Miles Davis’ album Walkin’ is one of those albums that should be in every jazz fan’s album collection. Recorded after he had famously cured himself of drug addiction and had returned, rejuvenated, to New York in the spring of 1954, and determined to get his career back on track after having been written off by club owners and booking agents as a hopeless junkie, the Walkin’ sessions were the third and fourth he recorded in 1954 as he set about rehabilitating his career. Quite what the lightweight Dave Schildkraut was doing on the 3 April session was as much a mystery to jazz fans then as it is now, but the only reason you buy Walkin’ is for the 25 April tracks, ‘Walkin’’ and ‘Blue ‘n’ Boogie’. Here Davis’ solos are the epitome of less is more: on the latter, for example, he unselfconsciously builds a masterful diatonic line using basic triads and ‘playing silences’; while the former is generally regarded as one of his very best solos. The ‘bonus’ tracks are from Volume 1 of the two-volume Blue Note set Miles Davis (they were the only albums he recorded for Blue Note). Volume 1 comprised two sessions, and the six tracks from the 9 May 1952 session are solid. The harmonically-savvy pianist Gil Coggins, incidentally, left jazz two years later to pursue a career in real estate.