John Coltrane – Best of (CD)

Coltrane's Atlantic years, roughly 1959 to 1961, captured a musician in transformation, bridging the hard bop vocabulary he'd honed with Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk toward the sheets-of-sound intensity that would define his later work. These recordings belong to one of the most documented pivotal periods in jazz history, and even a six-track distillation offers a window into that restless, searching intelligence at full burn.