7 Miles Davis Albums That Are More Important Than "Kind of Blue"

Perfect for those who want to explore beyond the ubiquitous starter album.

Like Thriller is for pop music, Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue is the populist, culturally agreed-upon entry point for most people into the world of jazz.

Commercially, the album’s ubiquity is unrivaled. It has sold over 5 million copies in the United States alone and has never been out of print since 1959. Even the most casual fans, folks who may only know Davis and a couple of other jazz names to begin with, are more likely to have this record in their collection than any of his other works.

But none of those measures vault it into the inner circle of the most important music he ever released. When Kind of Blue is both the beginning and end of a Miles Davis conversation, it crowds out a handful of records that genuinely changed how music was conceived, arranged, and recorded in ways that Kind of Blue, for all its beauty, didn’t.

This list isn’t meant to be a takedown. Kind of Blue is a great album. The modal improvisation, especially between Bill Evans, John Coltrane, and Cannonball Adderley, is everything people say it is. But Davis released 48 studio albums and reinvented his own sound at least six times. What follows are the LPs that shook the foundations of musical tradition and experimentation the world over.

Before I dive in, a quick reminder to do all the things, including subscribing and sharing this post if you’re enjoying this newsletter’s content so far.

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In chronological order, let’s begin:

1. Birth of the Cool (1957)

This album is arguably the most important contribution Miles Davis ever made to the art form. True to its namesake, it popularized the “cool jazz” archetype, adding this detached, effortlessly elegant temperature to bop’s supple sonic curves. It’s the style that would define Miles’s career from that point forward and was, at the time, his most orchestrally ambitious work. He was all of 22 years old when he assembled the nine-piece band, including musicians like Gerry Mulligan, Lee Konitz, and J.J. Johnson, that would change jazz forever in three sessions, recorded in 1949 and 1950.

Amid all that starpower, the biggest influence on this record (and, to a degree, Davis’s trajectory as a musical tastemaker) was arranger Gil Evans, the Canadian orchestrator who had gained a reputation for crafting arrangements that were seen as punishment by other big band leaders. The two men would go on to release a handful of other jazz masterpieces in their time working together, such as Miles Ahead (1957), Porgy and Bess (1958), and Sketches of Spain (1960). Birth of the Cool would go on to influence multiple generations of West Coast jazz artists, as well as bossa nova greats João Gilberto and Tom Jobim.

If you’re looking for the moment when Miles Davis became a superstar, give this one a spin.

2. Milestones (1958)

A credit I’ve seen falsely attributed to Kind of Blue in various critical and academic writing is how it “invented” modal jazz. Compositions that fall into that category feature solos and band member interplay improvised over scales, rather than chord changes, the latter of which was the dominant way to go about your business as a jazz pro in the mid—to-late-1950s. The theoretical framework for this movement drew in part on pianist and composer George Russell’s book, The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization, a text Miles had been studying with keen interest.

On the title track for Milestones, Miles translated Russell’s experiments into a conceptual breakthrough that quickly became the organizing principle behind much of his music. No matter how many times I hear it, it’s never less than exhilarating in its interplay. The rest of the record is far closer to hard bop stylistically, with fearless contributions from an all-star cast that includes John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley on saxophone, Paul Chambers on bass, and “Philly Joe” Jones on drums. “Dr. Jekyll” is one of my sleeper picks for best Miles Davis track ever, and “Two Bass Hit” is one of the brightest, most energetic tunes of its era.

On the right day, in the right mood, you wouldn’t have to twist my arm too hard to get me to say that I prefer Milestones to Kind of Blue.

3. Filles de Kilimanjaro (1968)

Often dismissed as a “bridge” album between the Second Great Quintet and Miles’s electric period, Filles de Kilimanjaro has evolved into one of the most underrated gems in the jazz impresario’s catalog. As important as the handoff moment is to his narrative, it obscures just how impressive the playing is top to bottom.

Miles recorded it in two sessions, five months apart, and the personnel’s pedigree is off the charts. The June session features Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams, while the September session saw Chick Corea step in for Hancock and Dave Holland for Carter. The former’s dynamic on the electric piano is among the album’s most arresting elements, with the instrument becoming increasingly central as you roll through the tracklist. Corea leaves more room than Hancock does and also pushes harder rhythmically. The architecture is still mostly familiar from the Second Quintet days, but the walls were already expanding out to more experimental horizons.

Of all the compositions on this LP, “Mademoiselle Mabry” is the most prominent hinge moment. Betty Mabry, Miles’s flame at the time, had introduced him to the funk and rock records reshaping popular music in 1968, and the track named for her is the clearest evidence of the shift that was on the precipice of taking over his musical thinking: a groove-first sensibility that jazz tradition had no framework for. All the effects-drenched weirdness has yet to rear its head sonically, but the altered mindset was locking into place. If nothing else, this record is indispensable if you want a comprehensive understanding of Miles’s genius.

4. In a Silent Way (1969)

In a Silent Way is, in a word, perfection.

