Entertainment

Kind of Blue was just 3 years old in 1962, but Miles Davis was already fed up with the spotlight that album and its successors were shining on him.

"It bugs me, because I'm not that important," the trumpeter told Playboy. "Why is it that people have so much to say about me?"If he were alive, the grumpy genius probably wouldn't be happy about the lavish 50th birthday party being given to Kind of Blue, which comes out Tuesday as a four-disc box set with a list price of $110.

Jerry Stoll

Miles Davis in 1964 at the Monterey Jazz Festival

Nor would he agree with its reputation as the best album in jazz history – although he'd have a tough time convincing the world. So many critics and fans agree on the greatest-ever label that it's all but etched in marble.

The problem is that as sublime as the album is, it's too mellow to be canonized as the ultimate achievement in jazz, a music born in rowdy bordellos, bars and dance halls.

As the title suggests, Kind of Blue isn't so much a jazz album as an experiment in the blues. It's mournful, melancholy and slower than molasses in January.

"Miles sounded lonely, like he was sitting alone on an iceberg on the North Pole," Kind of Blue drummer Jimmy Cobb said in Made in Heaven, a 2005 short film about the album.

That's exactly the remote quality Mr. Davis was going for.

"The music has to have air in it – you can't fill all the holes," Mr. Davis told the St. Petersburg Times shortly before he died in 1991.

In the spring of 1959, 32-year-old Miles Dewey Davis III was at a crossroads.

He'd found fame more than a decade earlier in saxophonist Charlie Parker's band, but he struggled to lead his own group after he and various bandmates got addicted to heroin.

Eventually, he kicked the drug cold turkey and put together a dream team for Kind of Blue, featuring sax ace John Coltrane. The glue was Bill Evans, a classically trained pianist-composer whose introspective style jibed well with Mr. Davis' less-is-more approach.

Both Mr. Davis and Mr. Evans were already experts at cool jazz, but they envisioned Kind of Blue as a total deep freeze. Their secret weapon was modal jazz – a then-new concept where musicians improvised over basic scales, or modes, instead of complex chords.

Mr. Davis didn't invent modal jazz. But in one grand stroke, he taught the world how liberating it could be.

"It's one thing to just play a tune, but it's another thing to practically create a new language of music, which is what Kind of Blue did," pianist Chick Corea said in the book Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece.

It was the language of simplicity. Recorded in the frantic era of rock 'n' roll, bebop and free-form jazz, Kind of Blue is a 45-minute meditation that holds its mood from the whispered start of "So What" to the last fading piano note of "Flamenco Sketches."

But the album wouldn't be nearly as haunting if not for its brilliant improvisation – especially Mr. Davis' solos, which recall Frank Sinatra's hushed ballad singing. Improv is a notoriously hit-and-miss art – as proven by the Grateful Dead – but Mr. Davis' whole band was so sharp that almost every song on Blue is a first take.

Released on Aug. 17, 1959, the album wasn't a huge commercial hit like Dave Brubeck's Time Out, the year's other cool-jazz classic. But critics raved, with Downbeat calling Mr. Davis' album remarkable and comparing the music to Maurice Ravel and Belá Bartók.

With time, the album's profile mushroomed so much it became one of the top-selling jazz albums ever, with three million copies sold in the U.S. and an estimated 10 million worldwide. Today, it's the only jazz CD a lot of people own: It's the rare album that works not only as art, but as background music for the bedroom.

"If you want a record to make love to, Kind of Blue is that record," Herbie Hancock said in Made in Heaven.

As Norah Jones reminded us with her 2002 monster hit, Come Away With Me, the world loves a romantic mood-setting album. But calling Kind of Blue the all-time best jazz album is like calling Joni Mitchell's Blue or Van Morrison's Astral Weeks the best rock albums ever. Sure, they're masterpieces, but they rarely rock.

And while Duke Ellington might have been generalizing with "It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)," he had a point. Kind of Blue doesn't swing, at least not as hard as classic albums by Ellington, Coltrane and Parker, not to mention Mr. Davis' own jazz-rock masterpiece, Bitches Brew.

None of which detracts a bit from the brilliance of Blue –just from its debatable status as the greatest album in jazz history.

First released on CD in 1984, the album was roundly criticized for poor sound quality. Columbia Records improved the sound for a 1992 release and also changed the speed of the first three songs, which had been recorded on a faulty tape machine in 1959.

More problems ensued in 2005 when Columbia Records reissued the CD along with a DVD documentary on DualDisc, a two-sided format that wouldn't work in many CD players. DualDisc has since bitten the dust.

On Tuesday, Columbia tries again with its most elaborate reissue yet, Kind of Blue: The 50th Anniversary Collector's Edition. The box set (list price: $110) features the original album on both CD and blue vinyl, an additional CD of outtakes and live tracks, a 55-minute documentary DVD, various pieces of memorabilia and a 60-page book of essays.

Thor Christensen