168. Miles Davis / Kind of Blue (1959)

A review of Kind of Blue seems pointless. I'll muse for a few hundred words, and then quit. I imagine a world without this record, and that is a difficult world. It's a world where Bill Evans didn't sub for Wynton Kelly, a world in which countless musicians were struck by inspiration elsewhere. A world that is one milestone short of properly demarcating the future. A world where your brain is not irresistibly and without permission drawn to referencing all subsequent Miles Davis dates to this one. It's a world without the myth of it all being done in one take, a world where you don't have to buy that other CD to find out that what you missed was not really anything special. In this world, 1959 is not terribly different than 1958 or 1960. The Columbia vault is one cart of tapes lighter. It's a party that went one album different. It's the late night DJ who selects something by Cliff Brown instead. It's a world where the porter didn't see the CD on my passenger seat. It's a world where as a teenager, I didn't once stop my bicycle in the middle of an intersection to change the batteries of my headset. It's a world where my daughter was lulled into dreamland by someone else's trumpet, and awakened by someone who was not John Coltrane. It's a lot the same, but it's not the same, and I'd rather have it with Kind of Blue.