21. Miles Davis - Kind of Blue (1959)

1. So What
2. Freddie the Freeloader
3. Blue in Green
4. All Blues
5. Flamenco Sketches


Another Miles Davis album! And it's better than Birth of the Cool! In fact, it's one of the Most High Revered Jazz Albums Of All Time not to mention the best selling one. I can't go around giving this a 6 like I did the last one, or else I'll get shot by that guy who teaches history of "jazz" at UCSC.

You can definitely tell that a lot of time has passed between this and Birth of the Cool (about 10 years, in fact!). While that album is made up of really structured 3 minute songs, this album is long and meandering. Rather than giving the musicians a score or chord progressions to improvise around, Miles just stuck them with a list of scales to play. Also, he apparently wrote (as much as you can write these sort of songs) them mere hours before they were performed. I guess when you're Miles Davis and you have Bill Evans, Cannonball Adderley and Coltrane playing with you, you can get away with that sort of thing.

This album is about as ethereal as the 50s got. It's very reminiscent of Brilliant Corners, the way the songs sort of float around dreamily, with only small bits of string tying them together. It's a lot more melodic than that album, even though most of the songs are sparse and simplistic. The solos are all extremely well done, naturally. I mean, look who played on this album! Miles Davis does not fuck around. This is probably the perfect album to play after a long hard day of work. 9/10