Article: KIND OF NEW A HALF-CENTURY AFTER ITS RELEASE, MILES DAVIS'S MASTERPIECE IS STILL THE BEST JAZZ ALBUM AROUND

Jazz, an improviser's art, is most purely itself as live performance. Not that recording hasn't been important to the music. Jazz and the proc ess of electrical recording are almost exact contemporaries, and the popularity of each contributed enormously to the popularity of the other. Once jazz lost its mainstream appeal - just around the time, in fact, music on rec ords shifted from 78s to LPs - recordings became all the more important in propagating a music losing its access to radio and the new, even more influential medium of television.

Yet there remains a fundamental conflict in jazz between what happens onstage and what happens in the studio: One is about contingency, the other about ...

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