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?
