From the author of the definitive biography of Frank Sinatra the story of how jazz arrived at
the pinnacle of American culture in 1959 told through the journey of three towering
artists-Miles Davis John Coltrane and Bill Evans-who came together to create the most famous
and bestselling jazz album of all time Kind of Blue The myth of the 60s depends on the 1950s
being the before times of conformity segregation straightness-The Lonely Crowd and The
Organization Man. This all carries some truth but it does nothing to explain how in 1959 the
great indigenous art form jazz reached the height of its power and popularity led there by a
number of Black geniuses so iconic they go by one name-Monk Mingus Rollins Coltrane and
above all Miles. 1959 saw Miles Coltrane Bill Evans and the other members of Miles's sextet
come together to record what is widely considered the greatest jazz album of all time and
certainly the best-selling: Kind of Blue. 3 Shades of Blue is James Kaplan's magnificent
account of the paths of the three giants Miles Coltrane and Evans to the mountaintop of 1959
and their path on from there. It's a book about music and business and race and heroin and
the towns that gave jazz its home from New York and LA to Philadelphia Chicago and Kansas
City. It's an astonishing meditation on creativity and the strange hothouses that can produce
its full flowering. It's a book about the great forebears of this golden age particularly
Charlie Parker and the people like Ornette Coleman who would take the music down strange new
paths. And it's about why this period has never been replicated why the world of jazz most
people visit is a museum to it. But above all this is a book about three very different
men-their struggles their choices their tragedies their greatness. Bill Evans had a gruesome
downward spiral John Coltrane took the mystic's path into a space far away from mainstream
concerns. Miles had three or four sea changes in him before the end. The tapestry of their
lives is in Kaplan's hands an American Odyssey with no direction home. It is also a
masterpiece a book about jazz that is as big as America--
