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Classic Recordings: Kind of Blue- Miles Davis

Five pieces recorded in two sessions in 1959 by a band that had barely rehearsed them. It remains the best-selling jazz album ever made.

Miles Davis: Kind of Blue (1959)

Kind of Blue is the record that gets bought by people who own no other jazz albums, which has slightly obscured how radical it was. Its innovation was modal playing: rather than improvising over a fast-moving sequence of chords, the musicians were given scales and long stretches of harmonic stillness, and told to find something to say inside them.

Davis brought in sketches rather than finished compositions, and most of what is on the record was played by musicians seeing the material for the first time. Nearly everything was a first or second take.

The band is the other reason. John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley on saxophones, Bill Evans on piano — whose harmonic sensibility shaped the record as much as Davis's — with Paul Chambers and Jimmy Cobb, and Wynton Kelly playing on one track.

What to listen for

"So What" opens with a piano and bass introduction written largely by Evans, then settles into two chords for nine minutes. Coltrane's solo is where you can hear him working out the language he would spend the next decade developing.

"Blue in Green" is the most beautiful thing here and the subject of a long authorship dispute — Evans maintained he wrote it, and most musicians agree with him.

"All Blues" is a blues in waltz time, and the shift in metre is what makes it feel weightless.

"Flamenco Sketches" is the purest expression of the concept: five scales, each soloist moving through them at their own pace, with no fixed structure at all.

"Freddie Freeloader" is the outlier — a conventional blues, with Wynton Kelly on piano instead of Evans, and it is the most immediately enjoyable track on the album.

Go deeper

Bill Evans's Sunday at the Village Vanguard and John Coltrane's A Love Supreme are where the two most important sidemen went next, and both are essential.

For Davis himself, the range is the point: Birth of the Cool, Sketches of Spain, In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew are four different musicians wearing the same name.

What makes it radical: the band was given scales rather than chord sequences and long stretches of harmonic stillness to fill, which sounds like a small change and altered the direction of jazz. Most of what you hear was a first or second take by musicians seeing the material for the first time — the calm is real, not rehearsed.

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