Does the world need another audiophile reissue of Kind of Blue? This was the obvious question to ask upon news that Chad Kassem’s Analogue Productions was joining the party. The album’s arrival in the mail (yes, of course, I bought one) signaled that something special might be happening: the classy hard-box slip case with the wooden dowel spine, the Stoughton tip-on gatefold jacket graced with well-reproduced session photos, a handsome booklet, and, finally, the LP: a 200gm UHQR pressing on off-white Clarity vinyl.

Does the package justify its lavishness? Is it worth the $100 price tag? Most importantly, how does it sound?

Little need be said about this Miles Davis 1959 masterpiece. It’s the best-selling jazz album ever, arguably the best jazz album and the culmination of Miles’s experiments with modal jazz (structured on scales rather than chords). It’s a send-off, too, as Kind of Blue is the only studio album made by this entire band (Miles, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Cannonball Adderley, Paul Chambers, and Jimmy Cobb); the members soon moved on, as did Miles’s music. There’s a purity to this music, which is almost completely improvised: Four of its five tracks are unedited first takes.

Finally, as recorded in Columbia’s spacious (and long ago demolished) 30th Street Studio by Fred Plaut (one of the greats but unsung, because Columbia never listed engineers on its credits), it sounds as lifelike as almost any Rudy Van Gelder Blue Note.

In the mid-1990s, Michael Hobson of Classic Records put out several vinyl reissues of Kind of Blue, mastered by Bernie Grundman from the original three-track tapes. By Grundman’s account, he did not tweak the EQ; it was already perfect. He only monitored the dials carefully, ensuring that the center track was consistently distributed to the left and right channels.

He made one other tweak. Sony/Columbia had recently discovered that the tape machine used to record one session was running a little slow, making Side A of the album, on playback, sound a little fast and higher in pitch by a quarter tone. Sony used the backup tape, which was running at the correct speed, for all subsequent reissues. Grundman manually adjusted the three-track master tape so that it matched the correction.

From Grundman’s masters, Classic stamped out limited-edition LPs on 180gm vinyl, then 200gm vinyl, then a double album with both versions of Side A (kind of silly) and the one alternate take of “Flamenco Sketches.” Finally, Hobson released a four-LP package of one-sided LPs, each mastered at 45rpm—one-sided to minimize the resonance between the platter and the bottom surface of the vinyl. I have A/B’d a few one-sided vs two-sided 45rpm LPs; the difference was slight but noticeable.

All of Classic’s LPs were revelations—Columbia’s own pressings of the 1970s sounded flat and lifeless—and each new edition sounded better than the one before it. Until now, that four-LP, 45rpm set was the best of all vinyl reissues, although it didn’t quite match the original “six-eye” pressing, which sported crisper cymbals, tighter bass, and a warmer (though not necessarily more accurate) midrange.

Over the past decade, a few other labels have taken shots at the title. On the album’s 50th anniversary, Sony/Columbia put out a blue-colored LP which was bafflingly noisy. Music On Vinyl, based in Europe, released an LP mastered from 24/96 digital files; I never heard it, but Stereophile‘s Michael Fremer gave it a very favorable review. More recently, Mobile Fidelity released a two-LP, 45rpm reissue mastered not from the original tapes but from a recent Sony two-channel mixdown. It was disappointing—the bass in particular was too boomy. It was the only letdown in MoFi’s otherwise superb series of Miles Davis 45s.

When Classic Records went out of business, Analogue Productions bought its assets, including Grundman’s masters from the original tapes of Kind of Blue. For this new edition, Kassem renewed the license for the material, had technician Gary Salstrom create plates, and pressed the records by hand, one at a time, on an in-house, heavily modified, temperature-controlled Finebilt press.

The result (drum rolls) is the best-sounding Kind of Blue ever, superior in every way to all previous pressings, including the original. The pressing is superquiet, allowing the slightest of details to pop out from the black backdrop.

Cobb’s drumkit is spooky real. I’ve heard this album, in one version or another, hundreds of times, and there are fine touches in Cobb’s snare swooshes and cymbal taps—accents on accents, rhythms within rhythms—that I’ve never heard before. Chambers’s bass lines are stunningly clear: the notes he’s playing, the pluck of the strings, the glow of the wood. There are also new layers of detail in Miles’s mouthpiece manipulations, Evans’s pedal work, and the sheer beauty of Coltrane’s and Adderley’s saxophones.

The music—and that’s what we’re here for—is mesmerizing. I sat listening as if I was hearing it for the first time (as much as this is possible for an album heard hundreds of times); there it was, right before my eyes and ears.

Kassem is pressing 25,000 copies of this new edition. If they’re sold out by the time you read this, don’t despair: He plans to follow up with a two-LP package mastered at 45rpm, also stamped from Grundman’s perfectly preserved metal parts.

The chase is eternal. This reissue holds the brass ring, for now.

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