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It's About That Time

By Richard Cook

Atlantic Books, 383pp., £14.99

It's About That Time by Richard Cook (Atlantic Books, 383pp., £14.99) deals with Miles Davis's recorded legacy. It takes sixteen key albums (Birth of the Cool, Steamin' with the Miles Davis Quintet, Miles Ahead, Milestones, Porgy and Bess, Kind of Blue, Friday Night at the Blackhawk,Saturday Night at the Blackhawk, The Complete Live at the Plugged Nickel,Nefertiti, In a Silent Way, Bitches Brew, Agharta, You're Under Arrest, Aura and Miles Davis & Quincy Jones Live at Montreux) and weaves lengthy critical reactions to them into a narrative that also touches on the rest of the trumpeter's recorded output; his often turbulent and troubled life; the contributions of sidemen, collaborators and producers; and the health of the jazz world in the last half of the twentieth century.

Admirers of Cook and Morton's (ongoing) magnum opus, The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, will know what to expect: an unflinching critical gaze, dispassionate where necessary yet imbued with enough understanding and compassion to throw light on the man behind the image; a wide and deep knowledge of the musical context from which all these albums sprang; a confidence in his own opinion that results in lively, disputatious assessments of even the most apparently secure reputations.

Two examples (from relatively recent recordings) will suffice, just as a taster: Cook thinks Tutu is overrated, while Aura is underrated. Throughout, he demonstrates an open-mindedness about the relative merits of the great man's various styles that is as rare as it is welcome in the Milesography to date, and overall, this is both an absorbing read and a useful resource to dip into as and when readers get round to reassessing their Miles CDs.

Again as a taster, here is Cook on that most (apparently) definitive Milesian characteristic, his restless desire for change: 'The accepted wisdom is that change was a constant in Davis's life, but perhaps Miles himself didn't really change that much.

Familiarity seemed to bore him, so his women, his cars, his style of clothes were all regularly shaken out. Music, which was much more important to him than any of those other things, changed around him: no one figure can shift music by themselves, and coming from what was perceived (at least, in a late twentieth-century perspective) to be the marginal area of jazz, he tended to stand quietly in the eye of the storm and make small, telling adjustments.'