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.

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 · 1958 Spin it Again - Bill Evans alone at the piano in 1958, holding one bass note for eleven minutes while the right hand just wanders, and somehow that's enough.

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.

Keith Jarrett · 1975 Spin it Again - Keith Jarrett sat down at a bad piano in Cologne with no plan and played for an hour, and it turns out that was enough.

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.

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.

Bill Evans · 1959 Spin it Again - Bill Evans in 1959, playing piano like he was working something out privately and just forgot to close the door.

Talk Talk · 1991 Spin it Again - Mark Hollis walked away from everything that made Talk Talk famous and came back with something that sounds like a room breathing.

Leon Thomas · 1973 Spin it Again - Leon Thomas yodeling over spiritual jazz like he's trying to contact something the rest of us stopped believing in a long time ago.

Pharoah Sanders · 1994 Spin it Again - Pharoah Sanders in his sixties, still finding the part of the tenor saxophone that sounds like it's coming from somewhere you can't quite name.

Steely Dan · 1974 Spin it Again - Fagen and Becker figured out that jazz could be smug and it still sounds like a Tuesday night that went somewhere unexpected.

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.