How 3 shades of jazz swirled together in 1959 to make ‘Kind of Blue’

Book Review 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Bill Evans and the Lost Empire of Cool By James Kaplan Penguin: 484 pages, $35 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores. Frank Sinatra biographer James Kaplan has set his sights on three jazz giants — Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Bill Evans — as their lives and their art lead up to the recording of “Kind of Blue,” Davis’ landmark 1959 album that featured Coltrane on tenor saxophone and Evans on piano. Jazz is the smooth soundtrack to polite brunches in restaurants with potted ferns and bananas Foster and clever young servers.” James Kaplan, author of “3 Shades of Blue.” ’Twas not always the case. Kaplan’s book is a bracing reminder of when jazz represented a widely relevant culture, when New York’s 52nd Street teemed with crowded new venues and new sounds, when the faces of Davis and Monk appeared on mass-circulation magazines and Columbia Records could market Miles as not just a jazz artist but as an artist, period, who appealed to anyone seeking great, adventurous music. Miles teamed up with composer-arranger Gil Evans on the groundbreaking nonet sessions that became “The Birth of the Cool,” blazed a trail through hard bop with his first great ’50s quintet, pioneered modal jazz with “Kind of Blue,” started a completely new quintet in the ’60s and just kept innovating through fusion and beyond.