By Graham K. Rogers

In 1985, about a year after arriving in Illinois to study, I was driving late one night around the twin cities of Bloomington and Normal (named after the Normal School of Education) in a massive Dodge I had just bought. The car would have been totally inappropriate for English roads, but I was in the USA, living on Route 66 and that was right for the time.

As I cruised the city's roads, I was listening to WGLT the PBS station that the university ran. Some evenings it had a jazz program and I heard a Miles Davis track called All Blues, for the first time. The moment, the time, the streets have been fixed in my memory since.

I called in at the radio station the next day and identified the album as Kind of Blue by Miles Davis. I tracked it down at a mall a few hours later and it was one of the first records in my CD collection. It is still with me now. The CBS disk has no release date on it but the five tunes included were originally released in 1959 and there have been a number of issues since then.

The latest remastering comes from a source that I usually find old classical music on: Pristine Classical. Andrew Rose has examined the recording and taken a new direction with the sound, using the XR-remastering techniques that have brought back to full richness many classical recordings (I am particularly pleased with a 1932 recording of Mozart's 7th Violin Concerto with Yehudi Menuhin aged 16), Pristine has a new recording of Kind of Blue.

Five versions of the album are offered: MP3, 16-bit FLAC, 24-bit FLAC and two CD options (with or without cover and case for €14 or €10 respectively). The MP3 version is priced at €7, with the FLAC recordings at €8 and €14 - 325 baht and 570 baht). A long version of "So What" is available on the Pristine Kind of Blue page.

I ordered the MP3 via Paypal which charged my credit card 297.61 baht. The download was available immediately as a single, uncompressed MP3 file which took just over 5 minutes to appear on my disk with current Bangkok speeds and was shown as 110 MB.

When the download was complete, I dropped the file onto the iTunes icon in the Dock and made a back to back comparison of "All Blues". This was not all that easy as the single file makes navigation to a specific part less easy (Classics on Line provide separate files for movements), but as "All Blues" starts at 25:00 it was a little easier.

There is a slightly more full, or mellower sound to some parts, especially the piano playing of Bill Evans and John Coltrane's tenor sax. A lot of minor detail could also be heard especially with the quiet drum sections and the double bass strings. Other tracks also gave me this more full sound experience.

There are no recommendations here. Up to now I have usually stuck with the first version of any music I buy (with one or two minor exceptions - usually concerning a dissatisfying recording). My original CD purchase of Kind of Blue has remained one of my favourites for 27 years and this Pristine Classical version will sit comfortably below in the iTunes listing. For anyone who does not have a copy, or has not experienced this seminal album - the best-selling jazz album of all time - this would be a good place to start.

Graham K. Rogers teaches at the Faculty of Engineering, Mahidol University in Thailand. He wrote in the Bangkok Post, Database supplement on IT subjects. For the last seven years of Database he wrote a column on Apple and Macs.