condition (record/cover): NM / NM

Insert and obi included.

Los Angeles, 1945, and Coleman Hawkins puts together a band including the young Howard McGhee and records a session that sits exactly on the seam between swing and bop. Hawkins was the senior figure who consistently hired the modernists when nobody else would, and the results here are fascinating: his own playing rooted in the harmonic thinking he had been developing since the twenties, McGhee's trumpet already speaking the new language, and the two of them meeting somewhere in the middle without any apparent friction. Sharp, punchy, superbly recorded for its date.

Japanese Capitol pressing. The moment of transition, caught by someone who was on both sides of it.