Recorded in a single day in February 1969, the final credits list boasts more than a dozen musicians “going electric” in ways that blur previously well-defined genre lines between jazz, rock, funk, and the bones of what would become ambient electronic soundscapes of the 1970s. Producer Teo Macero waved his magic wand in post-production, turning studio technology into a force that shaped performances and created a pervasive atmosphere of transfixing mystery. The approach was radical, altering how artists, producers, engineers, and labels conceived of how jazz records could be put together. It’s a powerful before/after inflection point.

The balance Miles and company strike here between richly textured, busy compositions that never feel chaotic or messy is astounding. Part of that is achieved through the instrumentalists’ contributions, but an equally important aspect of this album is the negative space between the notes that invites you to get lost in its delightful web of musical intrigue. The first side, “Shhh/Peaceful,” tacitly avoids any resolution, with wave after wave of electric piano and guitar drifting over Tony Williams’ glittering hi-hat. “In a Silent Way/It’s About That Time” is even more dazzling, featuring playing that’s so precise and unhurried that you can’t help but be drawn in. Joe Zawinul’s intro section is among my favorite stretches of jazz music ever.

As I often say when recommending legitimate 10/10 albums, I envy your first spin of this classic if you’ve never given it any play.

5. Bitches Brew (1970)

If In a Silent Way doesn’t split your skull open with its disregard for the “rules” of jazz as dictated by tradition, then Bitches Brew might blow it clean off.

The experimental apex of Miles Davis’s illustrious career, it’s an intense, bewildering, and, for some casual listeners, intimidating in its fusion-forward dissonance. And yet, in my original review of the album, I go over how many familiar influences Miles and his collaborators, particularly guitarist John McLaughlin, let bubble to the surface. Listen closely, and you’ll hear wisps of Ritchie Blackmore, Jimi Hendrix, Sly Stone, James Brown, and many other non-jazz entities helping this group push the art form into another sonic dimension.

I’ll let that initial write-up fill in some of the contextual blanks around what makes this release a must-listen, especially if you appreciate genius that can’t be defined in straight, neat lines. To that end, how you listen to Bitches Brew is also likely to impact your experience, regardless of whether you’re a first-time listener or not.

Here’s my recommendation:

“[I] want to add this disclaimer: If you’ve never listened to Bitches Brew all the way through, do yourself a favor and get your hands on the highest-quality speakers or headphones you can manage. You want the sound to wash over you from all sides, just as the recording intended. You want your listening experience to be as immersive as possible. And please, for the love of all things sacred in music, don’t you dare listen to this one from a smartphone speaker. That would be an insult.“

6. On the Corner (1972)

Of all the anarchic left turns in Miles Davis’s discography, On the Corner may be his most deliberately confrontational. Miles wanted to reach Black audiences who had moved from jazz to funk and soul, so he ended up making the most abstract, audacious science experiment of his career. There are no chord changes to speak of in the conventional sense, no solos in a similar vein. Practically nothing jazz purists from his existing audience would have recognized. Tabla, sitar, wah-wah trumpet, and layered percussion crashing into one another. It’s a doomsday scene for some, but it’s also a lot of fun.

As you might expect, critics hated On the Corner when Columbia first released it in 1972. It failed commercially, an outcome Miles later attributed to the label’s lack of a coherent marketing push. He said that, essentially, they didn’t want to back it 100% because they didn’t understand it. Whatever the case, Black audiences didn’t embrace it, and his jazz supporters rejected it as “selling out.” And yet, more than three decades on, legendary producers like J Dilla, Madlib, and Flying Lotus have cited it in their own work, confirming the record’s enduring appeal. It’s not hard to see why, too. Many of the arrangements and post-production choices anticipate hip-hop, R&B, and dance music production of the 80s and 90s in ways that are hard to dismiss once you hear them.

7. Get Up With It (1974)

You won’t find many 50-plus-year-old jazz fusion records that sound like they could’ve been made last year or even last week, but Get Up With It is one such release. A double album compiled from sessions that occurred between 1970 and 1974, it’s a wildly uneven and darkly compelling listening experience that, if you go into it with no inhibitions, will push all of the right emotional buttons. in exactly the right ways. The whole thing resists any concise sonic description, largely disregarding melody in favor of organ drone, wah-wah effects, and nerve-jangling rhythms. Miles’s health was deteriorating by this point, and after its completion, he nearly left the music business entirely.

Some more color, from my full review of the album:

“After Get Up With It, Miles Davis disappeared from show business. In his autobiography, he wrote of rampant substance abuse and promiscuity, habits that formed more as physical and emotional pain relief than anything else. “Sex and drugs took the place music had occupied in my life,” he observed frankly. Part of me wonders if this record took so much out of him that he needed years to recover and rekindle his love of the art form. By pushing the boundaries of what jazz, rock, funk, R&B, electronic, and various other genres could sound like, he’d also pushed himself far past the limits of what most musicians and composers would deem attainable. But that was Davis’ modus operandi until he passed away—to dig deeper. To look ahead to the future and what was possible instead of continuously dredging up the past and reheating well-worn trends or habits.”

From his 32-minute ode to Duke Ellington (“He Loved Him Madly”) to his equally epic Afrofuturist tornado (“Calypso Frelimo”), there’s over two hours of awe-inspiring material to sink your teeth into. It’s one of the strangest yet most unforgettable records you’ll ever hear.

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Which Miles Davis has left the biggest impression on you? Let us know in the comments.