the last book I ever read (3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool, excerpt eight)

from 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool by James Kaplan:

One way of working through his underconfidence—in performance, not on recording sessions—was to use his solos as explorations, blowing for chorus after chorus as he tried to figure out how to play what he really wanted to say. The method wasn’t always popular with his fellow players—or with the bandleader. “Miles would say to him, ‘Can’t you play 27 choruses instead of 28?’” the drummer Jimmy Cobb recalled. When Coltrane explained that he couldn’t figure out how to stop, Miles dryly offered, “You might try taking the horn out of your mouth.” But this was just Miles being Miles: in those early days he seemed to understand, Cobb said “that [Coltrane] was working on something.”

In hiring John Coltrane, Miles knew exactly what he was doing. “In Coltrane’s defense, vertical style, gritty sound, and emotional ferocity, Miles had found the perfect foil for his own sound and style,” Dan Morgenstern writes. “It was a bit like the contrast between himself and Parker—only this time it was the trumpeter who played lead.”

And this time, the leader was a minimalist rather than a maximalist. As for Coltrane, like Charlie Parker, he played a lot of notes. Only unlike Parker, whose improvisations traveled through the chord structure of a blues, standard, or bebop original, searching for harmonies that related to the melody, Coltrane ran all conceivable harmonies of a tune as an end in itself, searching for notes no one had ever thought of using before.

the last book I ever read (3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool, excerpt seven)

from 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool by James Kaplan:

John Coltrane would ultimately become a jazz deity, by virtue of his supreme technical skills, his ceaseless exploration of the far bounds of the music, and the intense spirituality that informed his life and art. But in 1955 he was an awkward outsider, as far as possible from any kind of distinction in his field. (Even his heroin addiction—desperate, furtive, ashamed—didn’t fit into the cool model of jazz culture.) In auditioning for Miles he was virtually coming out from hiding, having spent the past decade freelancing around jazz’s seamy outskirts as he searched musically; yet even as his playing improved, he gained little faith in his own abilities. His ceaseless questing for musical and spiritual enlightenment filled him with questions about everything, especially music. And in reencountering a newly ascendant Miles Davis, he was coming up against the ultimate non-answerer.

“Miles is sort of a strange guy,” he would tell François Postif in 1961. “He doesn’t talk a lot, and he rarely discusses music. You always have the impression that he’s in a bad mood, and that he’s not interested in or affected by what other people are doing. It’s very hard, in a situation like that, to know exactly what you should do . . . .”

the last book I ever read (3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool, excerpt six)

from 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool by James Kaplan:

In 1947 Bill Evans was still four years away from joining Herbie Fields. After graduating high school in Plainfield, New Jersey, that year, he entered Southeastern Louisiana College, in Hammond, forty-five miles northwest of New Orleans, on a music scholarship.

If anything, what the young Evans seems to have been is a gifted musical chameleon. He’d studied (and loved) classical piano from a tender age: “From the age of six to thirteen,” he later said, “I acquired the ability to sight-read and to play classical music . . . performing Mozart, Beethoven, or Schubert intelligently, musically.”

And yes, he added: “I couldn’t play ‘My Country ‘Tis of Thee’ without the notes.”

the last book I ever read (3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool, excerpt five)

from 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool by James Kaplan:

Davis’s Blue Note recording session of March 6, 1954, was his first record date for almost ten months and his first time working in the Hackensack, New Jersey, home studio of the soon to be legendary optometrist turned recording engineer Rudy Van Gelder. John Lewis had been the pianist on the May 1953 quartet recording; now that Horace Silver was on the piano bench (Percy Heath was back on bass; Art Blakey replaced Max Roach), Miles went in a different direction altogether.

the last book I ever read (3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool, excerpt four)

from 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool by James Kaplan:

“When we first came to New York everyone was so bright and eager,” Irene recalled. “Then suddenly everyone was nodding.” Miles was spending so little time at home, and had so little interest in her sexually, that at first she suspected he was having an affair. Then she found blood on his shirtsleeve and put two and two together. Gregory Davis, just three or four at the time, remembered his mother hiding Miles’s shoes so he wouldn’t be able to go out to score.

In early 1950 he left Queens and moved himself and his young family into the Hotel America on West Forty-seventh Street, one of the few Manhattan hotels south of Harlem designated by The Negro Travelers’ Green Book as hospitable to African Americans, within easy walking distance of Birdland, Bop City, and other Broadway clubs—and closer to sources of drugs. The America was home to a number of jazz musicians, including his old St. Louis friend Clark Terry, and Miles promptly consigned Irene and the kids to the care of another hotel resident, the up-and-coming young singer Betty Carter, who idolized him. Meanwhile he hung out with Sonny Rollins and his Sugar Hill Harlem crowd, basically a kaffeeklatsch of heroin users who also happened to be great musicians: the teenage altoist Jackie McLean, the pianist Walter Bishops, Jr., the drummers Blakey, Roach, and Art Taylor. Doing drugs with other addicts relieved loneliness; it also made it easier to score. Miles continued to work, even as his addiction dragged him steadily downward.

the last book I ever read (3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool, excerpt three)

from 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool by James Kaplan:

Under the smiles, though, was trouble, and Coltrane was at the center of it. He and Jimmy Heath had both been using heroin for a couple of years—snorting it, though Lewis Porter maintains that Coltrane may have started injecting it back in Philadelphia. (Charlie Parker had told Heath, “When you put it in your nose, you’re still a gentleman; when you put it in your arm, you’re a bum, exposed to all the world.”)

Musicians mostly snorted it—unbeknownst to Gillespie, six of the players in his big band had been doing so—and those who put it in their nose rather than in their arm were better able to stop when they wanted. But while the septet played Dayton, Ohio, that fall, Coltrane and Heath, sick and nervous from the diluted heroin they’d had to purchase in the hinterlands, got relief when “Specs Wright brought in a girl named Dee Dee . . . who came in with a set of ‘works’ (needles and supplies), and she helped them all with shooting up, mainlining. That way they all got high instantly.”

It was the beginning of a hellish seven-year addiction for Jimmy Heath. Coltrane’s relationship with self-soothing substances was more complicated. He gobbled sweets, which led to problems with his weight and his teeth. He treated his frequent dental woes with heavy drinking. He also drank when he couldn’t get heroin or was trying to stop. In October 1950, while he was in Los Angeles with the Gillespie group, he passed out in his hotel room after shooting up; Heath found him and revived him.

the last book I ever read (3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool, excerpt two)

from 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool by James Kaplan:

There is a photograph of a young John Coltrane watching Charlie Parker solo. The date is Sunday, December 7, 1947, six years to the day after Pearl Harbor; the place is the Elate Club Ballroom on South Broad Street in Coltrane’s hometown, Philadelphia. The occasion is a benefit concert “for little Mary Etta Jordan, who is 6 years old and lost both her legs in a recent trolley accident.” Some three thousand people are in attendance.

Coltrane, who is sitting on the bandstand as a member of the saxophonist Jimmy Heath’s orchestra, turned twenty-one that September. At first glance it’s hard to see what he’s doing or looking at. But zooming in on the image shows that the young saxophonist, laying out while the great man plays, has a lighted cigarette in his hand, and is staring at Bird so intently that it seems as though the cigarette might burn his fingers any second.