Informationen zum Autor James Kaplan Klappentext The National Bestseller • One of The Minneapolis Star Tribune 's Best Books of the Year A superb book...[Kaplan is] a master biographer, a dogged researcher and shaper of narrative, and this is his most ambitious book to date. Los Angeles Times From the author of the definitive biography of Frank Sinatra, the story of three towering artistsMiles Davis, John Coltrane, and Bill Evansand how they came together to create the most iconic jazz album of all time, Kind of Blue In 1959, America's great indigenous art form, jazz, reached the height of its power and popularity. James Kaplan's magnificent 3 Shades of Blue captures how that golden era came to be, and its pinnacle with the recording of Kind of Blue. It's a book about music, and business, and race, and heroin, and the cities that gave jazz its home, and the Black geniuses behind its rise. It's an astonishing meditation on creativity and the strange environments where it can flourish most. It's a book about the great forebears and founders of a lost era, and the disrupters who would take the music down truly new paths. And it's about why the world of jazz most people know is a museum to this never-replicated period. But above all, 3 Shades of Blue is a book about three very different menthe greatness and varied fortunes of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Bill Evans. The tapestry of their lives is, in Kaplan's hands, a national odyssey with no direction home. It is also a masterpiece, a book about jazz that is as big as America. Leseprobe 1 The blue trumpet Thirty years later to the month, in March 1989, I found myself riding an elevator, heart knocking, to the fourteenth floor of the Essex House on Central Park South to interview Miles Davis. It was an assignment I'd lucked into through my magazine-editor brother, who knew a Vanity Fair editor who'd said he needed a profile of Miles to accompany an excerpt from the trumpet legend's forthcoming memoir, coauthored by Quincy Troupe. The writer, the Vanity Fair editor told my brother, should know jazz. My brother, Peter W. Kaplan, told him that I didn't just know jazz; I knew everything there was to know about it. This was hyperbolic, to put it mildly. I liked jazz-liked it a lot, what little I knew of it. My record collection, just beginning to shift from LPs to CDs, was primarily rock and blues, with a bit of classical and a smattering of jazz. I was in the process of educating my ears-still am-but it was and is a long, slow process. I knew Miles Davis was a titan in his field; I knew he'd played with Charlie Parker in the 1940s. That was about it. I owned exactly two Miles albums: 1969's Filles de Kilimanjaro , which I'd bought simply because I heard it in a friend's dorm room and it was quietly beautiful, and the dark and menacing 1970 Bitches Brew , which I'd bought because, when it was issued, buying it felt vaguely compulsory. When I complained to my brother that I was very far from knowing all there was to know about jazz, he stopped me. This was Vanity Fair , he said, with some italicized heat. I took his meaning. The magazine, then under the leadership of legend-under-construction Tina Brown, was the magazine to write for in those days. And I had a wife and an infant son and a mortgage in Westchester, and a chance to get in the door at Vanity Fair would be a plum. One heard they were issuing fat contracts to writers they liked. I called my brother's editor acquaintance there, and, after surprisingly little discussion of my putative jazz expertise, got the assignment. I promptly went to Tower Records and bought every Miles Davis CD they had, not thinking about when I might have time to actually listen to all of them. Then I phoned Miles's p...

Autorentext

James Kaplan

Klappentext

*The National Bestseller • One of The Minneapolis Star Tribune*'s Best Books of the Year

“A superb book...[Kaplan is] a master biographer, a dogged researcher and shaper of narrative, and this is his most ambitious book to date.” —Los Angeles Times

From the author of the definitive biography of Frank Sinatra, the story of three towering artists—Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Bill Evans—and how they came together to create the most iconic jazz album of all time, *Kind of Blue**

• In 1959, America’s great indigenous art form, jazz, reached the height of its power and popularity. James Kaplan’s magnificent 3 Shades of Blue captures how that golden era came to be, and its pinnacle with the recording of Kind of Blue. It’s a book about music, and business, and race, and heroin, and the cities that gave jazz its home, and the Black geniuses behind its rise. It’s an astonishing meditation on creativity and the strange environments where it can flourish most. It’s a book about the great forebears and founders of a lost era, and the disrupters who would take the music down truly new paths. And it’s about why the world of jazz most people know is a museum to this never-replicated period.

  But above all, 3 Shades of Blue is a book about three very different men—the greatness and varied fortunes of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Bill Evans. The tapestry of their lives is, in Kaplan’s hands, a national odyssey with no direction home. It is also a masterpiece, a book about jazz that is as big as America.

  Leseprobe
  1

  The blue trumpet

  Thirty years later to the month, in March 1989, I found myself riding an elevator, heart knocking, to the fourteenth floor of the Essex House on Central Park South to interview Miles Davis. It was an assignment I'd lucked into through my magazine-editor brother, who knew a Vanity Fair editor who'd said he needed a profile of Miles to accompany an excerpt from the trumpet legend's forthcoming memoir, coauthored by Quincy Troupe. The writer, the Vanity Fair editor told my brother, should know jazz. My brother, Peter W. Kaplan, told him that I didn't just know jazz; I knew everything there was to know about it.

  This was hyperbolic, to put it mildly. I liked jazz-liked it a lot, what little I knew of it. My record collection, just beginning to shift from LPs to CDs, was primarily rock and blues, with a bit of classical and a smattering of jazz. I was in the process of educating my ears-still am-but it was and is a long, slow process. I knew Miles Davis was a titan in his field; I knew he'd played with Charlie Parker in the 1940s. That was about it. I owned exactly two Miles albums: 1969's Filles de Kilimanjaro, which I'd bought simply because I heard it in a friend's dorm room and it was quietly beautiful, and the dark and menacing 1970 Bitches Brew, which I'd bought because, when it was issued, buying it felt vaguely compulsory.

  When I complained to my brother that I was very far from knowing all there was to know about jazz, he stopped me. This was Vanity Fair, he said, with some italicized heat.

  I took his meaning. The magazine, then under the leadership of legend-under-construction Tina Brown, was the magazine to write for in those days. And I had a wife and an infant son and a mortgage in Westchester, and a chance to get in the door at Vanity Fair would be a plum. One heard they were issuing fat contracts to writers they liked.

  I called my brother's editor acquaintance there, and, after surprisingly little discussion of my putative jazz expertise, got the assignment. I promptly went to Tower Records and bought every Miles Davis CD they had, not thinking about when I might have time to actually listen to all of them. Then I phoned Miles's publicist and proudly announced myself as The Writer from Vanity Fair.

  It was only on that elevator at the Essex House, with the publicist by my side, that the full weight of my fraudulence began to sink in on me. I was nobody! I knew nothing! No G…