the last book I ever read (Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade, excerpt two)

from Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade:

Holed up in rented rooms at 20 Bloomsbury Square near the British Museum, Stein began to record her thoughts in a notebook—descriptions of her surroundings, quotations from books she was reading, snatches of overheard conversation. Her first entry is an evocative sketch of London’s East End—its greyness, its Indian restaurants, its pubs and music halls, laundries and tea shops—that slowly brings the buildings, and their interiors, to life. Lonely and anxious, she was people-watching intently, observing the way “everybody talks to everybody,” familiarizing herself with social quirks and unspoken rules (how anyone will buy a drink for someone out of work, for example, but regular spongers will be despised). Stein applied for a six-month pass to the British Museum’s reading room, where she devised a scheme to read through English literature from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century—extending the project she had begun as a teenager in California. She spent entire days at the museum, breaking only to eat: there she read the works of Fanny Burney; Bunyan’s Life and Death of Mr. Badman; several books about Chinese history and literature; and various studies of saints, including Mary Francis Cusack’s Life and Revelations of Saint Gertrude. Among her notes from her reading, Stein tried out some titles for possible short stories, her first attempts at fiction since the Radcliffe composition classes: “Maggie being the history of a gentle soul”; “The Progress of Jane Sands being a history of one woman and many others”; “The Tragedy of the Wirkin Sisters.” And she jotted down the beginnings of a narrative based on the ill-fated marriage of her older cousin, Bird Stein, who was then in the middle of a high-profile divorce case, involving numerous lawyers and private detectives, that was titillating the New York press.

the last book I ever read (Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade, excerpt one)

from Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade:

In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein recalled posing for hours in a broken armchair while Picasso sat opposite her on a small kitchen chair, his forehead inches from his easel, brown and grey swirled on his palette. While he painted, she “meditated and made sentences” in her mind. As the months passed, she watched Picasso’s mounting frustration as he redid and scrubbed out her features, before reaching total impasse, painting out the entire head in anger, and vanishing to Spain. The next time they met, six months later, he silently presented Stein with the completed portrait. In the interval, Picasso’s style had transformed. The original, naturalistic features were gone, and the face now resembled a sculptured mask, its features starkly outlined. She looks ageless, androgynous, out of time—and utterly assured in herself. When Stein protested that it didn’t look at all like her—if anything, it bore a closer resemblance to the artist himself—he calmly replied, “It will.”

When, in later life, Gertrude Stein was asked how her portrait came to be painted by the relatively unknown, twenty-four-year-old Pablo Picasso, she simply claimed that neither of them could remember. But—as was clear to visitors to her home, where she held court from a chair placed directly beneath her likeness—the painting became central to her sense of identity: “For me,” she wrote in 1938, “it is I, and it is the only reproduction of me which is always I, for me.” The aura of mystery around the sittings—which Stein, implausibly, numbered at eighty or ninety—turned the portrait, from its conception, into a myth. For Stein, it provided an origin story which would come to define her image, linking herself and Picasso indelibly as the two supreme geniuses of the twentieth century, in literature and in art. While Picasso was deep in the “long struggle” of her portrait—inventing Cubism in the process—Stein was immersed in writing Three Lives, a trio of stories which she considered “the first definite step away from the nineteenth century and into the twentieth.” There was, of course, another reason to foreground the connection. By the time Stein wrote the Autobiography, in 1932, Picasso’s work was growing fast in stature, while hers languished in comparative obscurity. By representing their beginnings as intertwined, Stein was making a plea for their futures, too, to be equal.

the last book I ever read (Offshore: A Novel by Penelope Fitzgerald, excerpt eleven)

from Offshore: A Novel by Penelope Fitzgerald:

It wasn’t the uncertain nature of his livelihood that worried him, nor the police visits, although he had twice been invited to accompany the officers to the station. So far they hadn’t applied for a search warrant to go over the boat, but Maurice didn’t care if they did. Still less did he fear the storm. The dangerous and the ridiculous were necessary to his life, otherwise tenderness would overwhelm him. It threatened him now, for what Maurice had not been able to endure was the sight of the emptying Reach. Dreadnought, Lord Jim, now Grace. Maurice, in the way of business, knew too many, rather than too few, people, but when he imagined living without friends, he sat down with the whisky in the dark.

the last book I ever read (Offshore: A Novel by Penelope Fitzgerald, excerpt ten)

from Offshore: A Novel by Penelope Fitzgerald:

‘And how would you describe the way you feel about him now?’ Richard asked.

‘Well, I feel unemployed. There’s nothing so lonely as unemployment, even if you’re on a queue with a thousand others. I don’t know what I’m going to think about if I’m not going to worry about him all the time. I don’t know what I’m going to do with my mind.’ A formless melancholy overcame her. ‘I’m not too sure what to do with my body either.’

the last book I ever read (Offshore: A Novel by Penelope Fitzgerald, excerpt nine)

from Offshore: A Novel by Penelope Fitzgerald:

Nenna had no more than an animal’s sense of direction and distance, but it seemed to her that the right thing to do would be to try to reach the City, then, once she got to Blackfriars, she knew where the river was, and though that would be Lambeth Reach or King’s Reach, a long way downstream of the boats, still, once she had got to the river she would be on the way home. She had worked in an office in Blackfriars once, before Tilda came.

That meant turning south, and she would have to ask which way she was headed. She began to look, with a somewhat dull kind of hopefulness, for somebody friendly, not too much in a hurry, walking the opposite way, although it would be more reasonable, really, to ask somebody walking the same way. Handfuls of sleet were beginning to wander through the air. Radio shop, bicycle shop, family planning shop, funeral parlour, bicycles, radio spare parts, television hire, herbalist, family planning, a florist. The window of the florist was still lit and entirely occupied by a funeral tribute, a football goal, carried out in white chrysanthemums. The red ball had just been introduced into Soccer and there was a ball in the goal, this time in red chrysanthemums. Nenna stood looking into the window, feeling the melted hail make its way down the gap between the collar of her coat and her body. One shoe seemed to be wetter than the other and the strap was working loose, so, leaning against the ledge of the shop window, she took it off to have a look at it. This made her left foot very cold, so she twisted it round her right ankle. Someone was coming, and she felt that she couldn’t bear it if he, because it was a man, said, ‘Having trouble with your shoe?’ For an unbalanced moment she thought it might be Gordon Hodge, pursuing her to see that she would not come back, and make a nuisance of herself to Edward.

the last book I ever read (Offshore: A Novel by Penelope Fitzgerald, excerpt eight)

from Offshore: A Novel by Penelope Fitzgerald:

The Bourgeois Gentilhomme was one of many enterprises in Chelsea which survived entirely by selling antiques to each other. The atmosphere, once through the little shop-door, cut down from a Victorian billiard-table, was oppressive. Clocks struck widely different hours. At a corner table, with her back turned towards them, sat a woman in black, apparently doing some accounts, and surrounded by dusty furniture; perhaps she had been cruelly deserted on her wedding day, and had sat there ever since, refusing to have anything touched. She did not look up when the girls came in, although the billiard table was connected by a cord to a cow-bell, which jangled harshly.

the last book I ever read (Offshore: A Novel by Penelope Fitzgerald, excerpt seven)

from Offshore: A Novel by Penelope Fitzgerald:

She bounded off, as though over stepping stones, from one object to another that would scarcely hold, old tyres, old boots, the ribs of crates from which the seagulls were dislodged in resentment. Far beyond the point at which the mud became treacherous and from which Small Gains had never risen again, she stood poised on the handlebars of a sunken bicycle. How had the bicycle ever got there?

‘Mattie, it’s a Raleigh!’

the last book I ever read (Offshore: A Novel by Penelope Fitzgerald, excerpt six)

from Offshore: A Novel by Penelope Fitzgerald:

Six months, Willis repeated. It was a long time to wait, but not impossible.

Richard suggested that the intervening time could well be spent in replacing the pumps and pump-wells, and certain sections of the hull. It was difficult for him to realise that he was dealing with, or rather trying to help, a man who had never, either physically or emotionally, felt the need to replace anything. Even Willis’s appearance, the spiky short black hair and the prize-fighter’s countenance, had not changed much since he had played truant from Elementary school and gone down to hang about the docks. If truth were known, he had had a wife, as well as a perdurable old mother, a great bicyclist and supporter of local Labour causes, but both of them had died of cancer, no replacements possible there. The body must either repair itself or stop functioning, but that is not true of the emotions, and particularly of Willis’s emotions. He had come to doubt the value of all new beginnings and to put his trust in not much more than the art of hanging together. Dreadnought had stayed afloat for more than sixty years, and Richard, Skipper though he was, didn’t understand timber. Tinkering about with the old boat would almost certainly be the end of her. He remembered the last time he had been to see the dentist. Dental care was free in the 60s, in return for signing certain unintelligible documents during the joy of escape from the surgery. But when the dentist had announced that it was urgently necessary to extract two teeth Willis had got up and walked away, glad that he hadn’t taken off his coat and so would not have to enter into any further discussion while he recovered it from the waiting-room. If one goes, he thought, still worse two, they all go.

the last book I ever read (Offshore: A Novel by Penelope Fitzgerald, excerpt five)

from Offshore: A Novel by Penelope Fitzgerald:

Once at the Tate, they usually had time only to look at the sea and river pieces, the Turners and the Whistlers. Willis praised these with the mingled pride and humility of an inheritor, however distant. To Tilda, however, the fine pictures were only extensions of her life on board. It struck her as odd, for example, that Turner, if he spent so much time on Chelsea Reach, shouldn’t have known that a seagull always alights on the highest point. Well aware that she was in a public place, she tried to modify her voice; only then Willis didn’t always hear, and she had to try again a good deal louder.

‘Did Whistler do that one?’

The attendant watched her, hoping that she would get a little closer to the picture, so that he could relieve the boredom of his long day by telling her to stand back.

the last book I ever read (Offshore: A Novel by Penelope Fitzgerald, excerpt four)

from Offshore: A Novel by Penelope Fitzgerald:

The ship’s cat was in every way appropriate to the Reach. She habitually moved in a kind of nautical crawl, with her stomach close to the deck, as though close-furled and ready for dirty weather. The ears were vestigial, and lay flat to the head.

Through years of attempting to lick herself clean, for she had never quite lost her self-respect, Stripey had become as thickly coated with mud inside as out. She was in a perpetual process of readjustment, not only to tides and seasons, but to the rats she encountered on the wharf. Up to a certain size, that is to say the size attained by the rats at a few weeks old, she caught and ate them, and, with a sure instinct for authority, brought in their tails to lay them at the feet of Martha. Any rats in excess of this size chased Stripey. The resulting uncertainty as to whether she was coming or going had made her, to some extent, mentally unstable.

the last book I ever read (Offshore: A Novel by Penelope Fitzgerald, excerpt three)

from Offshore: A Novel by Penelope Fitzgerald:

Presumably Father Watson said these things automatically. He couldn’t have walked all the way down to the Reach from his comfortless presbytery simply to talk about Martha’s name.

‘She’ll be taking another name at confirmation, I assume. That should not long be delayed. I suggest Stella Maris, Star of the Sea, since you’ve decided to make your dwelling place upon the face of the waters.’

the last book I ever read (Offshore: A Novel by Penelope Fitzgerald, excerpt two)

from Offshore: A Novel by Penelope Fitzgerald:

‘Rochester? Grace? Bluebird? Maurice? Hours of Ease? Dunkirk? Relentless?’

Richard was quite correct, as technically speaking they were all in harbour, in addressing them by the names of their craft. Maurice, an amiable young man, had realised as soon as he came to the Reach that Richard was always going to do this and that he himself would accordingly be known as Dondeschiepolschuygen IV, which was inscribed in gilt lettering on his bows. He therefore renamed his boat Maurice.

the last book I ever read (Offshore: A Novel by Penelope Fitzgerald, excerpt one)

from Offshore: A Novel by Penelope Fitzgerald:

Richard did not even want to preside. He would have been happier with a committee, but the owners, of whom several rented rather than owned their boats, were not of the substance from which committees are formed. Between Lord Jim, moored almost in the shadow of Battersea Bridge, and the old wooden Thames barges, two hundred yards upriver and close to the rubbish disposal wharfs and the brewery, there was a great gulf fixed. The barge-dwellers, creatures neither of firm land nor water, would have liked to be more respectable than they were. They aspired towards the Chelsea shore, where, in the early 1960s, many thousands lived with sensible occupations and adequate amounts of money. But a certain failure, distressing to themselves, to be like other people, caused them to sink back, with so much else that drifted or was washed up, into the mud moorings of the great tideway.

