Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece [Paperback]

Ashley Kahn (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 3, 2007

This acclaimed tribute to the most popular jazz album of all time is now available in a beautiful 50th anniversary edition, complete with a new afterword by Ashley Kahn. Featuring transcriptions of the unedited session tapes; in-depth interviews with musicians; freshly discovered Columbia Records files; never-before-seen photographs, and more, Kind of Blue is a vital piece of music history-and will be essential for fans and scholars for years to come.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Keyboard, 3/09
“Amazing.”

About the Author

Ashley Kahn is an award-winning journalist and radio essayist, and is the author of The House That ’Trane Built, and A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane’s Signature Album. He lives in Fort Lee, New Jersey.

Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Da Capo Press (July 3, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0306815583
• ISBN-13: 978-0306815584
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 6.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #538,517 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Companion, a guide, and much more., April 4, 2002

By 

Lawrence Peryer (Brooklyn, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Kind Of Blue: The Making Of The Miles Davis Masterpiece (Paperback)

A surprisingly brisk read for a book of such ambitious scope, the author begins a full decade before the recording it chronicles. A wide range of subject matter - the evolution of jazz, Miles as an artist and creative voice, recording techniques, even the business of jazz marketing - are covered engagingly, intelligently and leave the reader with a better context in which to place this seminal recording.

Long-time fans, who know the music and the myths inside out, will marvel anew at the dedication Miles showed not only to his music, but in what can only be called his sentimentality in working with the other artists on the dates. His relationship with pianist Bill Evans is especially poignant.

The rise of modal jazz and its off-shoot from bop, along with the impact on the post-war generation of players is juxtaposed against a record label system willing to actually bid for jazz artists(!) and put real thought and resources into promoting their works. There is a tinge of nostalgia to the writing, though the author is not a contemporary of the original recording's release. This tone is far out-weighed by the realization that Kind of Blue really did mark a second (or third) Golden Age in jazz and that men the likes of Miles Davis - or Babe Ruth or Marlon Brando - seem not to walk among us much anymore.

In an age of celebrity profiles and Behind the Music "documentaries", Kahn's book shows us that every story has many stories, and he tells each with a respectful touch.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating book about a terrific album, January 5, 2004

By 

E A Glaser (Delft, The Netherlands) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Kind Of Blue: The Making Of The Miles Davis Masterpiece (Paperback)

As a jazz fan I was eager to read Ashley Kahn's book on the album "Kind of Blue", and I wasn't disappointed. The author got a rare opportunity to listen to the master tapes of the two studio sessions that created the five songs on the album. The heart of the book is the dissection of each song -- its origins, the mistakes made along the way, and an analysis of the final complete version. Also interesting was the story of Miles Davis' career up to that point. The description of the jazz scene in 1959 put the album into context. It's fascinating to be reminded that "Kind of Blue" was overshadowed at the time by Ornette Coleman's debut album, which was considerably more avant-garde (but much less accessible).

Not being musically trained myself, I didn't completely follow Kahn's explanation of "Kind of Blue"'s ground-breaking use of modal (versus chordal) scales. I was more interested in the human stories -- how Miles hooked up with Bill Evans; John Coltrane's expansion of his musical horizons while working with Davis; the impact of heroin addiction on Davis' attempts to keep his bands intact. There are a lot of personal histories embedded in the story, and the author does a good job of teasing them out and explaining how this seminal release came to be made.

49 of 65 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Great Subject, a Deficient Book, May 1, 2003

By 

Jerry Engelbach (Brooklyn, NY) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Kind Of Blue: The Making Of The Miles Davis Masterpiece (Paperback)

I hate to be a nay-sayer when so many other critics have nothing but unqualified praise for this book. And, by and large, it's an interesting read with much fascinating information. As a compilation of facts, it offers an exciting look behind the scenes at the creation of a milestone (no pun intended) of jazz.

However, the book has deficiencies that can't be overlooked.

First of all, the book is too adulatory. Although it's much better than the completely worshipful Eric Nisenson book on the same subject, there's too much PR in proportion to journalism. When I buy a book I don't want to read an extended press release.

In addition, Kahn's excuses for the ineptitude of Columbia Records are too forgiving. More of this below.

