
3 Shades of Blue
Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool
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Narrated by:
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Dion Graham
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By:
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James Kaplan
About this listen
The National Bestseller • One of The Minneapolis Star Tribune's Best Books of the Year
“A superb book...[Kaplan is] a master biographer, a dogged researcher and shaper of narrative, and this is his most ambitious book to date.”—Los Angeles Times
From the author of the definitive biography of Frank Sinatra, the story of three towering artists—Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Bill Evans—and how they came together to create the most iconic jazz album of all time, Kind of Blue
In 1959, America’s great indigenous art form, jazz, reached the height of its power and popularity. James Kaplan’s magnificent 3 Shades of Blue captures how that golden era came to be, and its pinnacle with the recording of Kind of Blue. It’s a book about music, and business, and race, and heroin, and the cities that gave jazz its home, and the Black geniuses behind its rise. It’s an astonishing meditation on creativity and the strange environments where it can flourish most. It’s a book about the great forebears and founders of a lost era, and the disrupters who would take the music down truly new paths. And it’s about why the world of jazz most people know is a museum to this never-replicated period.
But above all, 3 Shades of Blue is a book about three very different men—the greatness and varied fortunes of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Bill Evans. The tapestry of their lives is, in Kaplan’s hands, a national odyssey with no direction home. It is also a masterpiece, a book about jazz that is as big as America.
©2024 James Kaplan (P)2024 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“[Kaplan is] a master biographer, a dogged researcher and shaper of narrative, and this is his most ambitious book to date . . . he shows his instinct for juggling and connecting multiple stories and characters without taking his eye off the big picture . . . a compulsively readable work of fine synthesis and perspective . . . a superb book.”—Los Angeles Times
“James Kaplan’s new effort, 3 Shades of Blue, raises the bar . . . At a time when jazz is reemergent and viral, seeping into virtually every musical genre (and vice versa), we are fortunate that the author has conjured this hothouse flower of a book—as rarified, intricate, and haunting as an orchid.”—David Friend, Vanity Fair
“‘This is the story of the three geniuses who joined forces to create one of the great classics in Western music,’ Mr. Kaplan writes . . . Kaplan does a wonderful job synthesizing sources to produce a compelling narrative history. His own interviews add a lot as well. His technical descriptions of the music are accessible and useful.”—Wall Street Journal
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Story
Written by award-winning jazz historian Ted Gioia, this comprehensive guide offers an illuminating look at more than 250 seminal jazz compositions. In this comprehensive and unique survey, here are the songs that sit at the heart of the jazz repertoire, ranging from "Ain't Misbehavin'" and "Autumn in New York" to "God Bless the Child," "How High the Moon," and "I Can't Give You Anything But Love." Gioia includes Broadway show tunes written by such greats as George Gershwin and Irving Berlin, and classics by such famed jazz musicians as Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, and John Coltrane.
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Great info, but not ideal in audio format
- By Patrick on 08-30-14
By: Ted Gioia
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Playing Changes
- Jazz for the New Century
- By: Nate Chinen
- Narrated by: Ron Butler
- Length: 11 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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“Playing changes”, in jazz parlance, has long referred to an improviser’s resourceful path through a chord progression. Playing Changes boldly expands on the idea, highlighting a host of significant changes - ideological, technological, theoretical, and practical - that jazz musicians have learned to navigate since the turn of the century. Nate Chinen, who has chronicled this evolution firsthand throughout his journalistic career, vividly sets the backdrop, charting the origins of jazz historicism and the rise of an institutional framework for the music.
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Jazz happens
- By álvaro castro on 02-11-19
By: Nate Chinen
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Elements of Jazz: From Cakewalks to Fusion
- By: Bill Messenger, The Great Courses
- Narrated by: Bill Messenger
- Length: 5 hrs and 59 mins
- Original Recording
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Jazz is a uniquely American art form, one of America's great contributions to not only musical culture, but world culture, with each generation of musicians applying new levels of creativity that take the music in unexpected directions that defy definition, category, and stagnation. Now you can learn the basics and history of this intoxicating genre in an eight-lecture series that is as free-flowing and original as the art form itself.
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A Disappointingly Distorted, Myopic View Of Jazz
- By Parallax View on 08-18-13
By: Bill Messenger, and others
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Saxophone Colossus
- The Life and Music of Sonny Rollins
- By: Aidan Levy
- Narrated by: Bill Andrew Quinn
- Length: 31 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Sonny Rollins has long been considered an enigma. Known as the "Saxophone Colossus," he is widely acknowledged as one of the greatest jazz improvisers of all time. His seven-decade career has been well documented, but the backstage life of the man once called "the only jazz recluse" has gone largely untold—until now. Based on more than 200 interviews with Rollins himself, family members, friends, and collaborators, as well as Rollins' personal archive, Saxophone Colossus is the comprehensive portrait of this legendary saxophonist and composer, civil rights activist and environmentalist.
By: Aidan Levy
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Frank
- The Voice
- By: James Kaplan
- Narrated by: Rob Shapiro
- Length: 22 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Bestselling author James Kaplan redefines Frank Sinatra in a triumphant new biography that includes many rarely seen photographs. Frank Sinatra was the best-known entertainer of the twentieth century—infinitely charismatic, lionized and notorious in equal measure.
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Both fascinating and tedious
- By Brad on 12-12-10
By: James Kaplan
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How to Listen to Jazz
- By: Ted Gioia
- Narrated by: Peter Ganim
- Length: 6 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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In How to Listen to Jazz, award-winning music scholar Ted Gioia presents a lively introduction to one of America's premier art forms. He tells us what to listen for in a performance and includes a guide to today's leading jazz musicians. From Louis Armstrong's innovative sounds to the jazz-rock fusion of Miles Davis, Gioia covers the music's history and reveals the building blocks of improvisation. A true love letter to jazz by a foremost expert.
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Kind of useless as an audiobook.
- By Mitch Foster on 02-28-20
By: Ted Gioia
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Herbie Hancock: Possibilities
- By: Herbie Hancock, Lisa Dickey
- Narrated by: Herbie Hancock
- Length: 12 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Hancock discusses his musical influences, colorful behind-the-scenes stories, his long and happy marriage, and how Buddhism inspires him creatively and personally. Honest, enlightening, and as electrifyingly vital as the man who wrote it, Herbie Hancock promises to be an invaluable contribution to jazz literature and a must-read for fans and music lovers.
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High Marks All Round
- By Joyce on 06-21-15
By: Herbie Hancock, and others
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Delta Blues
- The Life and Times of the Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionized American Music
- By: Ted Gioia
- Narrated by: Chris Abernathy
- Length: 17 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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The blues grew out of the plantations and prisons, the swampy marshes and fertile cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta. With original research and keen insights, Ted Gioia - the author of a landmark study of West Coast jazz and the critically acclaimed The History of Jazz - brings to life the stirring music of the Delta, evoking the legendary figures who shaped its sound and ethos: Robert Johnson, Charley Patton, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Howlin' Wolf, B. B. King, and others.
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A well-researched history of the blues
- By Joselo on 08-19-21
By: Ted Gioia
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White Bicycles
- Making Music in the 1960s
- By: Joe Boyd
- Narrated by: Joe Boyd
- Length: 8 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Joe Boyd tells of his journey through Sixties music, from tour managing Muddy Waters and Coleman Hawkins, to plugging in Bob Dylan's electric guitar while working as production manager at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, to becoming a leading record producer. His first session was Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood's "Crossroads" followed by Pink Floyd, Nick Drake, the Incredible String Band, Fairport Convention, Sandy Denny and many more.
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Fascinating story, monotone reading
- By Carl Howard on 07-09-19
By: Joe Boyd
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Blues People
- Negro Music in White America
- By: LeRoi Jones
- Narrated by: Prentice Onayemi
- Length: 8 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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"The path the slave took to 'citizenship' is what I want to look at. And I make my analogy through the slave citizen's music - through the music that is most closely associated with him: blues and a later, but parallel, development, jazz...[If] the Negro represents, or is symbolic of, something in and about the nature of American culture, this certainly should be revealed by his characteristic music." So says Amiri Baraka in the introduction to Blues People, his classic work on the place of jazz and blues in American social, musical, economic, and cultural history.
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Very good
- By Cara Foss Arellano on 05-06-21
By: LeRoi Jones
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Kansas City Lightning
- The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker
- By: Stanley Crouch
- Narrated by: Kevin Kenerly
- Length: 9 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker is the first installment in the long-awaited portrait of one of the most talented and influential musicians of the twentieth century, from Stanley Crouch, one of the foremost authorities on jazz and culture in America. Throughout his life, Charlie Parker personified the tortured American artist: A revolutionary performer who used his alto saxophone to create a new music known as bebop even as he wrestled with a drug addiction that would lead to his death at the age of thirty-four.
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A Disappointment
- By Stephen on 01-04-19
By: Stanley Crouch
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Duke
- A Life of Duke Ellington
- By: Terry Teachout
- Narrated by: Peter Francis James
- Length: 17 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington was the greatest jazz composer of the twentieth century - and an impenetrably enigmatic personality whom no one, not even his closest friends, claimed to understand. The grandson of a slave, he dropped out of high school to become one of the world's most famous musicians, a showman of incomparable suavity who was as comfortable in Carnegie Hall as in the nightclubs where he honed his style.
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This audiobook needs music
- By John on 04-08-14
By: Terry Teachout
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Sophisticated Giant
- The Life and Legacy of Dexter Gordon
- By: Maxine Gordon
- Narrated by: Joe Morton, Terria Joseph, Prentice Onayemi
- Length: 10 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Sophisticated Giant presents the life and legacy of tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon (1923-1990), one of the major innovators of modern jazz. In a context of biography, history, and memoir, Maxine Gordon has completed the book that her late husband began, weaving his “solo” turns with her voice and a chorus of voices from past and present. Reading like a jazz composition, the blend of research, anecdote, and a selection of Dexter’s personal letters reflects his colorful life and legendary times.
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Beautifully Told
- By Light Mentat on 03-23-21
By: Maxine Gordon
important American History
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The history of 3 jazz greats
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Captivating story
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Fantastic Telling of 3 Lives and Jazz Music
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everything about this book stood out!
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One of the most important periods of Jazz history.
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Three immortals who lived very mortal lives.
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A fresh look at three jazz giants
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I knew that many of these musicians lived hard lives and died young, but hearing about it in this book really brought home the deviation and loss.
This books also made me realize that the bulk of the jazz music I listen to and love was recorded from 1950 to 1965. I’m one of those who John Coltrane lost after A Love Supreme. I am not yet able to appreciate free jazz. Don’t know if I ever will.
This book is worth a read for jazz lovers and cultural history buffs alike. Highly recommend.
The early death of genius
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Such good listening.
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