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

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

Verchomin took the opportunity to address a serious subject—the pianist’s incessant financial woes—in a lighthearted way. “Hey, Bill,” she said, “what do you think about having a memorial concert to raise money for you?”

“You mean a tribute, my dear, as I’m still alive,” he said, dryly.

The three of them laughed again, and Evans began to cough up blood. In a moment a steady stream was flowing from his mouth; hilarity turned to horror. Evans gave LaBarbera directions to Mount Sinai Hospital. “Lay on the horn, Joe,” he said. “Tell them it’s an emergency.”

Verchomin turned in her seat, keeping a desperate watch on Evans. “He gives me the fear in his eyes,” she writes. “I want to tell him that I need more, that we aren’t done yet. He tells me, ‘I think I’m going to drown.’ I’m not sure a person can lose that much blood.”

They pulled up to the hospital. LaBarbera: “I remember picking him up—he weighed almost nothing—and carrying him into the emergency room.” Evans’s blood was everywhere, leaving a trail through the waiting room. He was laid on a gurney, and doctors and nurses took over. Back in the waiting room, sitting with his jacket on her lap, Verchomin watched a janitor mop up his blood. "A nurse appears and in a soothing voice describes Bill’s condition as something similar to a nosebleed that just needs cauterizing.” A woman sitting next to Verchomin told her, in great detail, about a similar experience her husband had gone through. She spoke of him in the present tense. A young doctor came out and took Verchomin into a small office. “We couldn’t save him,” he said.

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

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

Yet the stars in Bernhardt’s eyes (and ears) didn’t prevent him from noticing what, in Evans’s home life, went beyond slobby eccentricity. “Elaine looked like she had been in a concentration camp and Bill had tracks all over his hands, et cetera.”

The et cetera covered what was too painful to elaborate on—these were two junkies in love, with each other and, perhaps just as much, with junk. And the pushers loved them: there was nothing like a steady customer. The tracks all over Evans’s hands implied what wasn’t seen: tracks all over his arms, legs, and feet; collapsed veins necessitating a constant search for fresh needle-access points. Keen-eyed admirers in clubs noticed that the left-handed Evans had overinjected his right hand and arm to the point of nerve damage: in early 1963 “he played one-handed throughout a week’s booking at the Vanguard,” Pettinger writes. “With his left hand and some virtuoso pedaling, he was able to maintain harmonic interest in support of treble lines. In morbid fascination, pianists dropped by to witness the phenomenon.”

The bassist Bill Crow witnessed it on another occasion: “He would dangle the dead hand over the keyboard and drop his forefinger on the keys, using the weight of the hand to depress them. Everything else was played with the left hand, and if you looked away you couldn’t tell anything was wrong.”

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

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

We’ve seen much evidence of Coltrane’s worldly side. And though he had a powerful need to keep himself to himself (“He was the type of person, he didn’t care for socializing,” Alice Coltrane recalled “and I don’t care for socializing, so that’s sort of the way it was”), he had a domestic existence in Dix Hills, and he savored it. The presence of four young children, Alice’s daughter and their three sons, would have made the household lively; the harp and grand piano in the living room would have made it tuneful. (John combed the TV listings for reruns of Marx Brothers movies: he loved to watch Harpo play.) There was a telescope in the backyard for scanning the night sky. There were shelves full of books on philosophy and spiritualism.

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

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

“Does your religion help you in living, in playing?” the writer asked.

“It’s everything for me,” Coltrane said. “My music is a way of giving thanks to God.”

