The Blue Moment

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The Blue Moment: Miles Davis's Kind of Blue and the Remaking of Modern Music [Kindle Edition]

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Over 50 years ago, Miles Davis and his sextet walked into a church basement in midtown Manhattan that had been converted into a music studio. The album that emerged just nine hours later, Kind of Blue, not only changed jazz in a dramatic way, but it also changed popular music forever. As music critic Williams points out in this often exceptional, though sometimes pedantic, reflection, Davis introduced listeners in the Western world to a music suffused with a kind of mild exoticism that had its roots in Eastern philosophies. Many contemporary critics weren't exactly sure what to make of the album, but others recognized the powerful tremors that Davis's album sent through the music world. While the story of the making of the album has been well told before (as in Ashley Kahn's Kind of Blue), Williams traces the deep influence that the album had on a wide range of musicians, from John Cale and the Velvet Underground to Brian Eno, Robert Fripp, and Duane Allman. Williams's inspired reflections demonstrate the ways that luminous music can pervade other cultural forms and usher in momentous changes throughout all parts of culture. (Apr.)
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From Booklist

Beaten to the punch well before starting a book about the making of Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, Williams revised his game plan to focus on the historic record’s prehistory and influence (without, fortunately, discarding his own take on its making; see chapter 8, “The Blue Moment”). Williams sees the prehistory extending far before Davis’ just-previous album, Milestones—whose title track, based in modes rather than chord progressions, thereby fostering a slower-seeming overall pace and freer improvisation by soloists, prefigured every tune on Kind—to Davis’ musical impressionist-influenced Birth of the Cool in 1948 to the significance of blue in early modernist painting and literature. If that seems expansive of Williams, it pales next to his giant-stepping account of Kind’s influence. He depicts the album affecting not just the subsequent work of its musicians but also that of the classical minimalist composers (Glass, Reich, etc.), rock experimentalists John Cale and Brian Eno, godfather of soul James Brown, and environmental composer supreme La Monte Young, among many others. Exceptionally lucid, completely spellbinding—a book omnivorous music lovers should adore. --Ray Olson

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Product Details

• Format: Kindle Edition
• File Size: 477 KB
• Publisher: Faber and Faber Ltd (February 3, 2011)
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services
• Language: English
• ASIN: B004MW5FWU
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled