Kind of Blue Review

Davis walked into the 30th Street Studio on 2 March 1959 with scales and melody lines instead of finished parts, and the band sight read a language most of them had barely played in. That is the whole trick. Chord changes had been getting denser for a decade and bebop was running out of room to breathe; hand a soloist a scale and a tempo instead and there is suddenly space to think inside a chorus rather than sprint through it.

So What is two chords and a bass figure. Flamenco Sketches is five scales and an instruction to stay on each one as long as you want to. Bill Evans wrote the liner note comparing the date to Japanese brush painting, where a stroke cannot be revised, and the playing bears him out: most of what you hear is a first take.

There are no words, so the record argues with line and tone instead. Davis plays with the Harmon mute pressed close to the microphone and says less per bar than anyone else on the session, Coltrane answers by saying a great deal more, and Evans supplies the harmony that lets two opposite temperaments sit inside one tune. Blue in Green runs under six minutes and carries more ache than most sung ballads manage in four.

The one honest production complaint is real: side one of the original pressing ran slightly sharp because a tape machine was off speed, and Columbia did not correct it until 1992. Otherwise this is five million copies sold, a National Recording Registry entry, and the jazz album owned by people who own no other jazz albums.