Since it hit the airwaves half a century ago, Kind of Blue by Miles Davis has influenced the hearts and minds of jazz fans everywhere. Its songs became instant classics, and it has also converted many a non jazz fan to appreciate the subtlety and complexity of this masterpiece. Kind of Blue has also been recognized as one of the most influential albums in the history of jazz and is consistently ranked among the greatest albums of all time. One reviewer has called it a “defining moment of twentieth century music.” The album’s influence has reached beyond jazz, as musicians of such genres as rock and classical have been influenced by it, while critics have acknowledged it as one of the most influential albums of all time. Many improvisatory rock musicians of the 1960s referred to Kind of Blue for inspiration. One significant aspect of Kind of Blue is that the entire record, not just one track, was revolutionary. Gary Burton noted this occurrence, stating “It wasn’t just one tune that was a breakthrough, it was the whole record.

Kind of Blue, recorded 1959, was a re-statement of the beauty and possibility which jazz offered as an art form. With Kind of Blue, Miles Davis radically detached himself from his comfortable but fairly safe career to craft a more interesting future. More pointedly, simplicity was essential to the success of Kind of Blue. Simplicity empowered and freed Davis’s players- tenor saxophonist John Coltrane’s intense spirals of sounds,; alto saxophonist Julian “Cannonball” Adderley,’s penetrating funk, pianists Bill Evans’s introspective romanticism and Wynton Kelly’s pensive mood- to improvise and create without requiring them to put their technical mastery on show. In word, Kind of Blue changed the jazz vocabulary and jazz itself. As Eric Nisenson insightfully observed, “The unmistakable beauty of kind of Blue rest on two qualities of great death: the splendor of the sound and the starkness of its hard-won truths. Kind of Blue is further proof of Keats’s statement that beauty and truth are inseparable.”