Or of addressing God. Two months after the Birmingham church bombing (and four months after his switch from Naima to Alice), he recorded, for a part-live, part-studio album, Live at Birdland, an original song dramatically different from any he had written before. “Alabama” begins with a kind of invocation, a mournful tenor prelude played over McCoy Tyner’s dramatic, almost menacing tremolo, then shifts to an oddly swinging middle section with the whole quartet, a passage packed with mixed emotions: sorrow, anger, resignation—and then returns to Coltrane’s somber tune within a tune. The total effect is devastating. “If anyone wants to begin to understand how Coltrane could inspire so much awe so quickly,” Ben Ratliff writes, “the reason is probably inside ‘Alabama.’ The incantational tumult he could raise in a long improvisation, the steel-trap knowledge of harmony, the writing—that’s all very impressive. But ‘Alabama’ is also an accurate psychological portrait of a time, a complicated mood that nobody else could render so well.”

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.”

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.

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

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

There is a watchful sadness about him, a haunted quality, that began in boyhood and persisted until the end of his short life. Few photographs show him smiling. His childhood, in High Point, North Carolina, was broken in two by loss: for his first twelve years, Coltrane, an only child, lived in the bosom of an intact extended middle-class family in his maternal grandparents’ house in Griffin Park, the town’s best Black neighborhood. His grandfather, the Reverend W. W. Blair, was the presiding elder of St. Stephen A.M.E. Zion Church; his father, John R. (the younger John was John William), owned a dry-cleaning and tailor shop. It was a musical household, in a serious way. “My family liked church music, so there was no jazz in the house,” Coltrane remembered. John R. played violin well; he also had a clarinet and a ukulele, and tinkered a little on both. Coltrane’s mother, Alice, had a trained singing voice and played piano. Young John sang in his elementary school chorus and joined the Boy Scouts.

Then, within a few months in the winter of 1938-39, his family suffered a series of deaths—first a beloved aunt, then the Reverend Blair, and then, most devastatingly to John, his father. Suddenly he and his mother were not only bereaved but impoverished. Alice’s sister Bettie Lyerly and Bettie’s daughter Mary moved in with them, and Alice rented the bedrooms to boarders. Alice, Bettie, Mary, and John slept on cots in the dining room. He had always been quiet, with a subtle streak of mischief, but the rupture of his life turned him even further inward.

the last book I ever read (The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination, excerpt fourteen)

from The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination by Stuart A. Reid:

The change in Stanleyville was mirrored by a change in Washington, as liberals in the Kennedy administration slowly found their footing. On March 31, the administration endorsed the reconvening of parliament and said that any new government had to include Gizenga. As part of this policy reset, Kennedy cleaned house. Clare Timberlake’s hysterical cables from Leopoldville, in particular, were increasingly out of step with official thinking in Washington. Ever the stick in the mud, the ambassador continued to rail against Gizenga, failing to grasp the administration’s hope that bringing him into the fold would neutralize, rather than exacerbate, the possible Communist threat he posed. The final straw was Timberlake’s decision, amid unrest in Leopoldville, to radio the commander of the five-ship U.S. naval flotilla off the Angolan coast and order him to head toward the Congo River, without asking permission from Washington. It was a stunningly presumptuous move, and Kennedy, himself a former naval officer, was irate. Timberlake had to go.

Conveniently, Kennedy was able to make the insubordinate ambassador into a sacrificial lamb in a deal with Dag Hammarskjöld: Kennedy would recall Timberlake, who had long been a thorn in the UN’s side, and in return Hammarskjöld would recall Rajeshwar Dayal, who in any case had struggled to perform his duties on account of strong animosity with Kasavubu and Mobutu. Timberlake was put out to pasture in Alabama, at the Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base—the first in a series of what he considered “pleasant but indifferent jobs with no use being made of what talent I possess.”

Other U.S. officials who had been involved in the Congo drama were on the way out, too. William Burden, the U.S. ambassador in Brussels who had gone so native that he considered Lumumba’s assassination “all to the good,” was removed from his post despite Belgian pleas to Washington that he stay on. At the CIA, Kennedy had decided to fire the top two officials—Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell—after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion dealt the president his first major foreign policy failure.