Modal jazz was not unique to this album. Davis himself had previously used the same method on his 1958 "Milestones" album, the "'58 Sessions", and "Porgy and Bess" (1958), on which he used modal influences for collaborator Gil Evans's third stream compositions. Modal composition, with its reliance on scales and modes, represented, as Davis called it, "a return to melody." In a 1958 interview with Nat Hentoff of "The Jazz Review", Davis elaborated on this form of composition in contrast to the chord progression predominant in bebop, stating