Jazz 7: Speak No Evil

We all need a little help from our friends, and for the current entry in this series I'm taking a little help from my daily newspaper of choice. This comes from yesterday's Groan, and its Kyle Eastwood, Clint's son, answering the question:

If I was going to buy one album to start my jazz collection, what should it be - other than yours, obviously?

Well, a lot of people say Kind of Blue by Miles Davis, but it's hard for me to pick one. There's probably about five or 10. One of my favourites is Speak No Evil by Wayne Shorter.

That might not be in my first 10, but it's certainly a CD that I'm 'confident should belong in a jazz collection of excellence' - which was the starting rubric for the series. Here's what The Book says about Speak No Evil (1964 - 42 minutes):

For us, this is by far Shorter's most satisfying record. The understanding with [Herbie] Hancock was total and telepathic, two harmonic adventurers on the loose at a moment when, with John Coltrane still around as a tutelary genius, the rules of jazz improvisation were susceptible to almost endless interrogation.

And see the review at Allmusic.

[Links to the rest of the series.]