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
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1950s
1950 – 1959
Showing 26 albums from the 1950s
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
The Great Twenty-Eight
1955
Berry trained as a beautician and worked on a car assembly line in St. Louis when Muddy Waters told him which Chicago label to try.
★ 6.7
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
Here's Little Richard
1957
The words to Tutti Frutti were too obscene to record, so a local songwriter rewrote them in fifteen minutes over a lunch break.
★ 6.4
The Sun Sessions
1955
Elvis was a nineteen-year-old truck driver. That's All Right came out of the three of them messing about during a break Sam Phillips had called.
★ 6.3
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
Songs for Swingin' Lovers
1956
The trombone solo in I've Got You Under My Skin was played by a man standing on a box to reach the microphone.
★ 5.9
West Side Story
1957
Nearly every song is built on the same jarring interval, a tritone, which Bernstein threads through the whole score from the opening bars.
★ 5.8
Elvis Presley
1956
Five of the tracks were leftovers from his Sun sessions. The Clash copied the sleeve, pink and green lettering and all, twenty-three years later.
★ 5.6
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
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
Moanin' in the Moonlight
1959
Wolf did not make a record until he was past forty, having farmed until then. This gathers the singles that followed.
★ 4.3
Bo Diddley
1958
The beat he hammered out here has been borrowed ever since, by Buddy Holly, the Stones and everyone after. He built his own square guitars.
★ 4.0
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
Elvis
1956
His second number one album in a single year, cut in Hollywood between films, with Elvis himself at the piano on several tracks.
★ 2.4