Kind Of Great

So why are books about jazz pound for pound superior to their rock brethren? Better writers, who are better informed, with a better sense of audience? A better subject to write about? The advantage of a distancing in time enabling more definitive judgments to be made? I think it's a little of all the above. I think jazz is inherently a better subject because it's more clearly defined than rock, with a more obvious, and possibly more interesting, cultural history. Rock is amorphous, lacking in definition, leading to a nagging sense of uncertainty regarding its authenticity. Jazz slips easily into the authentic, particularly in the modern era, because you wouldn't make it if you weren't. Its gravitas is inherent.

And gravitas is what Ashley Kahn's Kind of Blue: The Making Of The Miles Davis Masterpiece has in bucketfuls. I don't mean it’s a heavy, pretentious work. Quite the opposite. It's highly readable, its enthusiasm and desire to communicate that enthusiasm as clearly as possible making it so. There's a lot of extremely informative musicological analysis which is so well done that even a non-musician like myself can end up feeling he understands what modal jazz is, how the musicians involved both created and approached it and why it was a breakthrough. The audience it has been written for is not simply the numerous fans of the album but an audience of potential fans - and with music as accessible as this that's practically anyone with ears.

It's also a pleasant book to handle, with brilliant black and white pictures throughout. (Why are jazzers more photogenic than rockers?) I've already been listening to Kind Of Blue with the book in my hands, reading along to the music. That sounds a bit silly, after all, isn't it enough to let the music speak? Well all I can say is that I was able to hear tracks I thought I knew very well in a new, and better, way. Wonderful stuff.

And, talking of wonders, I've just been on the phone to Mum who felt the earthquake last night in England, lived to tell the tale, and won a hundred and ten quid at bingo on Sunday and another thirty big ones on Tuesday. Not a bad haul for two nights' work