There’s a reason why I don’t write music reviews. It’s not that I don’t like music – quite the contrary, I love it, in almost all its forms – but unlike the task of using words to describe other words that is writing a book review, writing music reviews requires both mastery of musical technicalities (syncopation, rhythm and metre, keys and chords, and so on), but also the wisdom to use that knowledge sparingly and focus on describing how something really sounds, and how it makes the listener react. For me, Kind of Blue by Miles Davis is the lynchpin of my CD collection, a wonderful, calming, engrossing, transcendent display of musical genius that provides at least two of my Desert Island Discs – but it’s hard for me to describe why it’s so wonderful. Richard Williams has taken the opportunity of the 50th anniversary of its release to chart the impact it had on jazz, on art and on some very unlikely types of popular music. Where Miles Davis managed only a few pages of his autobiography devoted to this album, Williams has written a whole book – and a great read it is too.

There are tomes devoted purely to the detail of the recording sessions for Kind of Blue – the environment, the creative process, the false starts, and all of those minutiae – but this is not one of those books. For the fan of Kind of Blue though, Williams does put the album in the context of the history of jazz up to that point, and the context of Miles’s career so far, with a lot of emphasis on the legendary Birth of the Cool sessions that predated Kind of Blue by ten years, on the work the trumpeter did with Gil Evans, and on the history of his so-called ‘First Great Quintet’ which provided the backbone for the Kind of Blue band. There’s some information about the sessions themselves, more than I was aware of from Miles’s autobiography, from Ian Carr’s superb biography or from the album’s liner notes, but Williams doesn’t get carried away with this side of things. He’s more interested in Kind of Blue’s cultural impact – and what an impact…

While sometimes subtle, the effects of Kind of Blue can be traced far and wide across the musical landscape: its use of modes instead of chord sequences, while by no means a first, popularised a new way of writing tunes and improvising, and not just for jazz musicians – rock musos like the Allman Brothers Band were heavily influenced by this approach. Its use of space, and silence, its essential minimalism, unleashed all manner of musical experiments among the avant-garde. Its influence spread to art rock – The Velvet Underground and Roxy Music – and to funk: the riff for James Brown’s famous Cold Sweat was lifted from So What on Kind of Blue. While we can never know what the musical landscape would have been like had Kind of Blue not been called in to creation in those two inspired recording sessions in 1959, Williams makes a pretty convincing case that artists as diverse as David Bowie and George Clinton would not have sounded quite the way they did in a world without Kind of Blue in it.

For the Miles Davis fan, and for those people who are musically curious about jazz but have never progressed beyond Kind of Blue (famed as the one jazz album owned by by non-jazz fans), this is a great book, relatively easy to digest for the non-musician. My one suggestion would be this: read this book with ready access to your CD collection or to the Internet, or both – because it will constantly inspire you to head off in search of the sounds being described within its pages. It has introduced me to the subtleties of Terry Riley’s epic In C, inspired me to pay more attention to the Velvet Underground and to revisit my copious collection of other Miles Davis albums, and I feel confident it will have similar effects on many others too. Hightly recommended.

Read a Q&A with author Richard Williams on our sister site Bookhugger.co.uk.

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