RICHARD WILLIAMS' BLUE MOMENT

Richard Williams has written an admirable history of the classic Miles Davis album Kind Of Blue, but what he is trying to do in this book is much more than that, in those efforts he is only partly successful. There is no doubt that the Davis sextet with both John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderly on saxes is one of the high points of 20th century music--and if it isn't the album right at the apex it probably signals the beginning of a period of frenzied change in musical energy, in New York, that may culminate with Coltrane at the Village Vanguard. That's food for another argument.

Williams tells the story of the record with precision and understanding. The use of both Wynton Kelly and Bill Evans on piano, and the racial undercurrents behind that. He may give somewhat short shift to Adderly's album Somethin' Else, with Miles, which is very much a precursor to Kind Of Blue and, as you might expect from Cannon, somewhat more engaging, but overall Williams is a very sympathetic portrayer of the people involved, he has a balanced and empathetic view of Davis, and he is accurate and telling in his analysis of the record itself.

What is harder to is to make the case for it as the most influential, even of Davis' own records. At least three times in his career, Davis changed the course of jazz, with Birth Of The Cool, Kind Of Blue, and Bitches Brew. Since Birth more or less led to Kind Of Blue, and since the revolution Bitches Brew sparked more or less fizzled out, to be replaced by a sort of return of hard-bop, you'd think it makes sense, until you consider In A Silent Way, which even Williams concedes may be Davis' greatest work. But this is head-of-a-pin kind of quibbling.

More important is whether Williams makes the case for the centrality of Kind Of Blue to his 'Blue Moment', whether there is an era which it can be said to encapsulate. He makes the case in one way; certainly the record reflects and sets the mood music for a certain sense of the 'hip' character of the late 50s, the Hugh Hefner ideal which would bleed into the Rat Pack kind of JFK glamour of the early 60s. Whether this fits in with Fellini or Antonioni I'm not so sure. In musical terms, however, Williams makes the case well, especially the influence of what you might call the Impressionist composers, Debussy, Ravel, Faure. You could argue this sort of jazz carried on those experiments, where modern classical music moved in another direction which was then carried on by free jazz. In the jazz world, George Russell and Gil Evans' influence is pervasive, and Williams makes the case so well you wonder whether some of the music he cites is obviously influenced by Russell far more than Miles himself. Trying to distill an era into one record is difficult, but with a few limitations, most notably the narrow range of influence jazz had even then, when it was at its creative peak, Williams does a fine job.

As a sidebar, while I was listening to Kind Of Blue, I re-read the original liner notes, written by Bill Evans. This struck me as a kind of condescension by Columbia; there is a piece to be written about the underlying tone of the (admittedly loving) commentaries written by white jazz writers about black jazz musicians in that era, but the choice of the one white musician (and Davis--and Adderly's--bands were almost always integrated) to actually explain the music seems a device to give it a certain 'respectability'.

Williams' other task it to trace the influence of Kind Of Blue, and here he is less successful. This is partly because it's hard to see it as the, or even a, main factor in the rise of rock bands like The Velvet Underground or King Crimson, and partly because those bands are in a large dead-in you might label 'art-rock', which Davis-influence or no, shows no organic flow from his music. That I'm no fan of the sub-genre may influence me somewhat here. Williams is better on the modern composers, like Terry Riley, but again, modern classical music followed a different path, before maybe ending up in a similar place--Kind Of Blue doesn't constitute a prime, direct source. Even ECM, whose music does bear a lot of direct connection to the record, started with a lot of musicians trying to be Russell, or Coltrane, or Bitches Brew Davis, before settling into that KOB groove (and of course Keith Jarrett, ECM's biggest seller, came through Davis' BB band, after Charles Lloyd's.

It's an engaging read: Williams writes well enough to avoid the Anorak Syndrome which infects so much jazz (and music) writing, and it's refreshing to see him trying to make the links between the various types of music he loves. That he almost manages to do that, convincingly, makes this book a success.

The Blue Moment by Richard Williams Faber £14.99 ISBN 9780571245062