1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 20. Miles Davis – Kind of Blue (1959)

Sinatra got two albums at the start, now we’re at the second of our repeat artists (so far...).  I didn’t get on too well with Birth of the Cool, maybe this one will be different. How much more jazz are you going to make me listen to, Dimery? 

But much to my surprise, I really liked this one. It’s very different to the previous Miles Davis offering, more like Thelonius Monk’s Brilliant Corners that I also liked. There’s a lengthy Wikipedia page about this album and why it is significant, and, although I’m not utterly clueless about musical theory (although it’s been a while), didn’t make much sense to me. Something to do with Davis giving his players modes (i.e. scales) to improvise within, rather than around the chords. Which I partly don’t get because my experience of improvising a jam is using a scale taken from the root note of the chord, so I’m not sure I understand the distinction here. And to my tin ear the riffing doesn’t sound radically different to earlier jazz albums on this list. 

Be that as it may, the main difference to Birth of the Cool is that there’s a lot more space. Not every second is filled with noodling up and down scales, and so the music is allowed to breathe more. The last track, Flamenco Sketches, is so delicate and soft it’s like the musical equivalent of a piece of tissue paper, but manages to be fascinating and beautiful at the same time, gently fading away and drawing the listener down into a state of zen-like calm. Closest I can say is like some bits of Debussy where he works as much with the silences in between the notes as the sound itself. 

I read that afficionados consider this to be one of the best jazz albums ever, which is a bold claim, but even being relatively clueless about the mechanical innovation of the music, I enjoyed it and would probably come back to it. 

Oh, and ... 2% done.