First, I suspect that Kahn is not himself an experienced musician. When he tries to write about the music itself he makes several mistakes. I'll cite just one.

On page 70 is a picture of the chart Cannonball Adderley used for "Flamenco Sketches," with a caption by the author that refers to the scales used in the tune as "C Ionian, A-Flat Mixolydian, B-flat Major 7th, D Phrygian, and G Aeolian." The chart, however, is transposed for Eb alto saxophone, so the picture doesn't match the description. It would have been helpful if the caption had mentioned this.

Worse, however, is the apparent lack of understanding of music in the caption itself. "C Ionian" is essentially "C Major." Non-musical readers have heard of C Major but many may have no clue about what an "Ionian" is.

The "A-flat Mixolydian" scale shown here begins on Eb, so it would be more properly labeled "Eb Dorian."

"B-flat Major 7th" is a chord, not a scale. The scale is "Bb Major," period.

It may well be that musicians occasionally refer to the scale described as "D Phrygian" by that name. But they would be wrong. The name jazz musicians give to the scale is "D Phrygian DOMINANT," and the correct name of the scale is "fifth mode of the G harmonic minor scale," which begins on D. It's a mouthful, to be sure. But it just ain't a plain vanilla D Phrygian, which contains one note that is crucially different. A chord built on the root of the scale shown is a dominant, not a Phrygian, chord.

"G Aeolian" is possibly accurate. That would be the same as "G natural minor." But since some of the notes in the middle are obscured, it might just as easily be "G Dorian."

It's Kahn's excuses for Columbia records that really annoy me.

On "Kind of Blue" Columbia mixed up the tracks, which resulted in 50,000 copies of the record being produced with incorrect labeling. I had one of those original discs, and the best I can say is that it was fun figuring out the mistake and then relabeling my own record.

Astonishingly, the master tape machine for "Kind of Blue" ran slow, so pressings ran faster than the original recording and sounded sharp. This caused no end of puzzlement and annoyance to musicians who tried to play along with the album. Luckily, Columbia had a safety tape that ran at the correct speed, which has been used for subsequent reissues.

Kahn mentions the above gaffs with the very slightest of "tsk"s, nowhere near the condemnation they deserve. But even more incredibly, he has nothing but praise for the sound of "Kind of Blue," which is among the worst sounding groundbreaking record I've ever heard.

Columbia has a reputation among music listeners with real ears as producer of some of the worst sounding recordings of all the big record companies. They don't begin to reach the hem of the outstanding recordings of Decca (London), EMI, Deutsche Grammophon, Philips, and the absolute stars of early stereo recording, RCA Victor and Mercury, and numerous small companies such as Chesky. There isn't room to go into the details here, but if you have a good sound system and appreciate the value of realistic acoustics and accurate soundstaging across the width of the speaker field, you'll know what I'm talking about.

Sometimes a good record slips through Columbia's gauntlet of over-zealous engineers, but "Kind of Blue" isn't one of them. The company has always been into multi-miking the recording and "cleaning up" in the editing. Their recordings typically sound canned, and it's regrettable that so many fine artists, including Leonard Bernstein and Miles Davis, allowed their immortal performances to be preserved in less than state-of-the-art sound.

The acoustic of "Kind of Blue" is compromised by multi-miking, added echo, limiting of the dynamic range, "smoothing" of the true timbre of the instruments, and the lack of a believable three-dimensional space holding live musicians. There are any number of superb recordings out there that blow "Kind of Blue" away.

The greatness of "Kind of Blue" lies not in its sound but in its harmonic experimentation and the inspired performances of its musicians, and in the almost spontaneous way in which the tunes were created and realized. Miles Davis himself said in an interview that he wished for a time when recordings preserved everything, including the mistakes. Listening to "Kind of Blue" makes one wish that Miles had meant it, and that we had the sounds of breathing, the sweat, the uncertainty, the little glitches, the beauty marks, and the natural acoustics of the room -- the human presence that sets the sublime so far above the merely great.

Kahn says nary a word about all this. I wouldn't go so far as to say that he has no ears, but he didn't use them to really hear the SOUND of the recording.

Nevertheless, the story is a great one, and Kahn deserves credit for researching and bringing it to us.