Without a doubt this is the first album that walloped me upside the head and scrambled my brains. I think I heard this in 1961 or 62 about 3 years after it came out. At the time I was all about the clarinet, practicing up to four hours a day. Our band in junior and then senior highschool was literally nationally known - in 1967 Aaron Copeland came to us for 2 months and rehearsed his pieces on the fly as he arranged them for highschool bands and orchestras. As a result most of my later school years was immersed in 'band' music which amounted to current musicals - West Side Story, TV Themes - a lot of Henry Mancini, and Jazz in the key Dixieland. Somehow - I believe it was at a friend's house - I heard this album and was dropped to the floor with awe. I soon acquired my own copy (shoplifting a vinyl album is a bitch, but doable with good timing) and played it so much that my first poems lasted just as long as each cut - not intentionally. I became a fan of Miles, or the Miles of that era including Sketches of Spain, but wandered off into Coltrane's later works as I grew up... also I found his later work to be lost, and since i myself was rather lost, it left me quite unsettled. I like some of those albums better now, but in the end, I would say this is the gold standard of the post-war jazz era, and a "miracle of rare device" ... on a side note, the recording engineer, Tom Dowd was a genius in his own right. (There is a hard-to-find documentary called Tom Dowd and the language of music - he started with Miles and ended by discovering the Allman Brothers, having recorded Aretha and Otis, and the Cream along the way) -- so Tom, in recording this miked Miles separately and then put his pencil eraser down on the surface of the tape reel as the final take was being made, thus retarding Mile's entrances by a fraction of a second and creating a truly impossible and profoundly introverting sound... or rather completed the creation of that sound.
