For Christmas 2025, I received a poster listing 100 albums everyone should hear before they kick the proverbial bucket. So, in 2026, I intend to listen to every last one of ‘em and write about it here. Some I already adore, some I’ve never heard of, and some I’m utterly baffled as to why anyone would waste their time. Either way I’ll be sharing my thoughts and impressions on all 100 records throughout the year. I hope you enjoy the ride!

I quite like jazz, but all too often in my flat it ends up being background music. We might throw some Louis Armstrong or Rolf Kuhn on the record player while we have dinner, or get Siri to “play some jazz” while we have coffee of a Saturday morning. So, it was quite nice to have an excuse to actively listen to a jazz album this week, namely Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue.

Christ it’s good.

Davis’ modal jazz masterpiece is rightly held up as one of the most influential and important jazz albums of all time – if not the jazz album – and it’s not difficult to see why. Away from Davis himself, every single player on this record is phenomenal. The way drummer Jimmy Cobb sits in the pocket, emerging only with perfectly timed accents, provides the canvas for everyone else to paint extraordinary soundscapes. The twin saxophonists of Coltrane and Adderly even threaten to overshadow Davis himself at times, particularly on my personal favourite All Blues.

I think the most impressive thing about this album though is just how much space there is. Us rock musicians can often be accused of overplaying, yet counter-intuitively this free-form jazz album leaves acres of breathing room between runs, trills and individual notes for the vibe to just hang.

Naturally, Davis’ own playing comes to the fore in these moments, his impeccable choice of notes sounding both ethereal and unmistakably human all at once. Blue In Green in particular demonstrates this quality perfectly. I think it’s this element of the album that makes it such an approachable jazz record, particularly in comparison to the more dramatic In A Silent Way or the more esoteric Bitches Brew.

The fact Kind of Blue is rapidly approaching 70 years old is staggering for an album that sounds this exquisite. Utterly timeless. Utterly magnificent. It’ll be going back into heavy rotation for the foreseeable.