Kind of Blue Tracklist
Kind of Blue is widely regarded to be one of the best, if not the best, jazz album ever recorded. It also holds the record of the best-selling jazz album of all-time. The album brought seven legendary musicians to the prime of their careers:
- Tenor saxophonist John Coltrane
- Alto saxophonist Julian “Cannonball” Adderley
- Pianists Bill Evans and Wynton Kelly
- Bassist Paul Chambers
- Drummer Jimmy Cobb
- Miles Davis himself
While younger artists looked for guidance from Davis, he looked for new talent and ideas. Miles discovered Bill Evans in the mid-1950s, whom he eventually instated into his group.
This album firmly established modal jazz and had a profound influence on many genres of music, including jazz, rock and classical music. The musicians were given a set of scales for each tune, rather than a set of chords as was common to the bebop and hard bop of the time, which, according to Miles Davis in the book, Kind of Blue:
[G]ives you a lot more freedom and space to hear things. When you go this way, you can go on forever. You don’t have to worry about changes and you can do more with the [melody] line. It becomes a challenge to see how melodically innovative you can be. When you’re based on chords, you know at the end of 32 bars that the chords have run out and there’s nothing to do but repeat what you’ve just done—with variations. I think a movement in jazz is beginning away from the conventional string of chords […] there will be fewer chords but infinite possibilities as to what to do with them.
