UPDATE 2/21/25: Unfortunately, we are postponing our next Authors’ Circle with James Kaplan. If you’ve already registered, your spot will be reserved and we will reach out to inform you of a new date soon. The new date will also be posted on our social media, and communicated via our email newsletter. We’re so sorry! We hope you’ll be able to join us for what’s sure to be an interesting conversation about three jazz greats later this year.
The Authors’ Circle Presents:
James Kaplan, Author of 3 Shades of Blue
Author James Kaplan will discuss his book 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool with Gerald Howard, in person and livestreaming via Zoom.
In 1959, America’s great indigenous art form, jazz, reached the height of its power and popularity. James Kaplan’s magnificent 3 Shades of Blue captures how that golden era came to be, and its pinnacle with the recording of Kind of Blue. It’s a book about music, and business, and race, and heroin, and the cities that gave jazz its home, and the Black geniuses behind its rise. It’s an astonishing meditation on creativity and the strange environments where it can flourish most. It’s a book about the great forebears and founders of a lost era, and the disrupters who would take the music down truly new paths. And it’s about why the world of jazz most people know is a museum to this never-replicated period.
But above all, 3 Shades of Blue is a book about three very different men—the greatness and varied fortunes of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Bill Evans. The tapestry of their lives is, in Kaplan’s hands, a national odyssey with no direction home. It is also a masterpiece, a book about jazz that is as big as America.
“A superb book…[Kaplan is] a master biographer, a dogged researcher and shaper of narrative, and this is his most ambitious book to date.” —Los Angeles Times
About the Author:
James Kaplan’s essays, stories, reviews, and profiles have appeared in numerous magazines, including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Esquire, and New York. His novels include Pearl’s Progress and Two Guys from Verona, a New York Times Notable Book for 1998. His nonfiction works include The Airport, You Cannot Be Serious (coauthored with John McEnroe), Dean & Me: A Love Story (with Jerry Lewis), Frank: The Voice, and Sinatra: The Chairman. He is a 2012 Guggenheim Fellow. He lives in Westchester, New York. Click here to visit his website.
About the Interviewer:
Gerald Howard is recently retired Vice President and Executive Editor from Doubleday Books. He is a recipient of the Maxwell E. Perkins Award. His essays and reviews have appeared in Bookforum, Lit Hub, n+1, The New York Times Book Review, and other publications.