Clawing at the Limits of Cool: Miles Davis, John Coltrane & the Greatest Jazz Collaboration Ever

During the 1950s and ’60s, Miles Davis reinvented jazz several times over while maintaining an aura of implacable cool; meanwhile, John Coltrane embarked on an intense spiritual-musical quest, in the process creating music that was both deeply personal and universally resonant. The recordings the two men created together during the period in which Coltrane served as a sideman in Davis’ quintets are among the most important in the history of jazz, and in a their new book, Clawing at the Limits of Cool,, authors Farah Jasmine Griffin and Salim Washington argue that Davis and Coltrane’s collaborations also embodied important ideas about what it meant to be a black artist during the Civil Rights era.