Released: 1959
Tracks: So What; Freddie Freeloader; Blue in Green; All Blues; Flamenco Sketches
Best track: impossible…all of them
Track to skip: not a second
This is truly a classic album, and one of the absolute best pieces of vinyl/plastic ever made. By ANYONE. I frequently listen to this album over and over and over and over…and I’ve done the whole successive listening thing many times for this. I think I might have listened to this album more than any other in the past 10 years. When I listen to Kind of Blue (which is a lot), it’s rare that it only gets one spin. I never get tired of a single second of this album. All 5 of the tracks are strong and classics in their own right. This is considered to be under the umbrella of the first great quartet that Miles Davis led, but even within that distinction there are differences in players. For one, this album is actually a sextet with Davis on trumpet, John Coltrane on tenor sax, Cannonball Adderly on alto sax, Paul Chambers on bass, Jimmy Cobb on drums and Bill Evans on piano. The contributions of all these guys on this album are amazing. All of the solos are perfect and it’s almost like every single note played on Kind of Blue is divine. This is truly one of the rare albums that most anyone could enjoy, for any number of reasons. Overall it’s very mellow and spacious and the piano playing in particular is breathtaking. Seriously, you can listen to any of these guys and after hearing this you’ll want to check out all they’ve done. The grade for this one is obvious. Kind of Blue is one of the 5 best albums ever made. I tend to give a lot of 97’s and 98’s on these reviews so it might seem that this particular 98 is the same as some other 98’s like Phish’s A Live One or Bebel Gilberto’s Tanto Tempo, but in truth this particular 98 is light years ahead of those. I guess within all the albums I give a 98 to, there’s a span of probably 10 levels in there. I guess that’s the flaw of my review system: it’s hard to determine specific degrees of excellence. Well, Kind of Blue is one of the best ever and a perfect album. There ya go.
Rating: 98
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