A few months ago I received through interlibrary loan, a copy of 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool by James Kaplan. Use your library. Stay away from the corporations. The book uses their collaboration on Kind of Blue, the landmark Miles Davis album,as a foundation to explore the entire careers of these three jazz giants. The album is not only the bestselling jazz album of all-time but one of the most important and influential. It was a pioneering work in modal jazz, which used melodic improvisation instead of chord changes in order to create its tonal atmosphere. Modal as in mood. The album is also important for is accessibility, as demonstrated by the number of copies sold. The album is now background music in Starbuck’s everywhere.
At the time of its release, Kind of Blue was quite radical. It was a pioneering work in a new jazz style after all. But the fact that it plays (and is for sale) in Starbuck’s gets in Lou’s crawl. Vinyl Vogue has a six-eye Columbia copy of Kind of Blue in the store right now. Shop local. But what caught Lou’s eye was a copy of Miles Davis’ Agharta.
The fact that Kind of Blue is accessible is a strike against it in Lou’s book. He likes things a little more difficult. What is really cool are those works of the past that still continue to confuse and confront. In literature, with a work like D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which was considered legally obscene until the mid-20th Century, one wonders what all the fuss was about. But dip into the works of De Sade, Naked Lunch by William Burroughs or Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov and you are still disturbed. These works still pack a punch and in a conservative climate like today, can still be cause for being cancelled. That is remarkable given how permissive many consider where we are today.
Even more exciting for Lou are works that remaining illegible or unlistenable after all these years. Listening to Ornette Coleman’s free jazz of the late 1950’ or Charlie Parker’s trailblazing work throughout his brief career, which were considered noise at the time, one wonders what the contemporary audience were listening to. Today this stuff sounds soothing. Thus, it all plays at Starbuck’s. But not John Coltrane in the mid-to-late 1960s. When I worked at Second Story Books in the early 2000s, we would put on such Coltrane to clear-out the store. Customers would rush out holding their ears. For us, it was the music of the spheres.
Illegibility, obscurity, the unlistenable, this is the new obscenity. Anything difficult is obscene in a society of mass consumptionand fluid transfer that wants everything digested easily and quickly. Don’t have time to read a 3000-word article, let alone a book, just get AI to process it down to quick bites you can pop into your brain. In a world where AI and the mass produced areeverywhere, those things that put static and noise in the system are valuable to anyone who wants to think for themselves.
So work like James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake or Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow are increasingly dear to Lou, even if he has no idea what they are about or what is going on. The same holds true for Miles Davis’ Agharta. This electric/funk/rock jazz fusion masterpiece is still a bit rough on the ears. It is a difficult listen. This is not wallpaper music. You cant be reading or scrolling on your phone when it is on. It demands your attention. There is nothing more sought after nowadays in an information economy than your attention. If a website can keep you scrolling for over a minute or a streaming channel keep you watch that is cash in pocket for advertisers.
Many people can’t listen to Miles Davis’ jazz rock fusion period of the 1970s for more than a few seconds. And that is why it is so radical and transgressive. Kind of Blue’s accessibility is not a point in its favor. The album is not so much the music of the masses, but the theme song of the corporations and other global entities that seek to distract us from original thought by controlling our attention to focus on the mass produced and mass distributed. Agharta might be the best album from Miles’ most difficult and innovative period. Like Finnegans Wake, which Joyce said would occupy readers for a lifetime, Aghartafor those still with the ability to concentrate will be an object of fascination for listen upon listen. It never gets old because it never becomes tired or boring. The young at heart and in mind never get tired or bored, they could listen to Agharta for days. You want some five-hour energy give Agharta a spin.
Suggested Sites and Sounds:
Review of 3 Shades of Blue: Book Review: "3 Shades of Blue" - Transcendent Art, Despite Personal Demons - The Arts Fuse
The Pleasure of Difficulty: The Pleasure of Difficulty | Los Angeles Review of Books
Finishing Finnegans Wake: On Finishing Finnegans Wake | Sydney Review of Books
Reading the Illegible: Reading the Illegible - Northwestern University Press
— Lou Waxman