blackbag books

Shimmering Shadows recounts the life of genre-defying pianist and maverick educator, Ran Blake. Written over a 15-year-period, the book is based on interviews between Ran and his student, Leo McFadden. Author Janet McFadden weaves these into the narrative, allowing Blake to tell his own story. This story includes all the major details one would expect to find in a book about Ran Blake - early childhood memories and formative experiences, his time at Bard College and the Lenox School of Jazz, meeting key life figures and collaborators like Jeanne Lee, George Russell and Gunther Schuller, his time in New York, European tours with Lee, and his subsequent move to Boston to become the inaugural chair of the Third Stream department at the New England Conservatory.

It’s the glimpses the book offers into another world that make it such an enjoyable read. Blake’s enduring obsession with film noir, a formative influence in his music, finds its roots in radio mysteries he hears as a small boy on a transistor that he has smuggled into his bedroom. The reader is there when an eleven-year-old Blake walks into the Capitol movie theatre in Springfield to see Spiral Staircase, for the first time (an experience he frequently describes as life defining). Blake recounts with palpable excitement discovering heroes like Kenton and Monk playing on his local radio station in the early 50s, and describes New York’s jazz scene of the 1960s including now mythic clubs such the Jazz Gallery, where, in his twenties, he landed a job as a waiter - mainly to be around heroes like Thelonious Monk.

Ran Blake’s life played out against the backdrop of a changing world. His reflections often circle back to watershed moments such as the civil rights’ movement and the Greek coup of 1967. Unique insights about music, food, philosophy, and life figure throughout, and with numerous film and book recommendations along the way, the reader’s world will be enriched for having spent time in Blake’s world of Shimmering Shadows.