- Hardcover: 320 pages
- Publisher: Faber and Faber (6 Aug 2009)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0571245064
- ISBN-13: 978-0571245062
- Product Dimensions: 18.2 x 14.2 x 3.4 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 334,817 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
The Blue Moment
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Product Description
Book Description
The essential companion to one of the most influential albums of all time, publishing on the 50th Anniversary of its original release.
Product Description
'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 the history of jazz, and for many listeners among the most haunting in all of twentieth-century music. 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. Its atmosphere – slow, dark, meditative, luminous – became all-pervasive for a generation, and has remained the epitome of melancholy coolness ever since. Richard Williams has written a history of the album which for once does not rip it out of its wider cultural context. He evokes the essence of the music – identifying the qualities that make it so uniquely appealing – while making effortless connections to painting, literature, philosophy and poetry. This makes for an elegant, graceful and beautifully-written narrative.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
This is an outstanding work. Written with wonderful elegance, Richard Williams' labour of love not only sheds new light on the magic of Kind of Blue, but also identifies and explores the ripples it has had on other musical developments over subsequent years. Whether you are a jazz buff or interested in music generally, you will enjoy this immensely. It is a great source of education and a signicant literary contribution to cultural history and understanding. I strongly recommend it!
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Kind of Blue is the best-known and best-loved of all jazz albums and it already has a significant bibliography. In this book Richard Williams goes well beyond the existing accounts of the album's making and discusses why Kind of Blue is important for the subsequent development not just of jazz but of rock and minimalist classical music. As you'd expect from Richard Williams, whose credits range from Melody Maker to first rock critic of The Times to a stint presenting The Old Grey Whistle Test, there's a great del of enthusiastic knowledge about the highways and byways of all these musical genres. So the well-known (Velvet Underground) rub shoulders with cult figures such as LaMonte Young. The myriad connections aren't always convincing. Surely Amercian minimalism (YOung, Riley, Reich, Glass) would have happened anyway? But it's hard to quarrel with the claim that Kind of Blue helped to give us the exquisite soundworld of the ECM label and its various Scandinavian clones. Anyway that's my view - it's certainly worth reading and making up your own mind.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
"The Blue Moment: Miles Davis's Kind of Blue and the Remaking of Modern Music," concerns itself with a record that is the best-selling jazz album of all time, and the only jazz album many people own: Kind of Blue. It is now 50 years old: it was recorded in nine hours, over two days, in a disused Manhattan church, in the spring of 1959, by Miles Davis and six other musicians. And the American Congress has just honored the album as a central part of the American heritage. The book was authored by Englishman Richard Williams, who writes for "The Guardian" on music and sports and has written books on Enzo Ferrari and Bob Dylan, among other subjects. Williams, who lives in London, is a former editor of "Melody Maker" and head of A & R at Island Records.
Other books have covered Davis's life, and the creation of this particular record, but few have done so in the depth Williams does. He looks at the cultural zeitgeist of the late 1950's, and explains how Davis was influenced by the prevailing winds of the time; he examines the influence of the French Impressionist composers, such as Claude Debussy, Gabriel Faure and Maurice Ravel, of whose music Davis was very fond (as am I; they are my favorite composers, but I never knew Davis also particularly liked them.) He then goes on to trace the influence of this seminal record, in jazz; art rock, such as that of John Cale, The Velvet Underground, or Brian Eno; and on the current classical school of minimalism, works written by such composers as Steve Reich and John Adams.
Williams writes well and gracefully, in crisp stylish prose. He's evidently very knowledgeable about music, and has, furthermore, evidently done a lot of research. He's aimed this work at jazz lovers, without doubt, though those who are simply music lovers may also be gratified by the thoroughness with which he treats his subject. However, the book does presuppose a fairly significant technical knowledge of music in its readers. The book also is sometimes repetitive, and the author allows himself the freedom to range pretty far out in his meditations, as, for example, a chapter on the color blue. Finally, it's silly to complain that a book offers too much information, but the general reader may find that the book sometimes outstrips his or her interests. Frankly, it did mine: there's a lot of quite detailed material on subjects that don't much interest me, as, quite simply, I'd about a thousand times prefer spending an evening listening to Debussy than Adams. And, as to listening to The Temptations or The Velvet Underground, I can't even reckon the odds.
Other books have covered Davis's life, and the creation of this particular record, but few have done so in the depth Williams does. He looks at the cultural zeitgeist of the late 1950's, and explains how Davis was influenced by the prevailing winds of the time; he examines the influence of the French Impressionist composers, such as Claude Debussy, Gabriel Faure and Maurice Ravel, of whose music Davis was very fond (as am I; they are my favorite composers, but I never knew Davis also particularly liked them.) He then goes on to trace the influence of this seminal record, in jazz; art rock, such as that of John Cale, The Velvet Underground, or Brian Eno; and on the current classical school of minimalism, works written by such composers as Steve Reich and John Adams.
Williams writes well and gracefully, in crisp stylish prose. He's evidently very knowledgeable about music, and has, furthermore, evidently done a lot of research. He's aimed this work at jazz lovers, without doubt, though those who are simply music lovers may also be gratified by the thoroughness with which he treats his subject. However, the book does presuppose a fairly significant technical knowledge of music in its readers. The book also is sometimes repetitive, and the author allows himself the freedom to range pretty far out in his meditations, as, for example, a chapter on the color blue. Finally, it's silly to complain that a book offers too much information, but the general reader may find that the book sometimes outstrips his or her interests. Frankly, it did mine: there's a lot of quite detailed material on subjects that don't much interest me, as, quite simply, I'd about a thousand times prefer spending an evening listening to Debussy than Adams. And, as to listening to The Temptations or The Velvet Underground, I can't even reckon the odds.
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