Book 21 - Richard Williams "The Blue Moment"

Richard Williams "The Blue Moment: Miles Davis's Kind of Blue and the Remaking of Modern Music" (Faber & Faber)







A wonderful narrative on how Kind of Blue was made - and what a digression from Miles' progression it is - and how it resonates and influences the next 20 years of popular music. How well you like this depends on your musical tastes - for me, the sections following the natural path through Coltrane and more free forms of jazz were fascinating, as were the chapters on The Velvet Underground and Brian Eno.

The line starts with Gil Evans, George Russell and the "birth of the cool" in jazz, makes its way through Kind of Blue and Miles' second great quintet to Coltrane, minimalism, the Velvet Underground, Soft Machine, Brian Eno and ECM. It's a line, not a story -- and not a particularly straight line at that. Williams gives himself freedom to go off on extended riffs that relate little, if at all, back to Kind of Blue. In particular, his treatment of Terry Riley is extended, and fascinating stuff. Williams' account of Brian Eno is as authoritative as you'd expect from someone who's championed Eno's work from the very beginning. This book (in a similar way to Geoff Dyer's But Beautiful) showed me the direction to deeper appreciation.