Listening to: Miles Davis

The Sunday Times review by Clive Davis
It is the album that unites buffs who know every catalogue number under the sun and people for whom jazz is something to be listened to once a year at a dinner party. Half a century after it was recorded, Kind of Blue, Miles Davis’s bestseller, remains the most admired landmark in post-war jazz. Eisenhower was still in the White House and Fidel Castro was still finding his way around his presidential palace when the trumpeter went into the studio in 1959. Yet to listen to the album that nudged jazz in the direction of modal improvisation is to savour music that seems utterly timeless.
The story behind the making of the LP has previously been told in absorbing detail by the American author Ashley Kahn. Rifling through record-company memos and ­paperwork, he brought the ­sessions to life in a volume that combined ample footnotes with the allure of a coffee-table accessory. Now comes the turn of the effortlessly versatile British journalist Richard Williams, whose previous book subjects have been as diverse as the saxophonist Ornette Coleman, the racing driver Ayrton Senna and the film director Krzysztof Kieslowski.
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Given that Kahn has already pored over the blueprints (pardon the pun), Williams broadens his focus to examine how Kind of Blue influenced countless musicians within jazz and beyond. In a brief coda, Kahn had already demonstrated how the likes of Herbie ­Hancock, the pianist, and funk master James Brown had absorbed some of the lessons. Unlike the dense chord changes of bebop — which added ever more complex permutations to the Tin Pan Alley song structure — Davis’s exploration of the possibilities of scales produced solos that seemed refreshingly uncluttered and almost mystical in their intensity. Building on Kahn’s work, Williams now roams far afield as he introduces figures as disparate as Lou Reed, the keyboard guru Brian Eno, the composer Terry Riley and Manfred Eicher, the German producer and founder of the ECM label.
As a tour of the no man’s land where the more esoteric end of popular music overlaps with contemporary classical music, The Blue Moment is full of stylish thumbnail sketches. One problem, though, is that the connections between Davis’s work and the artists he is said to have inspired remain frustratingly elusive. Kind of Blue may have been part of the musical education of the composers John Adams and Steve Reich, but exactly how Davis’s influences have entered the world’s bloodstream is often left unexplained.
Williams is on more solid ground when he examines how Davis made the leap from conventional bop to the spacier textures of modal-based playing. He pays special attention to the haunting sketches that Davis created in Paris for Louis Malle’s 1958 film noir Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (Lift to the Scaffold), a film whose score far outshines its hackneyed storyline.
John Coltrane’s evolution after he left Davis’s group also comes in for scrutiny. His feverish solos pushed the modal framework to breaking point as he edged deeper into atonalism. Strangely, though, ­Williams shows little interest in the one Davis album of the 1960s, the pioneering jazz-rock classic In a Silent Way, which came closest to reproducing the introverted melancholia of Kind of Blue.
Nor does Williams confront the ­question of whether, after Kind of Blue, jazz paid a price for its increasingly ­introspective tendencies and Coltrane and co’s passion for ever more extended solos. Kingsley Amis, vintage jazz-lover, may have been pining for a lost youth of gramophones, punts and 78rpms when he declared his dislike of ­Davis’s musings, but the question of how the music can strike a balance between experimentation and entertainment is one that jazz critics spend a good deal of time avoiding.

The Blue Moment by Richard Williams
Faber £14.99 pp309