3 Shades of Blue
Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool
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3 Shades of Blue
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Narrated by:
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Dion Graham
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Written by:
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James Kaplan
About this listen
The National Bestseller • One of The Minneapolis Star Tribune's Best Books of the Year
“A superb book...[Kaplan is] a master biographer, a dogged researcher and shaper of narrative, and this is his most ambitious book to date.”—Los Angeles Times
From the author of the definitive biography of Frank Sinatra, the story of three towering artists—Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Bill Evans—and how they came together to create the most iconic jazz album of all time, Kind of Blue
In 1959, America’s great indigenous art form, jazz, reached the height of its power and popularity. James Kaplan’s magnificent 3 Shades of Blue captures how that golden era came to be, and its pinnacle with the recording of Kind of Blue. It’s a book about music, and business, and race, and heroin, and the cities that gave jazz its home, and the Black geniuses behind its rise. It’s an astonishing meditation on creativity and the strange environments where it can flourish most. It’s a book about the great forebears and founders of a lost era, and the disrupters who would take the music down truly new paths. And it’s about why the world of jazz most people know is a museum to this never-replicated period.
But above all, 3 Shades of Blue is a book about three very different men—the greatness and varied fortunes of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Bill Evans. The tapestry of their lives is, in Kaplan’s hands, a national odyssey with no direction home. It is also a masterpiece, a book about jazz that is as big as America.
©2024 James Kaplan (P)2024 Penguin AudioWhat the critics say
“[Kaplan is] a master biographer, a dogged researcher and shaper of narrative, and this is his most ambitious book to date . . . he shows his instinct for juggling and connecting multiple stories and characters without taking his eye off the big picture . . . a compulsively readable work of fine synthesis and perspective . . . a superb book.”—Los Angeles Times
“James Kaplan’s new effort, 3 Shades of Blue, raises the bar . . . At a time when jazz is reemergent and viral, seeping into virtually every musical genre (and vice versa), we are fortunate that the author has conjured this hothouse flower of a book—as rarified, intricate, and haunting as an orchid.”—David Friend, Vanity Fair
“‘This is the story of the three geniuses who joined forces to create one of the great classics in Western music,’ Mr. Kaplan writes . . . Kaplan does a wonderful job synthesizing sources to produce a compelling narrative history. His own interviews add a lot as well. His technical descriptions of the music are accessible and useful.”—Wall Street Journal