Kind of Blue

The musicians arrived with only sketches of scales and melody lines. Bill Evans wrote in the liner notes that Davis conceived the settings only hours before the recording dates. The story that everything was done in a single pass is untrue: only Flamenco Sketches produced a complete first take, and an alternate of it appeared on a 1997 reissue. Davis told Nat Hentoff in 1958 that working without chords gave a lot more freedom and space to hear things.

It reached number two on the US jazz albums chart and, in 2019, was certified five times platinum by the RIAA. Allmusic's Stephen Thomas Erlewine called it generally considered the definitive jazz album, and Rolling Stone placed it at number 12 on its 2003 list of 500 great albums. The Library of Congress added it to the National Recording Registry in 2002.