The blue moment

Richard Williams takes as his starting point the making of Kind of Blue, Davis’s most celebrated album, and shows how movements in art, philosophy and music fed into this meditative, melancholy masterpiece, first released in 1959. The haunting palettes of Picasso, Matisse and Yves Klein influenced the mood of a culture that valued the colour blue so highly; and the blues, mediated by jazz and other kinds of music, had become the sound that signified ‘coolness’. Williams tells the story of album’s creation in miraculously few hours in a converted Manhattan church and elegantly sketches the roles of the other five musicians who played on the recording. Davis’s album was profoundly influential on his bandmate John Coltrane, and they both haunted the avant-garde composers Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Lamonte Young, who in turn were responsible for transmitting that influence into rock music, touching artists as diverse as John Cale and the Velvet Underground, The Who, Soft Machine, Brian Eno and early Roxy Music, and Talking Heads and U2. The Allman Brothers reworked passages from Kind of Blue in their long improvised jams; and the Grateful Dead’s extended concert performances owed much to that strain of jazz. James Brown’s most copied riff, from ‘Cold Sweat’, was a reworking of ‘So What’. Richard Williams traces the echoes of Davis’s creation in the enduring success of the German ECM label, whose reverberant, brooding sound has defined the work of Keith Jarrett, Chick Corea and Jan Garbarek, and in the static, minimalist music of bands such as Supersilent and The Necks.