his addiction, would die even younger from liver cancer in 1967 at age 40.
But the Midwesterner Davis from Illinois, Southerner Coltrane from North Carolina and Northeasterner Evans from New Jersey would form a jazz version of a creative Bermuda Triangle on Kind of Blue, following Davis and others helping to convince the bespectacled, scholarly-looking, classical music-leaning Caucasian pianist that he was a unique, gifted and legitimate jazz musician.
Evans’s bold 1957 debut album as a leader, New Jazz Conceptions (Riverside), had nonetheless sold only 800 copies. But an impressed Davis hired him to replace Red Garland starting in early 1958, even as there was initial backlash among Black listeners and musicians, even some within the otherwise all-Black group.
Playing in Davis’s band the year before, Coltrane is fired by the recovered bandleader, who knew the signs of the saxophonist’s addiction all too well. His replacement is a young Sonny Rollins, also a future sax colossus with heroin experience. But fascinatingly, Kaplan shows how Coltrane — recovering from his addiction and finding himself musically — blossoms after being hired by the spacious, idiosyncratic piano legend Thelonious Monk during a stand at the Five Spot in New York City.
Davis, who always knew that the saxophonist’s explorations were going somewhere unforeseen as others were questioning his “sheets of sound” approach, eagerly recruits Coltrane back into his band after his stint with Monk.
All of which eventually led to sessions in early 1959 for the masterful Kind of Blue, the best-selling and perhaps most consequential jazz album of all time. Its five tracks — “So What,” “Freddie Freeloader,” “Blue in Green,” “All Blues” and “Flamenco Sketches” — were composed by Davis or co-composed by Evans. And that duo brought an inimitable mixture of influences in the disparate modes and micro-tones of the kalimba (the African finger piano) and the often-spacious themes of classical composers like Ravel and Rachmaninoff.
Unlike some Black jazz musicians, of that era and beyond, Davis didn’t regard classical music as too European and white. And Davis had built a larger following through Columbia collaborative releases with arranger Gil Evans (no relation to Bill) and classical musicians like Miles Ahead (1957).
Another not-so-secret ingredient was the album’s blend of personalities and talents. The project’s modal approach, with less chords, less breakneck bebop references and more solos, suited Davis’s economy and Evans’s lyricism, even though the pianist had stopped performing live with the group near the end of 1958.
Coltrane’s updated approach to notes and scales proved ahead of their time; Adderley and Kelly (who’d replaced Evans for live dates) added sophisticated bluesy elements, and Chambers and Cobb had gelled into a supple, elastic rhythm section on the album’s slower, more relaxed tempos.
The tunes were more sketches than exacting notation, and mostly based on Davis’s verbal instruction. The musicians were also set up at Columbia’s Thirtieth Street Studio in New York City the way they would be for a concert. Without the usual sound baffles, each had to control his own volume through the intensity of his playing and nearness to the studio microphones.
Producer Irving Townsend, engineer Fred Paut and assistant engineer Bob Waller thus had less control over the sound than the musicians themselves in the live-in-the-studio setting, complete with sound bleeds into each other’s mics that impacted their attack and expression. It was exactly the in-the-moment spontaneity that Davis wanted.
“Sorry — listen, we gotta watch it because, ah, there’s noises all the way through this,” Townsend interrupts at the beginning of the hushed intro to the two-chord “So What.” “This is so quiet to begin with, and every click — watch the snare [drum] too, we’re picking up some of the vibrations on it.”
“Well, that goes with it,” Davis interjects. “All of that goes with it.”
Most of Kaplan’s 16 chapters are far shorter than 30 pages among its total of 434. But the final one, simply titled “After,” is a compelling 112-page coda for even those who already know some of the endings for the three principals and their remaining personnel, which never reassembled after the final Kind of Blue recording session in April of 1959.
Chambers died two years after Coltrane, but even younger, passing from tuberculosis at age 33 in 1969. Kelly would also die very young following a 1971 epileptic seizure at age 39. Adderley would pass four years after that, suffering a cerebral hemorrhage in 1975 at age 46. Only Cobb would survive into his 70s or beyond, enjoying an illustrious career before dying at age 91 in 2020.
