Richard Williams “The Blue Moment”
Paperback Faber and Faber Ltd. Release: 1 July 2010.

When Miles Davis’ sextet recorded Kind of Blue in a disused Manhattan church in the spring of 1959, the history of music changed its course. Not only jazz, but all music. Artists as Terry Riley, La Monte Young, Brian Eno, the Velvet Underground, Keith Jarrett, Chris Rea, Robert Wyatt and many others, were all influenced by the two fateful sessions when Davis eventually achieved his aim: “learn all the changes”.

Step by step, Williams’ book, published by Faber and Faber, traces the legs of Davis’ journey from a stereotypical good-time jazz to a distilled, essential form of it: “full strength, pure essence”, the apogee of an era but also the beginning of a new one, the birth of the cool. Blue were the colour, the music and the mood of the time. Kind of Blue is, in Williams’ words, “a loop, a continuous mood”, the essence of which “could never be recaptured”.

The book goes through Sartre’s existentialism, the beat generation, the birth of cinematic cool with Fellini and Antonioni, Yves Klein’ Blue, Andy Warhol’s Factory and a myriad of characters who revolved around the orbit of Davis’ cultural milieu. With particular attention to the music paths of its protagonists, Coltrane, Evans, Adderley, Chambers, Cobb and Kelly, before and after Kind of Blue, Williams places Davis’ new aesthetic of jazz right at the throbbing centre of the changing spirit of the time.

Through numerous musical and historical references, the author shows how music changes that took place after the making of the album – Coltrane struggle “against the walls of harmonic constraints”; Evan’s sound explorations; the minimalist movement of Young, Riley, Hassell, Reich, Glass; the demolition of the conventions of rock ’n’ roll by the Velvet Underground; but also James Brown; the Soft Machines; Manfred Eicher- all drew on Davis’ genius, in a way or another.

This book is not only a well argued insight of an album that, in the author’s words “is, for many listeners, an addictive substance”, but it also provides a documented overview of a prolific music period, the influence of which endures up to our times.