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Title details for 3 Shades of Blue by James Kaplan - Available

3 Shades of Blue

Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool

by James Kaplan
Dion Graham
Audiobook
2 of 2 copies available
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2 of 2 copies available
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.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Awards

  • Release date

    March 5, 2024

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780593829851
      • File size: 406663 KB
      • Duration: 14:07:12

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      This absorbing audiobook looks at the lives of three jazz greats--Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Bill Evans--from their growth as young musicians to when they collaborated on Davis's 1959 album, KIND OF BLUE, and beyond. Their lives were challenging and full of pathos, which narrator Dion Graham captures with the empathy and vocal talent he's known for. His vocal range and skill with dialogue are fascinating to hear in themselves--pauses, pitch patterns, and finely modulated intensity make his performance sing but never upstage the drama. This lyrical storytelling shifts seamlessly between eras, characters, the jazz scene in major cities, and the broader culture of mid-century America. It's a sensitive look at the lives of three superheroes of the jazz world. T.W. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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