168. Miles Davis / Kind of Blue (1959)

A review of Kind of Blue seems pointless. I'll muse for a few hundred words, and then quit. I imagine a world without this record, and that is a difficult world. It's a world where Bill Evans didn't sub for Wynton Kelly, a world in which countless musicians were struck by inspiration elsewhere. A world that is one milestone short of properly demarcating the future. A world where your brain is not irresistibly and without permission drawn to referencing all subsequent Miles Davis dates to this one. It's a world without the myth of it all being done in one take, a world where you don't have to buy that other CD to find out that what you missed was not really anything special. In this world, 1959 is not terribly different than 1958 or 1960. The Columbia vault is one cart of tapes lighter. It's a party that went one album different. It's the late night DJ who selects something by Cliff Brown instead. It's a world where the porter didn't see the CD on my passenger seat. It's a world where as a teenager, I didn't once stop my bicycle in the middle of an intersection to change the batteries of my headset. It's a world where my daughter was lulled into dreamland by someone else's trumpet, and awakened by someone who was not John Coltrane. It's a lot the same, but it's not the same, and I'd rather have it with Kind of Blue.

159. Buck Hill Quartet / This is Buck Hill (1978)

This is Buck Hill is Hill's recording debut on SteepleChase. From Washington D.C., Hill worked for the post office by day and was a hard driving driving tenor sax leader by night. So by the time we meet him in 1978, he is 51 years old and already possesses a fully developed tone and unique stylistic approach to modal material. Because of this late exposure, he is easy to miss, but he was and continues to be a fantastic player in the tradition of other big tenors that jazz listeners are more familiar with. For the debut he teams up with Billy Hart, Kenny Barron, and Buster Williams. They have a good sound that approaches the Prestige or Blue Note gold standard from two decades earlier. This session lacks the production gloss of newer Hill releases like Relax (which is also excellent). Notably, four of the album's seven tracks are Hill's originals. These are modal explorations with contributions from all members of the group. The four musicians play so well together that it's a hard sell for me to believe they weren't working together a lot longer than they were! Finding the vinyl could be a challenge but the recent CD is a worthwhile purchase and comes with a bonus take of Hill's "S.M.Y."

98. John Coltrane / Interstellar Space (1974)

This was actually recorded in 1967, but not released by Impulse! until '74, almost a decade after Coltrane's death. It's famously dense, but not impenetrable. Throughout the album, Coltrane demonstrates a litany of technical ideas by running through scales, stacking chords, and changing meters in snatches of modal improvisation. It is very experimental and obviously one of the more inaccessible works in the Coltrane canon. Interstellar Space was recorded shortly after the session that produced Stellar Regions, so many of these pieces share themes. "Saturn" is the longest piece, also the only one to lack bells in the intro. Some people latch onto "Venus" which is the closest thing to a conventional melody on the record. Rashied Ali plays like a mystic, and I often find myself listening to him more than Coltrane, whose explorations are searching but also noisy and make the ear weary. Ali's rhythms seem to accommodate any of Coltrane's fancies, or rather Coltrane is free to step in and out of them when it suits he is doing. This is huge music for 1967 that has been hotly debated, put down, or academically dissected ad nausea ever since. I'm happy that the package was expanded on CD to include the similarly minded "Leo" and "Jupiter Variation." 2013 has a lot more context for this type of musical activity than there was in 1967, and it's found a happy home with hundreds of people. That's the crime of being ahead of your time, that it takes everyone else that much lonegr to catch up. Gregg Bendian chose this album to recreate with Nels Cline (Interstellar Space Revisited), describing it in the liner as his love letter to free jazz drumming. In that regard, I can't think of a finer template. Listen to both, see where it takes you.

58. John Coltrane / My Favorite Things (1961)

Coltrane's fluidity and eloquence with modal jazz hit a stride during these sessions, and the resulting albums (including also Coltrane Plays the Blues, Coltrane's Sound and Coltrane Legacy) are watershed recordings in the Coltrane oeuvre. And who better to support his statement of purpose than Elvin Jones and McCoy Tyner? Tyner's creative inversions and voicings rain down with a lush selection of harmonic possibilities and the mystically driven Jones shuffles through several rhythms at once, giving Coltrane maximum flexibility for his improvisations. Steve Davis plays wonderful bass, sometimes suggesting a single static harmonic element while Coltrane and Tyner wrap blizzards of changing ideas around it. The music is pleasant and listenable, infused equally with strains of Eastern ragas and the blues. Coltrane's soprano sax is haunting and delicate, assertive but not an overriding presence. It's remarkable that such individualistic music comes from a set without a single original. "But Not For Me" deftly reharmonized with Coltrane changes, and his long tenor solo is one of my favorite choruses from any musician, hands down.

17. John Coltrane / Soultrane (1958)

Coltrane's Prestige releases get overlooked unfairly, usually by the same people who prefer his innovative compositions or wilder explorations like those on Blue Train or Giant Steps. But if someone who honestly enjoys jazz can still relegate Soultrane to the sideline after hearing the unbridled modality of "Russian Lullaby" or 10+ minutes of pure soul in Eckstine's "I Want to Talk About You," then maybe that person would be better served by another type of music. The music on Soultrane is stunning, and a great starting point to understand modal soloing in jazz, a ferocious technique that Ira Gitler described as "sheets of sound." Garland, Chambers and Taylor back up Coltrane heroically and have a keen sixth sense for what he is doing. The set is comprised of covers, including a few cooky ones like the aforementioned "Russian Lullaby" or Broadway's "You Say You Care." These bring a strong, focused urgency to the program, a quality that is always present in Coltrane's work but is laid plain in the standards.