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Although often overshadowed today by better known titles like "A Love Supreme" and "My Favorite Things", John Coltrane's 1962 Impulse! album "Coltrane" (not to be confused with the Prestige label release of the same name from 1957) is probably the one that best summarizes everything that made him arguably the greatest Jazz saxophonist of all time. Falling chronologically between his more accessible early work and his later avant-garde excursions, the music on this set manages to walk the precise middle ground between these two major phases of his career, capturing a near-perfect stage in his evolution where all his ideas and identities managed to be at play, and perfectly in balance with each other, all at once. If someone told me I could only have one Coltrane album in my collection, this would be the one I'd pick, because literally everything one thinks of when they think of John Coltrane - The trademark sheets of sound, the raga-like modality, the masterful balladry, the fiery, free blowing that borders on the frenetic, the yearning spirituality - it's all here in one sublime package.