{"id":565,"date":"2026-05-27T16:07:37","date_gmt":"2026-05-27T16:07:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/2026\/05\/27\/miles-daviss-kind-of-blue-is-the-highest-selling-jazz-record-of-all-time-he-thought-it-was-a-failure\/"},"modified":"2026-05-27T16:07:37","modified_gmt":"2026-05-27T16:07:37","slug":"miles-daviss-kind-of-blue-is-the-highest-selling-jazz-record-of-all-time-he-thought-it-was-a-failure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/2026\/05\/27\/miles-daviss-kind-of-blue-is-the-highest-selling-jazz-record-of-all-time-he-thought-it-was-a-failure\/","title":{"rendered":"Miles Davis\u2019s Kind of Blue is the highest selling jazz record of all time \u2013 he thought it was a failure"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/span> Miles Davis<\/span><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

There are many things about Miles Davis to remember as we mark 100 years since his birth. There\u2019s the 1950s and 60s elegance and lyricism, with his Harmon muted trumpet, the tone of which was once said to sound like \u201ca man walking on eggshells\u201d<\/a>. There\u2019s his badass attitude taking no bull from anyone, with a particular invective for the racism of America. Most of all there is his fearless innovation, always reaching for sounds unheard.<\/p>\n

As the late (much lamented) writer and musician Greg Tate<\/a> wrote: \u201cMiles Davis was a musician you could set your atomic clock to: check in every five years or so and you\u2019d find him a parsec ahead of everyone else.\u201d <\/p>\n

But this was a hazardous approach that had a price. In 1969, Davis admitted to jazz journalist Hollie West<\/a>: \u201cI have to change, it\u2019s like a curse.\u201d Part of that price was the risk of failure, at least by his own exacting standards.<\/p>\n

And so, we turn to Kind of Blue (1959). It\u2019s the highest selling jazz record<\/a> of all time, (multiple times platinum); only it wasn\u2019t quite what he was after. In 1959, a spellbound Davis saw Les Ballet Africaines (the national dance company of Guinea founded in the early 1950s) and found his next direction. In his 1989 autobiography, Miles<\/a>, he wrote:<\/p>\n

\n

I knew I couldn\u2019t do it from just watching them dance because I\u2019m not African, but I loved what they were doing. I didn\u2019t want to copy that, but I got a concept from it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It was the sound of the \u201cfinger piano\u201d (mbira or kalimba), in particular, that inspired him. He set about combining that impression with a love (shared with his new pianist Bill Evans) of composer Maurice Ravel\u2019s Concerto for the Left Hand and Orchestra (1930), and half remembered sounds from his childhood \u201cback in Arkansas, when we were walking home from church and they were playing these bad gospels\u201d.<\/p>\n

Kind of Blue by Miles Davis.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

To chase the sound he was after, Davis employed the emerging \u201cmodal\u201d approach. This meant essentially basing his new music on diatonic scales<\/a> (think the basic seven notes do-re-me \u2026 but with the option to make any of them the \u201chome\u201d note) instead of the frenetic chord progressions of bebop. Despite being an important player in bebop, in his autobiography Davis recognised that the music of \u201cDiz and Bird \u2026 wasn\u2019t sweet\u201d and \u201cdidn\u2019t have harmonic lines that you could easily hum\u201d. <\/p>\n

This fusion of apparently disparate elements produced something of a paradox: a completely uncompromising jazz record (all the recordings were first takes), which has proved to be effortlessly accessible. But despite Kind of Blue\u2019s winning lyricism, Davis, in his autobiography, is mildly self-reproachful:<\/p>\n

\n

When I tell people that I missed what I was trying to do on Kind of Blue, that I missed getting the exact sound of the African finger piano up in that sound, they just look at me like I\u2019m crazy. Everyone said that record was a masterpiece \u2013 and I loved it too \u2013 and so they just feel I\u2019m trying to put them on. But that\u2019s what I was trying to do on most of that album, particularly on All Blues<\/a> and So What<\/a>. I just missed.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Of course, being Davis, he largely abandoned that approach, so that by 1964 he had a completely new group of young musicians and was reaching for the outer spheres of what was possible with acoustic jazz. This was a trajectory that by 1969, saw him \u201cgoing electric\u201d with the uncompromising Bitches Brew<\/a> (1969), also a stunningly successful album. But that is another story.<\/p>\n

This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org. If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something, The Conversation UK may earn a commission.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

Richard Worth does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Miles Davis There are many things about Miles Davis to remember as we mark 100 years since his birth. There\u2019s the 1950s and 60s elegance and lyricism, with his Harmon muted trumpet, the tone of which was once said to sound like \u201ca man walking on eggshells\u201d. There\u2019s his badass attitude taking no bull from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-565","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/565","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=565"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/565\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=565"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=565"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=565"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}