How do you draw time?

Making visual sense of what happened when

Hey y’all,

Several years ago, I was reading Jan Swafford’s introduction to classical music, Language of the Spirit, and I wanted to see the lives of all the composers on a timeline. Instead of searching for one online, I decided to make one for myself with a pencil in my notebook. It might be kind of a pain, but I had a feeling I’d learn something. Almost immediately while drawing it I was able to see connections Swafford wrote about that hadn’t sunken in for me yet, like how Haydn’s life overlapped both Bach’s and Beethoven’s while covering Mozart’s completely. Had I found a pre-made timeline, I’m not completely sure I would’ve studied it closely enough to get as much out of it as the one I drew. (When it comes to my self-education, the slower and more seemingly inefficient the exercise, the more helpful and meaningful it usually turns out to be.)

This week when I was finishing up James Kaplan’s 3 Shades of Blue, I was thinking how much I wanted to see a timeline of the lives of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Bill Evans mapped out on the page. Kaplan presents the jazz musicians’ 3 lives with the album Kind of Blue as a kind of convergence point — in my head I imagined their lives as Massimo Vignelli’s NYC subway map in 3 shades of blue. (Not an original thought, it turns out.) So I got out some graph paper and a pencil and made a few crude (and probably inaccurate) attempts. I even tried to draw one on the computer:

This time I came away thinking, “So What?”

Sometimes a timeline isn’t completely up to the task of explaining: So much was happening in these years so quickly that it’s hard to get real perspective on it visually — that’s what prose is for. It’s also worth pointing out that a timeline without words or captions doesn’t tell you much.

And yet, you always learn something when you make a timeline. In this case, it was a detail I overlooked while reading: Davis and Coltrane were only born a handful of months apart, while Evans was 3 years younger.

Evans, Davis, and Coltrane were jazz giants — I wondered if maybe I was wrong about the subway map and should’ve been thinking about planets in orbit: