Blue Moment: Miles Davis's Kind of Blue and the Remaking of Modern Music

About this book

A brilliant, wide-ranging book on how the seminal album revolutionized music and culture in the twentieth century. “It is the most singular of sounds, yet among the most ubiquitous. It is the sound of isolation that has sold itself to millions.” Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue is the best-selling piece of music in jazz history and, for many listeners, among the most haunting works of the twentieth century. It is also, notoriously, the only jazz album many people own. Recorded in 1959 (in nine miraculous hours), there has been nothing like it since. Richard Williams’s “richly informative” (The Guardian) history considers the album within its wider cultural context, showing how the record influenced such diverse artists as Steve Reich and the Velvet Underground. In the tradition of Alex Ross and Greil Marcus, the “effortlessly versatile” Williams (The Times) “connects these seemingly disparate phenomena with purpose, finesse and journalistic flair” (Financial Times), making masterly connections to painting, literature, philosophy, and poetry while identifying the qualities that make the album so uniquely appealing and surprisingly universal.

Details

Format

Hardcover

ISBN-13

9780393076639

Publisher

W. W. Norton & Company

Published

April 12, 2010

Pages

320

Weight

17 oz

Subject

Music