Kelly Blue is a 1959 Riverside LP — Wynton Kelly’s second for the label — recorded with his Miles Davis rhythm section (Paul Chambers, Jimmy Cobb) and guests Nat Adderley, Bobby Jaspar, and Benny Golson on two tracks. Produced by Orrin Keepnews, engineered by Jack Higgins, built around a blues concept. Three originals, four standards. No vocals. No effects. No digressions.
John Coltrane's first album as leader for Atlantic gathers sessions from three dates in 1959, built around a rapid, major-third chord movement that has since become a standard saxophone exercise. Alongside the title track's difficulty sit gentler pieces named for his family, including the ballad Naima, showing the same harmonic ideas turned toward tenderness.
Recorded in two sessions in March and April 1959 at Columbia's 30th Street Studio, Kind of Blue found Miles Davis trading bebop's dense chord changes for loose modal sketches, handed to his sextet with barely any rehearsal. The gamble produced five tracks, from So What to Flamenco Sketches, that have shaped how musicians well outside jazz think about improvisation ever since.