After 27 years in jazz, Coleman's first major feature in a leading music magazine came in 1980. There has not been much else since. Yet, when he replaced John Coltrane in the Miles Davis Quintet in 1963, his star seemed in the ascendance, appearing on four important Davis albums – Seven Steps to Heaven, In Europe, My Funny Valentine and Four and More, plus Herbie Hancock's classic Maiden Voyage from 1965. Post Davis he quietly assembled an impeccable discography and by the mid-1980s his playing was in the full flower of artistic maturity, acquiring a commanding grandeur and vitality that's perfectly captured on this album. The first two tracks – ‘They Say It's Wonderful’ and ‘Good Morning Heartache’ – are breathtaking saxophone tour de forces, object lessons in the science of building a rising line, manipulating tonal density (often using alternative fingering) and the use of side-slipping, double breathing and contrasting meters. Together with his technical command of the sax, from a resounding Bb bell tone to notes an octave above the instrument's normal range (all perfectly in tune), he shrewdly organises these elements to give a sense of direction to his playing that produces a series of choruses, each building one upon the other that leads the listener to the kind of climax rivalled only by Pavarotti on ‘Nessun Dorma’. Other highlights include ‘Laig Gobblin' Blues’ in 5/4 featuring Mabern, a resounding, percussive pianist, ‘Io’ in 7/4, ‘Up Jumped Spring’ in 3/4, where both Coleman and Mabern generate a hypnotic swaying feel that is almost hypnotic, and ‘Soul Eyes’ that elegantly captures a true saxophone master at work. As The New Yorker pointed out in 1995, “Coleman is a marvel; there isn't a sax player who knows his instrument better or imparts so much knowledge in every marathon solo”. In 2015 he was deservedly named an NEA Jazz Master.