Already nearing the star power of Davis, Coltrane officially branched out on his own and made an album that rivals Kind of Blue 60 years later. A Love Supreme (Impulse!, 1965) is a sublime collection of four lengthy, original and largely improvised tone poem movements, and features additional banner performances by the members of his stellar quartet, pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Jimmy Garrison, and drummer Elvin Jones.
That album’s title perhaps hinted at what would be Coltrane’s all-too-short future. He married his second wife, keyboardist, harpist, percussionist and vocalist Alice McLeod Coltrane, in 1966. The couple’s shared interests in Indian philosophy, African religion and world music, plus his fanhood of free jazz saxophonists Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy, Albert Ayler and Pharaoh Sanders resulted in a more esoteric and much-debated form of expressionism before his death in 1967. Like Parker, he died young, and like that alto master, Coltrane remains the tenor saxophonist all others aspire to since.
Evans formed a highly simpatico trio with bassist Scott LaFaro and drummer Paul Motian, which recorded definitive albums on the Riverside label between 1959 and 1961, the year LaFaro died at only age 25 in an auto accident. The pianist suffered from the tragedy, but rallied to win a Grammy Award for his 1963 collection of overdubbed solo duets, Conversations With Myself (Verve).
Though he never made an album to compete with Kind of Blue or A Love Supreme, Evans’s series of recordings with multiple bassists and drummers helped to define how expressive a democratic piano trio format could be. Particularly with LaFaro and Motian, Evans’ concept was of three musicians improvising off of each other in the moment as much as playing compositions — particularly in live settings — until his death in 1980.
And he expressed himself as perhaps no other pianist could on The Tony Bennett/Bill Evans Album (Fantasy, 1975), a series of duets with the vocalist and American treasure.
Without Coltrane and Evans, Davis gave up on the modal approach of Kind of Blue and struggled to find a rudder during the first half of the 1960s. That changed with E.S.P. (Columbia, 1965), the first recording with his phenomenal new quintet that featured the explorations and super-charged tempos of tenor saxophonist Wayne Shorter, pianist Herbie Hancock, bassist Ron Carter and teenaged drummer Tony Williams.
After several monumental albums with that lineup, other luminaries like George Benson, Chick Corea, Joe Zawinul, Keith Jarrett, John McLaughlin, Dave Holland, Billy Cobham, Jack DeJohnette, and Lenny White were added as Davis transitioned musically once again.
Like Bob Dylan had done to shake up the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, Davis officially took Columbia jazz into electric territory starting with Miles In the Sky (1968), Filles de Kilimanjaro (1969) and In a Silent Way (1969) — practically creating the subgenre jazz/fusion in the five years after The Beatles invaded America and started a course in which popular music made jazz a niche form.
Davis never looked back amid a similar backlash to Dylan’s. A rare jazz musician with popular music-worthy star power, complete with expensive cars and clothes, Davis could do whatever he wanted and knew it. Even if that meant abusing alcohol, cocaine, painkillers, tobacco and women along the way amid his recurring joint pain and marital problems.
His subsequent iconic 1970s Columbia fusion releases like Bitches Brew and Jack Johnson, and the jazz/funk vehicle On the Corner, plus more bluesy and pop 1980s efforts like The Man With the Horn and You’re Under Arrest, were at once new movements for Davis and for jazz/fusion. And signs of the times, a specialty for an artist who was enamored with the music of Jimi Hendrix in the 1960s, Sly Stone in the 1970s, and Prince in the 1980s.
Miles Dewey Davis III would die on Sept. 28, 1991, from the combined effects of a stroke, pneumonia and respiratory failure after slipping into a coma and never regaining consciousness. Forever impacted by crossing paths with Davis as a fledgling Vanity Fair reporter, Kaplan ends the book (other than the subsequent acknowledgments, notes and index) with the memory of finding out about his not-so-distant interview subject’s death:
“I heard the news as I drove up the West Side Highway from another interview. It felt unreal somehow. My mind went back two-and-a-half years, to the moment I was to leave at the end of our talk. As I shouldered my backpack and shook his hard, spidery hand, thanking him and saying goodbye, he looked at me with dark, glittering eyes. ‘You comin’ back?’ he asked.”
3 SHADES OF BLUE: MILES DAVIS, JOHN COLTRANE, BILL EVANS AND THE LOST EMPIRE OF COOL, by James Kaplan; Penguin, 496 pages. $35.