Before tracks like “Juicy Fruit” and “You, Me and He” made him a force in ’80s R&B, James Mtume was a jazz percussionist—most famously with Miles Davis during his revolutionary early-’70s period, but also with McCoy Tyner, Sonny Rollins, Pharoah Sanders and others. What follows here isn’t just a playlist focusing on Mtume’s highlights as a collaborator, but a snapshot of jazz as it moved from the liberations of post-bop into material that was freer, more spiritual, and often more Afrocentric—a shift Mtume, in his way, helped precipitate, and whose liberations guided him even when he moved in new musical directions.