Kind of Blue
1959
Davis handed the players sketches on the day and most of what you hear is a first take. Two sessions, and it was done.
★ 9.8
The Albums canon
Sourced and spun.
Every record chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 542 records or filter by genre, artist, and year.
Browse all 542 records or filter by genre, artist, and year.
A Love Supreme
1964
Coltrane recorded it in one December session and meant it as a prayer. On the last movement he plays a psalm he had written out.
★ 9.0
Bitches Brew
1970
Davis gave the players almost no written music, and his producer Teo Macero cut the tapes together afterward with a razor blade.
★ 8.9
Aja
1977
Becker and Fagen ran seven guitarists through the solo on Peg before they kept one, and worked the rest of the record the same way.
★ 8.7
Giant Steps
1960
The title track modulates through three keys so fast that the pianist, Tommy Flanagan, audibly struggles through his solo on the finished take.
★ 8.6
I Put a Spell on You
1965
Simone had trained to be a classical pianist and was turned down by the conservatory. You can hear the Bach in her left hand throughout.
★ 7.9
Mingus Ah Um
1959
Columbia refused to let him record the words to Fables of Faubus, an attack on a segregationist governor, so it appears as an instrumental.
★ 7.6
The Shape of Jazz to Come
1959
Coleman played a white plastic saxophone because it was what he could afford, and half the musicians in New York thought he was a fraud.
★ 7.4
Time Out
1959
Every piece is in an unusual meter. Take Five is in five beats to the bar and was written by the saxophonist, Paul Desmond, not Brubeck.
★ 7.3
Blue Train
1957
Coltrane's only record as a leader for Blue Note, made as a favor to the label's founder while he was under contract elsewhere.
★ 7.1
In the Wee Small Hours
1955
Sixteen ballads in one unbroken mood, recorded after his marriage to Ava Gardner fell apart, and built to be heard in order.
★ 6.9
Maiden Voyage
1965
A concept album about the sea, made by Miles Davis's pianist with Davis's rhythm section, and every title refers to water.
★ 6.8
My Favorite Things
1961
Coltrane picked up the soprano saxophone, an instrument almost nobody played then, and stretched a show tune over two chords for thirteen minutes.
★ 6.8
Rhapsody in Blue
1924
The famous clarinet wail at the start was a joke the player improvised in rehearsal, and Gershwin told him to keep it in.
★ 6.8
Waltz for Debby
1961
Both this and its companion record come from a single Sunday at the Village Vanguard, and glasses and conversation carry through every track.
★ 6.7
Sunday at the Village Vanguard
1961
Scott LaFaro plays the bass as a third melodic voice rather than keeping time. He was killed in a car crash ten days later.
★ 6.6
Birth of the Cool
1957
Recorded in 1949 and 1950 by a nine-piece band with a tuba and a French horn, and not gathered onto one record until 1957.
★ 6.5
Out to Lunch!
1964
There is no piano on it, just Bobby Hutcherson's vibraphone holding the harmony loosely enough that the tunes never quite settle.
★ 6.4
Sketches of Spain
1960
Gil Evans built it around a Spanish guitar concerto, scoring the solo part for trumpet. It took months and nearly broke both of them.
★ 6.4
Speak No Evil
1965
Shorter wrote these while working in Miles Davis's band and said he was thinking about folk tales and misty landscapes with witches.
★ 6.4
Brilliant Corners
1957
The title track was so hard to play that after twenty-five attempts they gave up and spliced a version together from pieces.
★ 6.1
Moanin'
1959
The pianist Bobby Timmons wrote the title tune as a joke riff the band kept asking him to finish. It answers itself like a hymn.
★ 6.0
Saxophone Colossus
1956
St. Thomas is a calypso his mother sang him as a child. A critic later analyzed one solo bar by bar to show it was composed.
★ 5.9
Somethin' Else
1958
Miles Davis plays as a sideman here, on someone else's record, which he almost never did before or after.
★ 5.4
The Sidewinder
1964
Chrysler used the title track in a television advertisement without asking, and the record sold well enough to steady Blue Note's finances for years.
★ 5.4
Ellington at Newport
1956
The tenor player Paul Gonsalves took twenty-seven choruses in a row and the crowd nearly rioted. Much of the record was quietly redone afterward.
★ 5.1
Ella and Louis
1957
Two voices at opposite ends of everything, one crystalline and one like gravel, backed by the Oscar Peterson quartet with no written arrangements.
★ 5.1
Soul Station
1960
A critic called Mobley the middleweight champion of the tenor saxophone, meaning he never played loudly, and this is where that pays off.
★ 4.9
Songs for Distingue Lovers
1957
Her voice had gone by then, and she sings behind the beat and around the notes, which turns out to be the whole point.
★ 3.6
Bird and Diz
1952
Parker and Gillespie's last studio meeting, with Monk on piano, playing fast enough that the rest of jazz spent a decade catching up.
★ 3.3
After Midnight
1957
By 1956 Cole was a pop star who rarely played piano. Here he sits back down at it, with a small group, after hours.
★ 2.9
Concert by the Sea
1956
Garner could not read music, and the tape came from an amateur recorder someone happened to be running at the back of the hall.
★ 2.9