Now that Universal has killed off the once-ubiquitous Original Jazz Classics label, home of hundreds of reissues of vintage sessions from the Prestige catalogue, Avid's budget-priced two-fers such as this edition are fast becoming the way for new listeners to encounter the music's past. This volume documents Coltrane's recorded association with his then Miles Davis' bandmate Garland.

On paper the two might have seemed an unlikely pairing – the earnest, soul-searching saxophonist, the very acme of jazz modernity, and a pianist whose sparkly inventions often found him slapped down as a lightweight (or at times ‘cocktail’-styled) talent.

Yet like the Davis quintet itself, theirs was a teaming that thrived on contrasts. Three of these ‘classics’ (Soul Junction, High Pressure and Dig It!) feature a quintet with the young Donald Byrd in the front-line; and although identical in instrumentation to the Davis unit, this was a line-up with a vibe all its own, Byrd then sticking close to the lessons of the late Clifford Brown.

The fourth is strictly a co­shared quartet album (it was later re-released solely under Coltrane's name as Traneing In). What you get, in effect, is oodles of the type of jazz then prominent in New York's clubland, that is hard-bop, blues, choice standards and pithy reworkings of established bop classics, and as a result each album plays like a mini live set of its own. Hearing Coltrane in these settings is fascinating, not because they find him on the cusp of greater discoveries but because they remind you how well he played the game of modern jazz by its then existing rules. On things like ‘Soft Winds’ and the long ‘Soul Junction’ his roots are plain as day. The future is well hinted at too, never more so than on the full-on ‘sheets of sound’ assault of ‘Two Bass Hit’.

Maybe not indispensable jazz then, but full of character, individuality and charm. Recommended.