This was the group that walked in Columbia Record's 30th Street studios in Manhattan to record Kind of Blue. Ashley Kahn, in Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece covers this session, the events leading up to it, such as Davis' then rapidly rising stature, his 1955 signing to Columbia, which provided the budgets and studios to allow Davis to produce "concept albums", often with a small orchestra behind him, a decade before the Beatles made both concepts popular in rock music.

Kind of Blue would not exist in its current form but for Davis' astute hiring of Bill Evans. Kahn sketches Evans career up to "Kind of Blue", and briefly, but effectively covers the "Crow Jim" reverse racism that Evans occasionally received from black audiences when performing as the only white member of an otherwise black group.

(He also mentions the hilarious request of Davis before he allowed Evans into the band: "You got to make it with everybody, you know what I mean? You got to f**k the band." The straitlaced Evans stuttered in reply, "I'd like to please everyone...but I just can't do that". Davis's sardonic humor, and attempts to mess with the minds of his musicians would eventually become the stuff of legend among his band members.)

All of these anecdotes demonstrate Kahn's most important writing skill: the ability to describe, (in fairly short, and splendidly illustrated chapters) that bookend the history of the recording sessions Davis's career, and its meteoric rise prior to Kind of Blue, and that album's impact on the jazz world as a whole, both in the 1960s, and today, as it sells an astonishing 5000 copies a week.

Kahn's effortless style belays the intense research and reporting that makes it possible. To describe the actual recording session, Kahn uses a remarkable collection of skills as a combination historian, detective, and musicologist. He combines material gleaned from existing interviews with Davis and his band members and the album's producer, Irving Townsend, new interviews with Jimmy Cobb, the last surviving member of that session, photographs of the session (ironically, Cobb was never clearly photographed, since he spent most of the session behind his kit), and numerous quotes transcribed from the band's own comments recorded onto the studio session tapes. His best detective work is determining, with a fairly high degree of certitude, that Gil Evans (no relation to Bill Evans) wrote the introduction to the first track of the album, "So What", perhaps the most beautiful 30 seconds or so in all of jazz.

Kahn also describes the careers of Davis and his band members immediately after Kind of Blue, including Davis' epochal concert at Carnegie Hall, with his five piece band, and the Gil Evans Orchestra backing him on one of the great live recordings in all of jazz.

Kind of Blue is an album that simultaneously evokes an era, while remaining timeless. Ashley Kahn does a masterful job of both explaining that era, and why Davis' music from it remains astonishingly popular today.