Your date has been going extremely well: the banter, the chemistry, the moments of simpatico. The date has now seamlessly moved to your place, and you put on something that makes an entrance but does not intrude. Something sensuous but not presumptuous. You want to hear a trumpet breathe, piano cascading like water, modes turning to each other and sounding as nature intended.
You put on Miles Davis’s immortal Kind of Blue. Just as you are taking in Davis’s solo on “So What”—shrugging yet emoting, full of space and attitude yet brimming with taste and emotion, your date tells you that you are among five men in your demographic who have played this album for the same purpose.
There is a reason Kind of Blue is a go-to album for setting the mood. It has sold five million copies, the biggest-selling jazz album ever. It is perfect every time you listen to it, and even more than that.
Recorded at Columbia’s 30th Street Studio in just two sessions—on March 2 and April 22, 1959—pianist Bill Evans, hiding in heroin, brimmed with the harmonies of Debussy and Ravel, creating a permanent vocabulary for jazz piano. They had a minimalist idea to base the album around modes (most famously the Dorian mode of “So What,” alternating from D minor to E-flat minor), all languid: Paul Chambers’s slow-walking bass on “So What” and “Freddie Freeloader,” a chilled-out jazz waltz on “All Blues,” and soft and slow splashes of color and ink with “Blue in Green” and “Flamenco Sketches.”
When Davis hired John Coltrane on tenor for his quintet in 1955, many wondered why, but after Coltrane got kicked out, got clean, and began his renaissance, all was aligned for 1959. Coltrane is maximalist, Davis is minimalist, Evans is impressionist, and Cannonball Adderley, on alto, swings and swaggers, but delicately, like everyone else. They did not play to impress your date, but they wouldn’t have been surprised to be part of it, either. It is the sound of intimacy, of individual expressions coming together for an exquisite collective.
There is a reason Kind of Blue is a go-to album for setting the mood. It is perfect every time you listen to it, and even more than that.
James Kaplan’s 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans and the Lost Empire of Cool is centered around what led to that legendary session and what followed. The America of 1959 was a long way from Kind of Blue. Shortly after its release, Davis would be beaten and bloodied by a cop just for standing his ground in front of Birdland, where he was headlining.
The outside world intruded on Kind of Blue’s insular, exquisite calm. Davis’s playing was so bare, so intimate, it is miraculous that he could be so vulnerable in one moment when he had to put up armor the next. The trumpet was a vessel. You could hear a human voice soothing you, dancing with you, sparring with you, and, of course, seducing you.
Of the album, Kaplan writes, “It was an island of quiet mystery in a world growing faster and louder by the day. It was Miles, Coltrane, and Evans leaving the blues behind and heading for parts unknown.” This album has two blues compositions—and Davis plays the blues on “So What.” But the space between the notes are statements, too. This is what Kaplan means about the lost empire of cool. You can hang back, say your thing, or not. The songs on this album are sketches, meditations on modes.
“Blue in Green,” probably stolen from Evans, has 10 bars in search of a resolution. It ponders two colors, and it doesn’t need a destination. It has a theme but no hooks. Yet it grabs you. Davis’s muted trumpet makes the loneliest sound you ever heard. It is sparse, a canvas to be painted. A love affair that could be starting, or ending, or yearning to happen.
After the two sessions, the sextet would never play together again. Kaplan keeps up with his trio.
Coltrane kept peaking and exploring, until his quest became so clangorous and atonal he alienated many while cultivating a few. A year before his death, of cancer, at 40, he told a Japanese reporter that his ambition was to become a saint.
Far from it for Evans, hitched to heroin, a giant of the piano who would sometimes lose the use of his right hand because he was injecting between his fingers. (The sound of Bill Evans has no track marks.) He eventually tapered to methadone and began shooting up cocaine. His final year was a fight with death, all sublimely documented with his piano trio—lyrical, fiery, and innovative until last call.
Coltrane left us in ’67; Evans, in ’80. Davis hung around until 1991, but his best work was way behind him. Everything about him had fallen from the peak of 1959. No matter how many times you listen, analyze, and track down all the stories, its depths continue to resound. It is why you are reading the book, and it is why you keep returning to the source.
The year 2024 does not sound like Kind of Blue. Not by a long shot. Your phone is filled with messages; your social-media feeds are exploding. You are feeling the pressure of living in the now, right now, when everything is coming at you at once. You must get somewhere, but you are messaged from everywhere. The subway has stopped. You are in uncomfortable proximity to strangers.
If you close your eyes and stay aware, you want to get to a place of beauty, of calm. You remember that date, or those five dates. Your earbuds are already in place. You need to escape. You want to listen again. Davis leaves all that space, a human voice that keeps speaking beyond the grave. Everyone on this album is gone, but they’re more present than most living people. You want that feeling again. You have a date night coming up. You have an idea for the perfect soundtrack.
David Yaffe is a professor of humanities at Syracuse University. He writes about music and is the author, most recently, of Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell. You can read his Substack here