Faber & Faber

There have been many books about Miles Davis, one of the twentieth century’s most protean musical figures, but The Blue Moment is unlike any other work on the subject. We asked the author, Richard Williams, why Miles Davis holds such a fascination for him and why, even today, Davis's influence remains so strong.

Why another book about Miles Davis and 'Kind of Blue'?

Because the authors who wrote excellent earlier accounts of the making of the album concentrated on investigating the circumstances of its creation rather than describing its cultural context and analysing its impact.

Kind of Blue is not just the biggest-selling jazz album of all time, by a very wide margin. It emerged from a post-war environment conditioned by new movements in philosophy and the arts - including existentialism, abstract expressionism and the new fiction of such European authors as Albert Camus and Alberto Moravia - to become a key text in the evolution of modern music, its influence spreading into unexpected areas.

Such as, and in what way?

Davis’s insistence on paring down the music’s harmonic movement paved the way for the minimalism that's gradually been surrounding us over the past 40 years, from Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells to the work of today’s avant-gardists, such as Australia’s the Necks and Norway’s Huntsville.

The influence started to spread when one of his partners on Kind of Blue, the saxophonist John Coltrane, developed the strategy of harmonic reduction to such effect that he influenced musicians outside jazz, notably including the key figures of early American minimalism: the composers La Monte Young, Terry Riley and Steve Reich. They in turn influenced the work of the Velvet Underground, who eventually became the most widely copied rock group since the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and Brian Eno, who emerged from Roxy Music to become the most influential strategic thinker of modern music, thanks to his work with Talking Heads, David Bowie, U2 and others.

The pianist Bill Evans, whose playing inspired Davis to devise the mood of Kind of Blue, pursued the direction through the work of his own trio, which inspired Manfred Eicher, the founder of the ECM label, to expose and elevate the reflective qualities of the music of Keith Jarrett, Jan Garbarek, Chick Corea and many others.

Eno’s creation of 'ambient music' also came out of this aspect of Kind of Blue, as did the work of a group of Norwegian musicians recently heard via the much admired Rune Grammofon label, including the trumpeter Arve Henrikson.

But Davis’s album was also a direct influence on music that seemed diametrically opposed to the meditations of Evans and Jarrett. Its best known track, 'So What', provided the template for James Brown’s 'Cold Sweat', one of the foundation stones of funk and a recording widely sampled by musicians of subsequent generations.

Isn’t 'Kind of Blue' a bit of a cliché, a kind of 'Tubular Bells' for the thinking classes, the one jazz album that everybody owns?

Far from it. Kind of Blue is one of those rare works of art that grow stronger and richer through repetition, capable of surviving in the most inhospitable surroundings. Frequent use as background music in pizza restaurants cannot diminish its impact and value. Even someone who has been listening closely to it for half a century can still have the impression of finding something new in each hearing. And its influence continues to spread through the music we hear every day.