Description

The best-selling jazz album ever made wears a photograph its photographer never intended for a record. Jay Maisel took the picture of Miles Davis on stage at the Apollo Theater for himself. Months later Columbia called to ask whether he had any shots of Davis it could use, and this one became the cover of Kind of Blue: Davis bent over his trumpet in a pool of light, his fingers blurred on the valves, almost everything else swallowed by deep blue shadow.

Maisel came to photography from painting. He studied at Cooper Union and then at Yale under the colour theorist Josef Albers, graduating in 1953 before deciding to work with a camera instead of a brush. He wrote that "if the light is everywhere, the drama is gone," and the cover is a demonstration of that idea. He was never fully satisfied with it, and wished the image had been sharper. The music historian Ashley Kahn felt otherwise, writing that the photo "floats above jazz history in an ether all its own."

Maisel guarded the picture closely. In 2009 the programmer Andy Baio released Kind of Bloop, a chiptune tribute album, with a pixel art version of the cover. Maisel's lawyers demanded damages, and the dispute ended in 2011 with a $32,500 settlement, a case still cited in arguments about fair use. Kind of Blue was released on 17 August 1959. Maisel died in 2026 at the age of 95, with this accidental album cover as his best known work.

Credit

Cover photography by Jay Maisel