

This mammoth collection of cuts from 1955 to 1961 plays out like a private conversation between two jazz titans talking in their own harmonic language. On songs like the melancholic "'Round Midnight," Davis makes restrained and delicately phrased statements with his muted trumpet, while Coltrane blows through the feisty "Two Bass Hit" with his trademark intense expressive lyricism. This contrasting exploration of shared musical space comes to define the recordings, climaxing bewitchingly on the modal jazz cornerstone "So What."