1. Miles DavisMilestones

I listened to Milestones a lot when I was studying when I was about 18. My brother had it on all the time and I remember being really impressed by it, inspired by it, in fact, because he had John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley on the album and I thought Miles was such an innovative, awesome, groundbreaking creative person and I was into everything he did really. Especially due to the fact that he’d worked extensively with Charlie Parker. He was doing a music course at a university in New York but he got bored with that because he didn’t feel that he could learn anything from it, because they just pushed all of this really conventional stuff at him. He ended up playing with Charlie Parker on 52nd Street instead because he said he could learn so much more from Charlie Parker than he could from any academic musicians. I played it so much I brainwashed myself with it really. There are some really great tracks on it, ‘Two Bass Hit,’ ‘Straight, No Chaser’…