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

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

Coltrane had been playing the soprano in public since the beginning of the Jazz Gallery stand; he had even performed Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “My Favorite Things” on it that summer. But he’d never recorded with the instrument before October 21, 1960, the day he, Tyner, Davis, and Jonas turned The Sound of Music’s perky song of uplift into a jazz classic.

As written by Richard Rodgers, the melody is a waltz. And while Coltrane refers to his version as a waltz, his rendering quickens the tempo considerably, changing it from ¾ time to 6/8. Rodgers and Hammerstein’s original version is written in AAAB form, the A sections contrasting the great lyricist’s sparkling sensuous evocations of the good things—kittens’ whiskers, bright copper kettles, “wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings”—with the bad, spelled out in the B section: dog bites, bee stings, sadness.

It's Coltrane’s genius—inspired by Miles’s impulse to radically simplify the chord structure of his tunes—to base nearly the entirety of his thirteen-minute forty-six-second version of “My Favorite Things” on the two harmonies of the A section: harmonies that, Coltrane later said, “we’ve stretched . . . through the whole piece.” In his version, the B section is given precisely eleven seconds in the entire song, played just second before the track winds up. His improvisation through the A sections is as audacious as any he has recorded to date: at times his lightning runs up and down the E-minor scale, set against the dronelike effect of Tyner and Davis’s pedal point, resemble the Indian ragas played by the great Ravi Shankar that Coltrane was studying at the time.

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

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

Termini promised him that between the Five Spot and the Jazz Gallery, he could guarantee Coltrane at least ten weeks’ work a year and match what Miles was paying him. And so, while on a European tour with Davis that spring, the saxophonist gave his notice—with his blessing, Miles later said—and opened at the Jazz Gallery on Tuesday, May 3, 1960, with Steve Kuhn on piano, Coltrane’s old Philadelphia friend Steve Davis on bass, and Pete La Roca on drums. It was an excellent rhythm section, and Coltrane’s name by itself was enough to draw crowds, but the band he opened with wasn’t the band he truly wanted.

The players Coltrane really wanted all happened to be otherwise engaged. McCoy Tyner, not yet twenty-one but Trane’s close friend and musical confident since 1957, was touring with the Jazztet, a group co-led by Art Farmer and Benny Golson. (The band had played opposite Ornette Coleman at his Five Spot opening in November.) The bassist Art Davis was traveling with Dizzy Gillespie. And the great Elvin Jones, recently arrested for possession of heroin, was temporarily residing at Rikers Island.

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

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

Tired by the time the band came to the third son of the session, “Stella by Starlight,” Cannonball laid out—and then fell asleep in the studio as the five other players went through take after take of the number, stymied at first by a technical difficulty in the control booth and then by a frustrating inability to get the tune exactly right. By take 5, Miles’s patience was fraying: “Paul, what’s wrong with you?” he snapped at Chambers after a false start. Another brief take came to a halt with the intrusion of a loud, startling sound in the studio: Adderley’s snoring. “Hey, man, wake Cannonball up.” Miles said. Someone woke him up. “Don’t snore on my solo, bitch,” Miles told him, as loud laughter broke out.

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

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

We have no record of the Colony date of the Philadelphia weekend, but we do know that the Miles Davis Sextet, with Bill Evans on piano, opened on Friday, April 25, 1958, at the Café Bohemia opposite the Jimmy Giuffre Trio. And that Evans found himself thrown into the deep end of the pool—and, to his own surprise, stayed afloat.

“I had always had a great respect for Miles Davis,” he said some years later. “And when he asked me to join him I realized that I had to revise my views about my own playing. If I continued to feel inadequate as a pianist, it would be to deny my respect for Davis. So I began to accept the position in which I had been placed.”

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.”