1959 saw Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans and the other members of Miles's sextet come together to record the bestselling jazz album of all time: Kind of Blue.

3 Shades of Blue follows the paths of Miles, Coltrane and Evans to the mountaintop of 1959 and their roads on from there. It's a book about music and business, race and heroin, and an astonishing meditation on creativity and the strange hothouses that can produce its full flowering. But above all this is the story of three very different men - their struggles, their choices, their inspiration. The tapestry of their lives is, in James Kaplan's hands, an American Odyssey.