Is “Kind of Blue” the greatest jazz album ever?

That’s been said. But, while I love the album, I find the idea that there is some GOAT (greatest of all time) jazz album to be empty. Ted Gioia discusses Kind of Blue in the following video. It’s excellent and illuminating discussion. He’s got his doubts about the idea of it being the greatest.

Early in his remarks, Gioia notes that it is often recommended to people as the first album they should listen to if they want to get into jazz, and the first album they should buy. I think that’s a much more interesting issue, and one that doesn’t depend on believing that Kind of Blue is the best album ever.

One thing Gioia does mention, is that it is a well-recorded album. That’s a superficial consideration, but very real. He points out that much excellent jazz was recorded before the advent of high fidelity recording and that some of the best jazz musicians were never recorded in high fidelity, e.g. Charlie Parker, Clifford Brown. I agree. When I first started listening to jazz I started with high fidelity recordings and found older recordings, such as Louis Armstrong, a bit difficult to get into because of the sound quality.

But that’s a superficial issue. A more important issue is the nature of the music itself. Kind of Blue is modal jazz, jazz that is based on scales, not on often complex harmonic progressions. That’s much easier for beginners to grasp that bebop or swing, where you have to be able to parse the harmonic structure in order to grasp the improvisation. If you can begin making sense of improvised lines in modal jazz, that will make it easier to deal with improvisation over complex harmonic structures. Thus Kind of Blue is a good starting point for exploring other styles.

That’s what makes it such an important album in the jazz canon. It’s centrally located within the universe of jazz styles. Gioia gets at this indirectly when he points out that the musicians on the album – Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Bill Evans – had different stylistic leanings. Kind of Blue thus becomes a meeting point for stylistic diversity.