I thought I had reached the point of no return with Kind of Blue. Having listened to the classic 1959 Miles Davis album so many times, having owned it in so many of its reissued iterations, I suspected, feared even, that I might never desire to hear it again.

What was once my go-to platter for midnight mood music had slipped considerably down the list — and for no other reason than burnout. I hardly thought that yet another reissue of Kind of Blue — this time a deluxe 50th Anniversary Edition — would rekindle my passion for it. But somehow it did.

And I didn’t even get the full deluxe box, which includes, staggeringly, the original album on CD along with several studio segments, breakdowns and false starts; a second CD that compiles recordings by the Kind of Blue ensemble from 1958, and a 17-minute, previously unreleased concert version of the lead track “So What,” recorded in 1960 (and played at a faster tempo, but not as fast as Miles would play it further on in the ’60s).

The new set also includes a riveting 55-five minute documentary DVD on the making and impact of Kind of Blue.

These three elements were what the kind folks at Sony Legacy sent me in the mail. I did not receive the 12×12-inch full color, 60-page book or the LP on 180-gram blue vinyl. I just couldn’t bring myself to plunk down the $109 retail to own the extras. (But I’m hoping that the LP comes to market in a stand-alone format at some point.)

So some of you might be wondering: What’s the big deal about Kind of Blue? Most anyone with any awareness about music has at least heard of it. Probably more non-jazz fans own it than any other jazz album. Sony touts it as the best-selling jazz album of all time, having moved more than 3-million units. Rolling Stone put it No. 12 on its rock-intensive list of the 500 Greatest Albums of all Time.

Reams of scholarly words have been spilled about the importance and appeal of Kind of Blue, and I won’t try to recap them here. Let me try to explain it through personal experience.

This article appears in Oct 8-14, 2008.

Eric Snider is the dean of Bay area music critics. He started in the early 1980s as one of the founding members of Music magazine, a free bi-monthly. He was the pop music critic for the then-St. Petersburg...