It is the best-selling jazz record in history, the one even non-jazz listeners own, and the one everything has already been said about. Ashley Kahn — with the same method he would later bring to A Love Supreme — did the most useful thing possible: he went to see how it was made. With Sony's archives open to him, he reconstructed the two 1959 sessions in which Miles Davis and his sextet, in a few hours and with almost no rehearsal, cut Kind of Blue.
The book tells the modal turn, the moment Davis abandoned bebop's harmonic density for the freedom of a few chords held long; it reconstructs the roles of Bill Evans, Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley; and it analyses, take by take, how the absolute calm we hear came out of near-total improvisation. It is proof that perfection is sometimes a matter of one afternoon and the right people in the right room.
For anyone who owns Kind of Blue on vinyl — and sooner or later everyone does — this is the book that sends you back to the record with new ears. Short, dense, illuminating: the perfect companion to one of the century's essential albums, and the ideal introduction to Kahn's method.
