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As timeless as the classic riff that anchors its opener and best known track, "Stolen Moments", Oliver Nelson's "The Blues and the Abstract Truth" is the bandleader and saxophonist's crowning achievement. Working here with a much smaller ensemble relative to the big band work he was at the time best known for, Nelson gathered an all-star septet for this stunning, post-modern take on the Blues idiom. In addition to trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, multi-reedist Eric Dolphy, bassist Paul Chambers, and Nelson himself taking up both alto and tenor saxophone duties, it's notable that two of the key players on this album, pianist Bill Evans and drummer Roy Haynes, also played on Miles Davis' watershed "Kind of Blue", as it's clear that Nelson was taking the ideas for a modernist jazz re-interpretation of the blues that Davis laid out as a jumping off point from which to explore those concepts and expand upon them. The result is a Post Bop classic, full of slinking grooves and infectious hooks, the accessibility of which allows it to also be replete with knotty solos and flourishes of avant-garde dissonance and atonality, helping to expose a mainstream audience to these more experimental concepts and sounds by wrapping them in song structures that are so tight and hook-heavy they defy any potential resistance, coaxing the listener into embracing them in a way they otherwise might not were they presented in a less seductive and melodically rich context.