20 pages of introduction and stuff, then 236 pages of Book Proper for a total of 256 pages, also known as About 12 1/2 days' worth of reading on my DDR schedule...unless it proves to be particularly interesting, in which case probably a week. I was quite satisfied with Ashley Kahn's book on Kind of Blue...so much so that I'm now planning to read his A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane's Signature Album...but I also wanted more on Kind of Blue, so I found Eric Nisenson's book at the Louisville Free Public Library. (Thank you, LFPL.) And speaking of John Coltrane, Nisenson also wrote Ascension: John Coltrane and His Quest, which (1) sounds like my 🍵 & (2) is not available via the LFPL, but is through the Internet Archive. So that might happen, too. Hmmm. This Jazz Unit's Syllabus is getting longer as we go, Professor Brother K. Yeah, sometimes you don't know how deep the hole goes until you climb in.
Day 1 (Jazz Day 41 / DDRD 1,619) April 7, 2022
Woke up at 4 o'clock this morning with no hopes of going back to sleep, so I got up to start the coffee and on my way to the kitchen hit the cd player up. Was going to put in Evolution, since that album plays in my head pretty much all of the time these days, and it's a bit of a relief to hear it externally, but saw that there was already a cd in the chamber, so I just hit play. There were some faint piano notes, and just as I was thinking, "That sounds very pretty and delicate," I realized that it was Miles Davis's rendition of "Green Dolphin Street," which is another thing that runs through my head a lot. I'd left the second disc of the Ex-Wife Gave Me Shit For Buying This edition of Kind of Blue in the player. So I let it roll. It was a nice way to start the day. Also made me glad that I don't live in an apartment, since I didn't have to worry about disturbing anyone by playing Jazz at 4 am.
ANYway...read to page 40...which includes the 20 pages of Introduction and stuff, so 60 pages today. I don't think it's going to take 12 1/2 days to read this one.
When I first started reading, the thought crossed my mind that it might be overkill to read another book on this Miles Davis album. But it didn't take long for me to realize that Eric Nisenson was bringing a whole new game to the table. Check out this comment from the Introduction:
"...for me, Kind of Blue was one of the stepping-stones toward emotional maturity as well as simply another beautiful piece of music." (xi)
I enjoyed Kahn's book and got a lot out of it, but Nisenson is clearly a different kettle of fish. He brings a more personal and more philosophical attitude to Kind of Blue.
He also does a great job of intertwining social history and attitudes into the narrative. For instance, this: "Jazzmen have often been characterized as 'eccentric' or even 'crazy.' But this is simply an expedient way for others to reject their insistence on individuality in a society in which conformity is the desired norm." (3)
Which might also be a way of understanding the pervasive drug addiction thing going on in Jazz, at least in the 40s. Reference this, Nisenson quotes Sonny Rollins as saying, "Using drugs was kind of a way for the boppers to express what they thought about American capitalist values." (37)
Nisenson also tells some stories about Miles Davis from his personal experience (he knew him for a period of several years), and tells a story about the young Miles who had to literally be pushed onto the stage by Charlie Parker because he was so fearful of playing on the stage.
Definitely enjoying this book.
P.S. Also found an old library receipt in this book.
Nothing earth shaking, of course, but I like finding stuff left behind in books which gives some indication of a previous reader's existence. In this case, the reader seems to have been walking a much more intense Miles Davis path than I am (or am capable of) doing, since s/he was reading a technical analysis of the music. I just checked, and it looks like the LFPL no longer has a copy of this book.
Day 2 (Jazz Day 42 / DDRD 1,620) April 8, 2022
Read to page 90. Didn't really mean to. One of the things I really like about this book is that Nisenson is spending a lot of time setting up his actual discussion of Kind of Blue. He has spent a chapter each on George Russell, John Coltrane, and Bill Evans--which is where I currently am residing, and still has a chapter on Cannonball Adderley before we get to "The Sessions." And yes, there were two chapters on Miles Davis which preceded the George Russell chapter.
Speaking of George Russell...Eric Nisenson does an excellent job of showing how important this fellow was to the sound that Miles Davis created on Kind of Blue. And it wasn't until I was almost finished this chapter that it hit me: I didn't even remember Russell being mentioned in the Kahn book. So I went back and had a look. And I was wrong, George Russell is mentioned 11 times, actually. But most of those are just passing references, and though it's mentioned that he influenced Miles to some degree, there's nothing close to what Nisenson gives in his chapter on GR. So I went to Spotify and found New York, New York and listened to most of it. It wasn't really my thing, at least not at this moment when I can not seem to escape from the sound of Grachan Moncur III, but it was interesting, Big Band-y type stuff, for sure. And it had some familiar names...Bill Evans, John Coltrane, Max Roach.
