Kind of Blue, the Miles Davis recording which is considered by many to be one of the 20th century’s most popular, innovative, and influential jazz records ever released, is now available on MP3 format from Amazon this month for only $5.

Jazz music sometimes seems like it is wholly improvisational for the most part to the casual listener, but the approaches Miles Davis employed on 1959’s Kind of Blue really explored those sonic tenets of the jazz idiom and language. Davis mapped out loose, skeletal frameworks, and basically gave them to the musicians, who turned out to be one of the most stellar back up bands in jazz history: Paul Chambers on bass, who in his short life was a highly rhythmically and original stand up player, whose punchy bass lines accented the other musicians; Jimmy Cobb on drums; the wonderful Bill Evans and Wynton Kelly on piano; and the saxophone tandem of Julian “Cannonball” Adderly and the spiritual, always sonically reaching sax master, John Coltrane. Davis, however, keeps a firm center throughout, his presence is felt even when he isn’t playing his instantly recognizable trebly trumpet. Bits and pieces of the album have been heard in countless other forms of medium, films, commercials, TV shows and consciously and unconsciously have been nicked by other musicians, and not only just in the jazz genre either. Songs like “All Blues,” “Blue in Green,” “So What,” and the others ring like a watercolor painting in a summer rain and grab one’s emotions and soul with full aplomb. Words can’t do it justice here, what lies here in its grooves tell the tale indeed. A true authentic American classic, Kind of Blue is the on-ramp to one’s discovery of all the world of jazz has to offer.

Browse all 100 albums on sale this month for only $5 each.

Track Listing

1. So What
2. Freddie Freeloader
3. Blue In Green
4. All Blues
5. Flamenco Sketches
6. Flamenco Sketches (alternate take)

Note – when you purchase MP3s through Amazon, it stores your purchases to Amazon’s Cloud Drive; from there you can stream the music right from their online player. Also, if you have a Kindle Fire, your MP3 purchases will automatically be available for you to stream on your device. All your purchases are backed up and available for you to download at any time. You can download the files to your computer to load to an MP3 device and to your iTunes account if you have one. If you’d like to gift these MP3 purchases, you can – just click the “Give album or song as gift” button on the right on the product page. From there you enter the recipient’s email address and then select either specific songs to gift or the entire album.