However you define it - and it's better not to try - the word jazz implies a vast spectrum of music, and an immense body of recordings. So how do you pick just a handful? To narrow it down, I excluded all but a very few vital items from the 1920s, 1930s and early 1940s. So there's no Jelly Roll Morton (even though his 1926 recordings offer superb sonics for the time), no Bix Beiderbecke, no Fats Waller, no Art Tatum, no Django Reinhardt... But then my favourites from the 1950s filled up the list before I'd done more than scratch the surface. So 1960 became a natural cut-off point. Kind Of Blue is a key recording, but then many people already have it. Indeed, I could have filled the whole list with Miles Davis. Limiting him to one album meant leaving out, for example, the great quintet sessions recorded in 1956, issued by Prestige as Workin', Steamin', Cookin' and Relaxin', not to mention Sketches Of Spain from 1960.
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