And I think that points out one of the big differences between this book and the Kahn one. Nisenson is not just more philosophical in his expressions, he's more philosophical by nature, so he can't talk about the sessions for Kind of Blue without first examining each of the key players and tracing their development before they came together to make this album.
And speaking of Coltrane, Nisenson thinks that Kind of Blue was the line in the sand for JC...that after this he was ready to make his Great Leap Forward (Jazz Joke: To take his Giant Step for Jazzkind), because his work with Miles allowed him to break away from the stuff he had been working on previously. (Which, so far as I can discern, was a super BeBop thing, a perfection of Charlie Parker's sound, something like that.) Of course, Nisenson puts it much more poetically than that. He suggests that Coltrane's intense and frenetic playing could be seen as "a saxophonist fervently seeking his salvation in chords, as if, should he be able to play every possible harmonic permutation, he might find the mind of God." (82)
That comes pretty close to the idea I've been playing with vis-a-vis the reason for human suffering, but since I've gone down that road previously, I'll just drop that line here for now.
Nisenson also made comments about a picture where a young (21 year old) Coltrane is staring in awe at Charlie Byrd, and of course I wanted to see that picture. (One thing that Kahn has going for him--and there's more than one thing, btw--is that he WOULD have given us that picture. This book, on the other hand, has no pictures at all. But hey, this is the 21st fucking century, man:
Those are some My Eyes Have Seen The Glory eyes, for sure.
You know, if I'm not careful...and I so rarely am...I'm going to finish this book in a couple more days. Well, no push, but if it happens, I just happen to have this Miles: The Autobiography on hand. Plus I just got a notification from the LFPL that they have A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane's Signature Album by Ashley Kahn waiting for me. So there's that. And that.
Day 3 (Jazz Day 43 / DDRD 1,621) April 9, 2022
Read to page 123. No doubt going to read some more today, but so many ideas have filled up my head that I needed to pause and write them out.
Nisenson makes reference to Miles Davis' cruelty, especially towards women...and although he doesn't give any specifics here, I think it's significant that he finds the need to mention this...as well as give some examples of his cruel treatment of the musicians who played with him, and even going so far as to say that he hears cruelty in Davis' music. Nisenson definitely isn't approving of any of that, but he also does not reject Davis...or at least not his music...on account of it. That is something I struggle with, and is, in fact, the reason that I didn't want to read Miles Davis' autobiography. But maybe I'll try to get past that. Haven't decided yet.
Also, this: an artist "has only the truth of his own life to use as grist for his music. If he is a genuine artist, he will be able to use his own experience in the act of artistic creation regardless of the nature of that experience." (103) That's pretty intense stuff, isn't it? There's also the implication that a full spectrum of artistic creations would require a full spectrum of human experience...including the most abject degradation and abuse, wouldn't it? Once again I find myself circling around a concept of God and human suffering which seems in some senses to be the only reasonable cosmological explanation for "the troublemakers." *
Also interesting, Nisenson links the need for creative, individual expression to the stereotyping that occurs with black people.
This, for instance: "The reason these issues are so vital to blacks in this country is obvious. As a member of a stereotyped minority, an African American must answer the need to express one's selfhood; the need for freedom is equally obvious." (104)
That makes a lot of sense. If you're not treated as an individual, you might go out of your way to proclaim your individuality...whether that means giving yourself a "weird" hairdo, tattoos, etcetera, or whether it means finding a unique way to play a musical instrument or to write songs, stories, poems, and so forth.
So, yeah. Got that out.
Oh, just one more thing. Nisenson suggests that Evans, Coltrane, and Adderley were all on the cusp of finding their own, personal styles when they joined Miles to create Kind of Blue. So you can see how that would contribute to the richness of the album...and also, perhaps, and I think this was Nisenson's implication, that the album was a catalyst for all three of these Jazz Giants.
Okay.
Later: Read to page 140, but had some challenges beginning with page 135. Some yahoo spilled ink on the top corner of the book at this point, and it pretty much obscures the writing in some spots all the way up through page 194. Check this out:
And that's one of the better pages...and while I was holding the book in direct sunlight. There were other spots where I just had to keep straining to make words out...and couldn't do it in some cases. Which is pretty frustrating. HowEVER...Internet Archive has come to the rescue. Check THIS out:
So at least I have a back up plan if I run into unreadable sections. Still, a shame that somebody did this to this book. What kind of idiot reads a book with a bottle of open ink next to it? I mean, this is way to much ink to have come from a leaky pen.
