The Blue Moment: Miles Davis's Kind of Blue and the Remaking of Modern Music

'It is the most singular of sounds, yet among the most ubiquitous. It is the sound of isolation that has sold itself to millions'. Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue" is the best selling piece of music in the history of jazz, and for many listeners among the most haunting in all of twentieth-century music.

It is also, notoriously, the only jazz album many people own. Recorded in 1959 (in nine miraculous hours), there has been nothing like it since. Its atmosphere - slow, dark, meditative, luminous - became all-pervasive for a generation, and has remained the epitome of melancholy coolness ever since.

Richard Williams has written a history of the album which for once does not rip it out of its wider cultural context. He evokes the essence of the music - identifying the qualities that make it so uniquely appealing - while making effortless connections to painting, literature, philosophy and poetry. This makes for an elegant, graceful and beautifully-written narrative.

CONTENIDO:

1. Introduction
2. Into the Blue
- Welcome to the modern world
3. The sound of blue
- Blue valentines. Blue kisses. Blue velvet. Way to blue
4. Blue Moods
- Conversations behind a Chinese laundry
5. Blue Dawn
- From the Third Stream to the nouvelle vague
6. Six colours (Blue)
- Adventures in modality: from Milestones to Porgy and Bess
7. Interlude: Outside in Blue
- Camus, Moravia, Mastroianni and the man with the strand cigarette
8. The blue moment
- An American Orthodox church with a three-second reverb
9. Blue Waves
- John Coltrane and Bill Evans: quartet and trio
10. Blue Horizon
- Enter minimalism: La Monte Young and Terry Riley
11. Dark Blue
- The Velvet Underground: how art came to the discothèque
12. So blue
- What James Brown told Pee Wee Ellis
13. Blue Bells
- Soft machines and curved air
14. Code Blue
- The art school hop: Brian Eno and the bush of ghosts
15. Blue on Blue
- Northern latitudes and the most bautiful sound next to silence
16. Coda: Permanent Blue
- Inside the Dream House
References
Acknowledgements
Index