What is the best-selling jazz album of all time?
Jazz finds itself at a very interesting crossroads in the year of our lord 2025. On the one hand, jazz has been a niche genre of music for well over half a century. Sure, there was a period of time when jazz was the form of popular music of its day. In fact, it arguably set a tone that pop music follows to this day. However, that period of time was the 1920s to the mid-1950s, when rock ‘n’ roll overtook it as the dominant form of pop music to this day. Thus, jazz finds itself in this hinterland where, to most, it’s a crusty, heady style of music.
The kind where ageing, Howard Moon types sit in reverent silence as another, older Howard Moon type blows himself into a prolapse trying to recreate a few Ornette Coleman tricks on the saxophone. On the other hand, jazz has spent the last ten years having a fairly spectacular renaissance. No less an album than Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly being the first mainstream appearances of the likes of Kamasi Washington and Thundercat.
Instrumentalists who lead a charge of jazz musicians, bringing the genre into the 21st century spectacularly. The kind of players whose technical ability is matched only by their influence from genres outside of the normal jazz dogma, taking cues from hip-hop, rock and mainstream pop music to bring the genre forward. As such, one can imagine the most successful version of modern jazz is one that comes directly in between those extremes.
An album that is traditional enough to appeal to old-school jazzers who still believe that the genre peaked in the 1950s, progressive enough to get young listeners in, yet not so far down either spectrum to alienate the casuals. While jazz fans are tribal and there will be a fair few raging at the heavens for me even calling this record a “jazz” album, there is one record that pretty clearly stands out as the most successful jazz record of all time.
What is the highest-selling jazz album of all time?
One can only imagine the dollar signs that appeared in the eyes of the record exec who first discovered Norah Jones. Born Geethali Shankar to American concert promoter Sue Jones and Indian sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar, her debut album Come Away with Me isn’t a successful record by jazz standards, it’s a successful record by anyone’s standards, selling 27 million copies worldwide and becoming the most successful jazz record ever made by quite some margin.
However, there are some caveats to that. There will be some that go to their grave saying that it’s a pop album and they may have a point. While Norah Jones was a devout fan of jazz whose primary inspirations were Bill Evans and Billie Holiday, her success probably counts against her inclusion in the eyes of purists. Much in the same way that calling Imagine Dragons a “rock band” might not encourage die-hard Led Zeppelin fans that “real rock ‘n’ roll” is still alive.
However, for those purists who think a singer on a jazz record makes it a pop album, they can have Miles Davis‘ Kind of Blue. Long since hailed as one of the best jazz albums ever made and the likely candidate for “the one jazz album people own”, the record has sold five million copies since release and is, without a doubt, the highest-selling instrumental jazz album of all time. A fitting monument to its legendary creator.