* In her superb song, "How Do You Do" from the Oral Fixation, Volume 2 album, Shakira asks God, "...and if you wrote the script / Then why the troublemakers?"
Day 4 (Jazz Day 44 / DDRD 1,622) April 10, 2022
Read to page 170, and I tried to peer through the ink, but there were words I just couldn't make out, so I opened up Internet Archive and went back and forth from book to ebook for this morning's read. It was kind of frustrating. I should just switch to the ebook, of course, but I don't really want to do that for some reason, so we'll see how it goes. On the plus side, only 24 ink-stained pages to go. On the minus side, 24 ink-stained pages to go.
BTW, one of the things I love about Eric Nisenson's writing is that he says stuff like this: "It is of such lyrical splendor that the first time I heard it, I actually gasped." This was in reference to John Coltrane's solo on "Someday My Prince Will Come."
So I dialed the tune up on YouTube and gave it a listen. I have to admit that I didn't gasp, but it was worth listening to, for sure. I was particularly struck by the piano part, which was played by Wynton Kelly, another Jazz guy who died way too young--at age 39, after an epileptic seizure.
On the other hand, Ashley Kahn definitely gave a lot of cool details about Kind of Blue that haven't appeared in the Eric Nisenson book. Of course, I've still got 48 text pages to go, so we'll see what happens, but I'm thinking that if you really want to get inside this album, then it'd be best to read both books...and if you only want to read one, it should probably be the Kahn book. It's not as intimate or as philosophical (both of which are things I like immensely), but it does deliver the goods.
Read some more...to page 190. So almost past the ink stains now.
Ran into a weird proofreading error on page 189:
So looks like tomorrow is going to be it for this book...a week earlier than predicted. I'll bet my page per day average is pretty high right now. Let's see: as of tomorrow, I'll have read 29,252 pages in 1,623 days...that's a smidge over 18 pages per day. I actually thought it'd be a bit higher than that, but still...not bad considering we're talking about rocking steady for about 4 1/2 years. Water on stone, man, water on stone.
Day 5 (Jazz Day 45 / DDRD 1,623) April 11, 2022
Read to page 236, aka The End. Other than the annoyance of the ink stains, this was a most excellent book indeed. For me it was a better book than Ashley Kahn's, though I would say it's well worth your time to read both of them, as Mr. Kahn brings some things to the table that aren't even in the kitchen for Mr. Nisenson. And that said, I have plans to read more by both of these fellows.
But next up, I think, is Miles: The Autobiography. I'm feeling very hesitant to take that plunge, but after reading two books about him in succession, I'd also like to hear his side of the story. With that in mind, here's something that Miles Davis said to Eric Nisenson which I think is worth remembering:
"If you don't have anything to put into the world, you ought to get out of it."
Mmm-hmmm.
DDR Day 1 to 1,000: 13,449 pages read
DDR Day 1001 to Day 2000:
(1) Leviathan 63 days, 729 pages
(2) Stalingrad 27 days, 982 pages
(3) Life and Fate 26 days, 880 pages
(4) The Second World War 34 + 32 + 40 + 43 + 31 + 32 days = 212 days, 4,379 pages
(5) Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming 10 days, 572 pages
(6) The Great Bridge 25 days, 636 pages
(7) The Path Between the Seas 29 days, 698 pages
(8) Blake: Prophet Against Empire, 23 days, 523 pages
(9) Jerusalem 61 days, 1,266 pages
(10) Voice of the Fire 9 days, 320 pages
(11) The Fountainhead 15 days, 720 pages
(12) The Pacific Trilogy: Pacific Crucible 23 days, 640 pages
(13) The Pacific Trilogy: The Conquering Tide 28 days, 656 pages
(14) The Pacific Trilogy: Twilight of the Gods 31 days, 944 pages
2nd 1K Sub-Total: 13,945 pages. So as of Day 578 of The Second 1,000 Days, I've already passed (by a substantial amount) the number of pages I read in all of the first 1,000 Days. Woo-hoo.
(15) Jazz: Its Evolution and Essence 13 days, 304 pages
(16) Toward Jazz 18 days, 224 pages
(17) The Worlds of Jazz 13 days, 279 pages
(18) To Be or Not...to Bop 14 days, 571 pages
(19) Kind of Blue 4 days, 224 pages
2nd 1K Sub-Total: 15,547 pages. Grand Total: 28,996 pages.
(20) Kind of Blue: Miles Davis and his Masterpiece: 5 days, 256 pages
(21) Miles: The Autobiography 445 pages
(21) A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane's Signature Album
(22) Ascension: John Coltrane and His Quest
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