Kind Of Blue

Miles Davis handed his band sketches instead of chord charts and asked them to invent inside a scale, and the result loosened jazz from the tyranny of the changes for good.

"So What" opens with a piano-and-bass call that answers itself in two chords, and once Miles enters he has almost nothing to lean on except space and taste. That emptiness is the gift: with fewer harmonic hurdles, the soloists slow down and think, and you can hear Bill Evans in "Blue In Green" treating each note like it costs him something. "Flamenco Sketches" pushes the idea furthest, letting each player linger on a mode until he decides to move on. Players spent the next decade chasing the freedom this record proved was possible.