When Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue came out in August of 1959, it turned the music world on its head. For years, the jazz world had been an arms race for who could fit more complexity into their compositions, and in many regards, Miles Davis was winning, but Miles changed it all on Kind of Blue.

"So What," the first song on the record, has only two chord changes. In the jazz world, that permitted to return to melody. The players called it modal jazz, but a lot of the listening public simply called it jazz they could enjoy. What resulted was more romantic, less athletic, and a lot less sarcastic than what came before. Solos were primarily carried by the incredible horn line of Miles Davis, Cannonball Adderley and John Coltrane. Miles Davis's spare lean solos were balanced out by Coltrane's searching lines and  Adderley's incomparable soulfulness.

But the secret weapon on Kind of Blue was the piano player Bill Evans. Though he only has official writing credits on two songs, Evans' fingerprints are all over the record's styled improvisation. Drummer Jimmy Cobb and bassist Paul Chambers bring the beat to the record with a soulful bounce that gives the slow-moving chord changes the momentum and vigor they deserve.

In a lot of record collections, Kind of Blue is the only jazz record on the shelf; though there's certainly plenty others that deserve a shot, it's hard to argue with Kind of Blue as the quintessential jazz album.