# What is the most overrated jazz album of all time?

> Canon status invites backlash, and these records have collected plenty of both. Say which one the critics oversold.

*By YPB Team · Published September 3, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/what-is-the-most-overrated-jazz-album-of-all-time*

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## Current results (no votes yet)

1. **Kind of Blue** — score 1000/1000
   Miles Davis's 1959 modal landmark and the best-selling jazz album ever, which is exactly why it draws the backlash.
2. **Getz/Gilberto** — score 710/1000
   The 1964 bossa nova summit that produced 'The Girl from Ipanema' and a thousand elevator playlists.
3. **A Love Supreme** — score 560/1000
   John Coltrane's 1964 four-part spiritual suite, canonised so thoroughly that dissent has become its own genre.
4. **The Shape of Jazz to Come** — score 560/1000
   Ornette Coleman's 1959 free-jazz manifesto, a landmark to some and an emperor's-new-clothes joke to others.
5. **Ascension** — score 560/1000
   Coltrane's 1965 forty-minute collective improvisation, praised as a breakthrough and heard by many as noise.
6. **Time Out** — score 485/1000
   The Dave Brubeck Quartet's 1959 odd-meter experiment, beloved by newcomers and dismissed by purists as cocktail jazz.
7. **Free Jazz** — score 485/1000
   Ornette Coleman's 1961 double-quartet recording that gave the movement its name and split listeners on contact.
8. **Blue Train** — score 397/1000
   Coltrane's only Blue Note album as a leader, a hard bop staple some call his most conventional record.
9. **Sketches of Spain** — score 397/1000
   The 1960 Davis and Gil Evans orchestral collaboration, adored as tone poetry and dismissed as jazz-adjacent mood music.
10. **Charlie Parker with Strings** — score 397/1000
   Parker's 1950 sessions backed by a string section, his own favourite and a lush disappointment to bebop devotees.
11. **Head Hunters** — score 291/1000
   Herbie Hancock's 1973 funk crossover, the best-selling jazz record of its decade and a sellout to its critics.
12. **Bitches Brew** — score 291/1000
   Miles Davis's 1970 electric double album, hailed as the birth of fusion and derided as formless studio collage.
13. **Mingus Ah Um** — score 291/1000
   Charles Mingus's 1959 album, routinely placed in all-time top tens ahead of the records Mingus fans actually argue for.
14. **The Köln Concert** — score 162/1000
   Keith Jarrett's 1975 improvised solo piano recital, the best-selling piano album ever and a favourite target of snobs.
15. **In a Silent Way** — score 162/1000
   Davis's 1969 ambient bridge into fusion, assembled from tape edits by producer Teo Macero.

Tags: music, jazz, classic