It didn’t take long after its release on August 17, 1959, for Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue to ascend to a throne it has yet to vacate in all of the decades that have followed. With its scepter, came a title: Greatest Jazz Album of All Time, an honorific that most people who are not hardcore jazz people have left more or less unchallenged.
If there is an album that people begin—and perhaps end—a jazz record collection with, it’s Kind of Blue, which is both a worthy thing—for it’s not hard to delight in what Kind of Blue offers over the full course of a lifetime—and a less-than-ideal reality.
One of my favorite Miles Davis stories involves an occasion when he was riding to some glitzy awards banquet and a blue-blooded white woman inquired as to what he had done in his life that made him so special. Davis, being a man averse to bulls--t—to put it charitably—issued a response along the lines that he had only reinvented music four or five times, and what had you done, white lady?
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Davis had put in real work prior to cutting Kind of Blue with his briefly assembled lineup of John Coltrane on tenor saxophone, Cannonball Adderley on alto, Paul Chambers on bass, either Bill Evans or Wynton Kelly on piano, and Jimmy Cobb at the drums over two sessions in the spring of 1959. He was a seismic-shifter. Present for the birth of bebop as a rapacious acolyte of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, Davis the artist modulated into the creator of the calmer, lush indigo tones of cool jazz. Drugs derailed him for a time, before rediscovering his groove with a trumpet solo that might as well have come courtesy of the embouchure of God on the Newport Jazz Festival stage in 1955.
From there, Davis recalibrated the possibilities of hard bop, which itself was a new strain of the many that comprise jazz. Said overhauling happened with Coltrane by his side. Jazz is a music of partnerships. Duos. Parker and Gillespie. Billie Holiday and Lester Young. Eric Dolphy and Booker Little. None was loaded with more tension than that between Miles and Trane. When matters went smoothly, the music reached apex level. When everything went less rosily, the music still reached pretty damn high, save now you could sense the ground rushing up at you, the impact imminent.
Coltrane soared on the mid-1950s hard bop albums with what became known as Davis’ first great quintet. The records were cut on the cheap, which fed a prevailing spirit that all was permissible, if it was within your range as a player. This was Coltrane feeling out his own abilities—stretching, leaping beyond where he had last been, which might have been an hour before at the same session.
For Kind of Blue, Davis decided that he would take matters further out—in the jazz parlance—by paradoxically reining them in. The soloists would need to confine themselves to modes—scales, essentially. Anything you were able to invent, you were free to do so, but you had to build from the mode.
Think of it like a game. The players were going to play music and they were going to play, in the whimsical sense of children—children who’d been challenged. The form was prescriptive, but in no more limited a manner than when Beethoven utilized the sonata model. You had your marching orders, but there were a lot of places you could end up.
The result is an album that is arguably the most melodic in all of jazz, if not popular music, which is a label that I think we can accurately apply. The big band artists like Count Basie and Duke Ellington crafted the popular music of their day—music that is also worthy of the museum and study—but art house jazz, to borrow a term from the film world, is the stuff of smaller ensembles. Music you think about, rather than dance to.
Davis was always a melodist, the same as a Paul McCartney or a Franz Schubert. He fashioned tunes that then rooted themselves in a listener’s brain, never to go anywhere. The music of Miles Davis—until his fusion period—is ideal for whistling. The music of John Coltrane, much less so. Coltrane’s music chopped you up into little squares and reassembled you with a brand new prevailing geometry. Something was going to have to give, but first there would be Kind of Blue and Davis’ modal directive.
Few jazz albums are easier to listen to than Kind of Blue, which isn’t to suggest it’s easy listening, though I think for many it does function as unchallenged aural wallpaper. If there’s a unifying idea to what makes music last and spread, it’s melody. That’s what makes The Beatles as popular as they are more than anything. Not ideas, not depth—hummability.
We can think about a witty, incisive song like “They Can’t Take that Away from Me” by George and Ira Gershwin, and for all of the value packed in those lyrics, they’re not what’s going through your head as you vocalize the song in the shower. You can’t hum Charlie Parker’s “Ko-Ko,” but good luck getting the melody to “So What” from Kind of Blue out of your head.
This is wordless jazz, but highly melodic jazz has these kind of built-in, ghost words. Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald realized as much and gave those ghost words discernible shapes via scatting. The instrumentalists on Kind of Blue perform a variation on the idea, save the “voice” is Bill Evans’ piano or Cannonball Adderley’s horn.
Coltrane could do melody, but Kind of Blue has always felt to me like he had been asked to be a sixth man coming off the bench, rather than a starter and potential MVP candidate. I heard the album early in my own initial foray into jazz as a teenager. I don’t think there’s anyone who comes to Kind of Blue after years of listening to jazz. It will be among the first 10 albums you hear, and, more often than not, the first one you seek out unless you’re a listener on a mission.
That can be problematic. I feel like I need to preface the next remark by saying try to stay calm, but here we go: Kind of Blue isn’t close to the best music Miles Davis ever made. Nor is it the best music from this period. Milestones from the previous year, waxed by the first great quintet with the addition of Adderley to the mix, also explored modes, but with greater derring-do.
Kind of Blue tries to please, and when we try to please, we often try to placate. Milestones, on the other hand, answers first to its own aims and standards, and stands up just as the much to repeat listen as the more famous record that followed. Then there are the sessions at the Plugged Nickel in Chicago from December 1965 with Davis’ second great quintet, and the Cellar Door material from Washington, D.C. in 1970.
The truth is, you can learn and experience most of what there is to learn and experience about Miles Davis minus Kind of Blue, which sounds like the ultimate heresy. That isn’t to knock the album. I’d not care to guess how many times I’ve heard it, to say nothing of the many additional times I plan to. But we can’t let Kind of Blue stop us cold, because of all that we might miss out on.
Part of our identity, as people who partake of music, is going out and finding something else. In film, Citizen Kane was branded as the best ever movie for an age. In rock, it used to be Sgt. Pepper. These were givens. We watch many movies, though, and rock is always around. Titles are challenged. Kings and queens are dislodged.
Jazz has a different problem, in that the people who listen to jazz are typically other musicians, the highly educated—in the went-to-school-for-a-long-time sense—the intellectual, the wannabe intellectual. So when we land on that jazz album—like Kind of Blue—we pat ourselves on the back, because most people do not. We are very smart, eclectic. We’ve done a form of cultural extra credit.
A listener gets wrapped up in those melodies of Kind of Blue and it becomes a bit like staying in bed—it’s just so damn comfy there. But I’m telling you, if you haven’t heard Davis’ E.S.P. (1965) or Agharta (1975), I want to do a wellness check by speeding over to your home with the music in hand so we can have a listening session.
The Kind of Blue band was not built to last. Having achieved what he had achieved, Davis was ready to move on, as always. His time with Evans was at an end, and the partnership with Coltrane would soon flame out in volcanic fashion in the spring of 1960 across various bandstands in Europe upon which Coltrane would unleash his extended solos of tessellated fire, as Davis watched and listened, letting his brother in innovation have his head, but knowing that this would be it for the two of them.
Take a lesson from Davis’ own example: Hear Kind of Blue, but move past Kind of Blue. You can always come back for a jam session, so to speak, with your old buddy. But don’t stop there. Listen like Miles Davis created.
Colin Fleming’s fiction, nonfiction, and op-eds have appeared in Harper’s, Rolling Stone, Slate, Salon, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, USA Today, Sports Illustrated, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post, among other venues. He is the author of Sam Cooke’s Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963.
