The Making of Kind of Blue: Miles Davis and His Masterpiece Paperback – October 5, 2001

Insight into music that stops time for a moment. Music that never fails to arrest your attention and let your spirit roam.

This is a very thorough description on the making of one of the best Jazz albums of all time. The author does repeat himself a lot of the time and the book could have been shorter without losing any of the detail. I am really new to jazz but this album was so special after playing it only 2 or 3 times that I wanted to know how it came about. I would have liked more information on the Lydian system and examples of where it was used on the recodings. There are some wonderful stories on each of the band members and the lead up to the album. Nisenson does a great job and leaves you wanting more info on the lives of the players.

Nisenson parses every aspect of the World of Kind of Blue: its Time, its Cultural Context, the Players, the Music and George Russell’s underlying Modal Theory, and most of all the psychology of Miles Davis and his goals in creating this Album. To those of us who understand and appreciate the impact of this Music and its impact on our lives, this is a wonderful reflection of what we know to be true. For the uninitiated it is a beautifully written narrative of a historic moment in an important time in American Music. Read this book.

A very exhaustive review of the history of the making and the music of one of the best Jazz albums ever made. It is in-depth and personal and all about Miles Davis and the other players.

Enjoyed reading about each player's background

Miles Davis remains a legend. Few musicians are revered as much as he was both in life and death. Kind Of Blue, without a shadow of a doubt, towers over every jazz album ever released. Eric Nisenson's account of the Making of Kind Of Blue is gripping. The legend of Miles Davis continues in this book and we are made aware of how exactly an album as grand as this came about. Eric Nisenson takes us through every sinew from a neutral standpoint. Even though he remains an ardent fan of the man this does not stop him from giving an impartial view on the man. The Making of Kind Of Blue is an exciting read and I would encourage any one who has the opportunity to read it to do exactly that.

I was hoping for more information about the recording session and the modes used in the songs. Very few pages are devoted to the actual recording session. It is mostly a biography of the players.I also disagree with his main assertion that jazz can be divided into before and after Kind of Blue. Perhaps for a lack of a better word, what can be called modem jazz began then. But it is an over simplification. It ignores the many directions jazz took both before and after. He seems to totally ignore Ragtime, Dixieland, evolving into the great American Song Book, Swing, Jump Blues and the transition from big band jazz to small groups which set the stage for bebop. He makes it sound like jazz began with bebop.He repeats himself over and over about George Russell's Lydian mode theory but doesn't explain anything about it until the end of the book. He speaks about how jazz before modal theory is a series of V chords resolving to I, suggesting Russell's theory is somehow different. But when he finally does give any explanation, it is how the V major scale is identical to the I Lydian scale. I fail to understand how that is any different. I'm sure Russell's system is far more complicated than that, but his books are rare and expensive so I don't think I'll be reading much more any time soon.A disappointing read about my favorite record. It is because so little is about the book is about the record itself that I'm disappointed. If however you want to read detailed biographies of everyone involved in the record this book is for you.

highly pedantic. got irritated with repetition