Jimmy Cobb of the players was still alive – and many others who were associated at a greater distance . In contrast to Kahn ’ s approach is the veteran English writer and broadcaster Richard Williams who in The Blue Moment ( now also the name of his cultural blog ) sets the album in the context of a wholesale “ remaking of modern music ”. For Williams , Kind of Blue is evocative of something otherwise indefinable , a constellation of feeling perhaps only otherwise better expressed in the existentialist writing and song-making that Miles encountered in Paris . A paradox : “ the most singular of sounds , yet among the most ubiquitous … the sound of isolation that has sold itself to millions ”.
There are umpteen other accounts of the making of the record , in books by first biographer Ian Carr , John Szwed ’ s So What , Richard Cook ’ s It ’ s About That Time , my own short study of Miles ’ life and work . Such obsessive narration has a similar effect to the record ’ s popular ubiquity . So closely has it been observed that it continually gets away from us and leads a second cohort of commentators and indeed some of the first into a kind of revisionism that tends to downgrade Kind of Blue in relation to other , less celebrated work . This happens constantly to classic texts . For the Victorians , who rescued him from the Dead Letter Office of the 18th century , Shakespeare was quite simply the pinnacle of English literature and drama , a figure so self-evidently superior to his contemporaries and his followers that his position in the canon was unquestioned and unquestionable . A subsequent generation preferred to locate Shakespeare within the busy theatre and drama-writing of his time rather than as an isolated eminence . It will quickly be seen , though , that trying to contextualise and thus diminish Kind of Blue as “ just ” another of the remarkable jazz albums released in 1959 ( which some would argue was jazz ’ s high water mark as an art form ) is doomed and signally fails to disperse its unique aura .
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