Richard Williams first heard Miles Davis's Kind of Blue on the radio as a teenager in the early 60s and immediately knew he was listening to something special.
As his new book, The Blue Moment, is published, he explains how it came to be the most important jazz album of all time, and explores the influences that shaped it – from Davis's dalliance in Paris with Juliet Greco and the existentialists, to the basement apartment in Manhattan where New York's jazzers amused each other with competitive chord games.
He tracks the history of blue as the colour of melancholy, and hears echoes of Davis's genius across all genres of music today.
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