Miles Davis: Walkin' (180g) (LP)

Back in New York, having successfully battled his personal demons, and leading the incredible Horace Silver/Percy Heath/Kenny Clarke rhythm section, Miles Davis recorded two sessions in April 1954 that took both his own music and jazz in general in a new direction. The quintet, featuring underground legend Davey Schildkraut on alto saxophone, gave the first hint of the trumpeter's haunting, subdued style and introduced his classic composition "Solar". Even more influential was the sextet session with J.J. Johnson and Lucky Thompson, which took advantage of long-playing record technology with two extended jams that heralded both the return of modern jazz musicians to a focus on the blues and the arrival of the funky hard bop era. Together on the LP Walkin', this music (one of the first recorded by Rudy Van Gelder for Prestige) created one of the first essential albums in the Miles Davis canon. This masterpiece, a cornerstone of hard bop, is reissued in the audiophile Original Jazz Classics series.