Jackie McLean · 1961Jackie's Bag

Jackie’s Bag stems from two recording sessions, twenty months apart, bookending 1959 and 1960, the two years jazz tore up the rulebook and started having a full blown identity crisis.

In that span, Miles drops Kind of Blue and sets off the modal revolution, Trane drops Giant Steps and buries everyone in sheets of sound, and Ornette drops The Shape of Jazz to Come (and Change of the Century), basically telling everyone they’ve been doing it all wrong this whole time. And we got Jackie McLean sitting right in the thick of it, listening hard.

So when the needle drops on Jackie’s Bag, Jackie Mac is in straight-up Charlie Parker mode on "Quadrangle" and "Fidel", breezing through bebop lines over steady hi-hat, while "Blues Inn" sounds like it came right off Blakey’s Moanin’.

But then "Appointment in Ghana" comes out of nowhere like a haymaker and knocks you the fuck out.

From the first notes of the intro to the galvanizing AABA with syncopated accents and flowing bridge, this thing’s perfect. All that even before McLean steps up for the first solo and takes off like Jumpman at the All Star game.

The rest of the album also hits pretty hard, but if you do just one thing today, hit play on "Appointment in Ghana".