You can imagine the question popping up on one of those television quiz shows. What connects Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Bill Evans? Anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of jazz would have hand on buzzer in a flash. Answer: Kind of Blue. There is an altogether darker, and equally correct, answer: heroin.

James Kaplan is best-known for his sizeable, award-winning biography of Frank Sinatra (2015). But with 3 Shades of Blue he has swapped the individual life for that of collective biography. He confesses his original pitch was to craft a very different book, ‘somewhat akin to Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians’, sketching the lives of four figures who died in 1955: Albert Einstein, Charlie Parker, Wallace Stevens, and James Dean. The mind boggles! Little wonder his editors steered him down an alternative path, suggesting three figures whose trajectory at least collided.