Book review

The Blue Moment
Mile's Davis's Kind of Blue and the remaking of modern music

Richard Williams

In High School, I played the baritone saxophone, in both the concert band and the jazz band. I rarely practised. The music the concert band played wasn't particularly hard, at least not the parts I had, and Doc, our teacher, spend countless time screaming at the percussion section and others for not staying on rhythm. (It was kind of comical at times. When I broke my collarbone, I spent some time banging on the bass drum. It was only one mallet, and one drum, but at least I kept it on rhythm.)

Anyway, I can only remember a few of the pieces of music we ever played. "Sleigh Ride" - in the concert band, which we had to play every year, and was very boring for me, for some reason. The one piece of music I remember from the Jazz band was "So What", Doc had written the basic rhythm for everyone out, had us listen several times to it, then tried getting us to play solos in the thing. I took one, or was told I was doing one, or some thing of the sort. Doc wanted me to make a solo up, but I could never really come up with anything. Then Doc wrote me a solo, and I never really stuck to it, and played it a bit differently every time. (I rarely practised, after all.) I think this drove Doc crazy.

Anyway, I liked that song, the way the basses and horns had their little back and forth dialogue, and stuff like that. Years later, I came across "So What", on Miles Davis' Kind of Blue, which I bought on CD. It's the one Jazz CD I own.

This book, "The Blue Moment", talks about Miles Davis' career leading up to the creation of the album. This was pretty interesting, although the author clearly knows a lot more about music and music history than I do. He talks about lots of different people in the early days of Jazz (at least recorded Jazz, I assume) that he expects the reader to be familiar with. (I am not) It was interesting reading how the album was recorded in two days. It turns out that all recording of the album were inadvertently played slightly too fast until about 1993. (If Doc had slowed us down just a bit, I might have played that solo just like he wanted me too...)

Anyway, I liked the book up to the point of the recording of the album, even though I had to just kind of take what the author was saying about some of the music on his word. After writing about the recording, the author tried to tie the record into lots of other music and pop culture that followed. Some of it was about the artists that contributed to the album, some of it was a little weird, some of it I just didn't know what the author was talking about. He seemed to just be off on his own little tangents for the last hundred pages of the book, most of which just weren't all that interesting to me.

Anyhow, the first half of this book was very interesting. I listened to the album quite a few times while reading the book. It certainly made me appreciate the discussion of the recording session that created the album a bit more.