John Coltrane · 1965 Spin it Again - Four movements, one theme, and Coltrane playing like a man who had already settled the argument with God and just wanted you to hear how it ended.

John Coltrane · 1960 Spin it Again - Coltrane changed the harmonic vocabulary of jazz with this record and then basically walked away from it, which is either the most confident or most restless thing a musician has ever done.

Bill Evans Trio · 1965 Spin it Again - Bill Evans at the Club Saint-Germain, 1965, and the piano sounds like something you overhear through a half-open door at 2am and decide not to interrupt.

Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band · 1969 Spin it Again - Don Van Vliet recorded it in a house where the band wasn't allowed to sleep, and somehow that's exactly what it sounds like.

Moondog · 1969 Spin it Again - A blind man in a Viking helmet stood on a Manhattan street corner for twenty years and still made something quieter and stranger than anything recorded inside a studio that decade.

Wayne Shorter · 1964 Spin it Again - Wayne Shorter with Miles Davis's rhythm section, no Miles, just four nights of recording until they got it right, and you can hear exactly what that kind of quiet pressure does to a tenor player.

Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers · 1961 Spin it Again - Art Blakey hits the kit like he's settling an old argument, and Lee Morgan and Wayne Shorter spend six tracks proving him right.

Jimmy Smith · 1960 Spin it Again - Jimmy Smith found that groove where a Hammond B-3 stops sounding like church and starts sounding like the back of a cab at 2am, and he just lived there for forty minutes.

Lee Morgan · 1964 Spin it Again - Lee Morgan walked into Van Gelder's studio with a blues shuffle and a hard bop trumpet and left behind forty minutes that still sound better at midnight than most things sound at any hour.

Sun Ra · 1963 Spin it Again - Sun Ra in 1963, before most people had a framework for what he was doing, pointing a microphone at the part of the room where the sound goes to die.

Bill Evans Trio · 1962 Spin it Again - Bill Evans plays like he's trying not to wake someone up, and Scott LaFaro is dead eleven days after this was recorded.

Eric Dolphy · 1964 Spin it Again - Eric Dolphy had about eight months left to live when he recorded this, and somehow the flute already knew it.

Duke Ellington & John Coltrane · 1962 Spin it Again - Duke Ellington playing like a man with nothing left to prove, Coltrane playing like a man with everything still to say, and somehow they both ended up in the same room on the same night.

Charles Mingus · 1963 Spin it Again - Six musicians playing like they're mourning something they can't name, recorded in one day because Mingus knew it wouldn't get better than that.

Aretha Franklin · 1967 Spin it Again - Aretha walked into Muscle Shoals in January, got into a fight with her husband on the second day, and still cut the title track before anyone could stop her.

Roberta Flack · 1969 Spin it Again - Roberta Flack walked into a studio in 1969 and played piano like she had thirty more years of heartbreak to account for, and it turns out she was right.

Miles Davis · 1969 Spin it Again - Miles Davis turned the volume down so low in 1969 that you had to lean in, and once you did, you couldn't hear anything else the same way again.

Bill Evans Trio · 1963 Spin it Again - Bill Evans in 1963, late, quiet, the piano doing exactly what a piano should do when there's nothing left to prove.

John Coltrane · 1964 Spin it Again - The Coltrane quartet in the year before everything broke open, playing like they already heard what was coming and decided to take their time anyway.

John Coltrane · 1963 Spin it Again - John Coltrane slowing all the way down in 1963 and proving he didn't need to burn anything to make you feel it.