Stop me if I've said this before (er, actually, don't please Ed. I'm raising a valid point!) but can someone – anyone – please tell me why releases of this sort continue to appear? Who doesn't already have these Miles Davis classics in their library? After all, isn't Kind of Blue one of the best-selling jazz albums ever, already marketed in all manner of deluxe, bonus-track-included, audio enhanced, all singing and dancing, covered in gold dust editions from Columbia's parent label Sony?

And, with all this material out there on a remarkably inexpensive box set which collates all the Miles/Coltrane recordings for Columbia (plus a tranche of alternate and previously unissued takes), who on earth is going to plump for this no-frills Avid? The music, of course, is marvellous throughout, Coltrane emerging from the sometimes hesitant yet already arresting individual heard on ‘Round About Midnight to the essayer of such heart-stopping solos as those on ‘Blue in Green’ and ‘So What’ from Kind of Blue Between comes Milestones – my own pick of the bunch – which shows how the pattern of the 12-bar blues (three of its five tracks are blues) could bring forth such varied riches. As usual with Avid, there are some bonuses, in this instance two live versions of ‘So What’ from the 1961 Davis quintet featuring Hank Mobley, one of which (taped at Carnegie Hall) the late Ronnie Scott once cited as among his favourite on-record Mobley They're great, of course – and at CH Miles plays with incredible fire and drive – but what they're doing here is anybody's guess. Mastered off of vinyl rather than the original session tapes, this issue is more than a little indulgent and pointless. The stars are for the contents, not the concept.