All Miles: The Prestige Albums

This set of Prestige recordings contains Miles’ first Albums as a leader and which include many of the absolute classics of 1950’s modern jazz. It charts the early development of the legendary Miles Davis Quintet with John Coltrane, Red Garland, Paul Chambers and Philly Jo Jones, who soon after leaving Prestige for CBS produced two of the finest jazz albums ever made - ‘Kind of Blue’ and ‘Milestones’. Miles’ Prestige Albums should be in every jazz fans collection in my opinion, and these recordings, re-mastered in the 1980’s, are just fine. The one big problem with this box set is that is occupies a large amount of shelf space unnecessarily, and is cumbersome to handle. This box has 14 CD’s (one Album per CD) with no track information on the individual CD. You have to get out the accompanying booklet every time you want to know what track you are listening to – very annoying. They could have got all this music on just 7 discs quite easily and had proper sleeve information with each disc, but they didn’t. What a pity. The music is *****, the packaging is *

Just to be clear - I am commenting on the box set pictured - thats a small clam shell type box with 14 CDs in it - Amazon seem to have put some reviews of the earlier version on here - anyway you get one album per CD (sometimes not too long, varying from about 30 to about 50 mins per CD) - the front cardboard cover of each disc features the original front cover , but the back has a nice clear set of info suitable for the CD cover area (includes track names, times , info on all the players and dates of recording - so no booklet needed really as all important info is here)Quality of sound to my ears is uniformly good - very good considering the age they were recorded.Altogether, cool as flip :)

I would have liked a booklet containing the original 'liner notes' but other than that; the remasters are great (although I've not heard them all yet), and the meagre packaging might have annoyd me if I hadn't intended to put all the albums in my 100xCD storage case.

EXCELLENT

as other reviewers have noted, gone are the original sleeve notes, which is a shame. More importantly, these digital remasterings date back to 1987 or thereabouts. It won't diminish the music, but I do believe the later remasterings sound even better - I can't understand why they weren't used, given that this set was released very recently, but in any case you pays your money etc etc. Wonderful music, and extraordinary that this only the beginning...

What are those people on about who are complaining about the lack of sleeve notes and the 1987 remastering when you are paying around £2.40 per album, which is about what you would pay for these albums on vinyl in the mid 1970s.What you are getting here, clearly is the breadth of the whole Miles Prestige catalogue. There are better packaged and rostered versions of these albums bought individually but you would pay between > double to four times for them.The rationale here is that the music is perfectly good enough and if the listener wants to read background on the individual albums there are plenty of easily accessible sources available online for example.These are great albums that encapsulate the coming of age of John Coltrane among their treasures.

There are many Miles Box sets, as you probably noticed if browsing, including one called the 'perfect' collection. For my money though the Prestige one is the best.Much as I like Kind of Blue, Nefertiti, Miles Smiles and try to like Bitches Brew, the albums I always come back to are the wonderful 50's Prestige albums. I love their lyricism, their hope and beauty. The 60's gets the publicity, but its the 50's where you would find me, in a sharp suit, given the chance, in some cocktail bar booth or small club shaking my foot and sipping my drink. These records are full of innovation and energy. Notice how many of the records have gerunds for titles. These are works of movement and life. As good as jazz gets. This is a must-buy collection. You should be 'downloadin' !

This is a fantastic box of very well known music, if you are a fan of earlyish Miles you cant go wrong, its all here. Very good value, good strong box, card sleeves, my reason for 4 star is the lack of book information. Maybe there is an assumtion that if you want this material you already know its history and importance in Mile's development prior to his Columbia recordings. Given the thorough information supplied with most Miles product a good informative booklet/book is not to much to ask for. Transfers are very good and this box gives us a chance to consider a very interesting period in Mile's output. Most of the CD's come with extra tracks of outakes, nothing that is not already available, the big advantage of this set is to have it all together at a very good price. One thing that struck me in our age of 75 minute Cd's is the relatively short running time of each album. Sometimes 25 minutes of genius is worth 75 minutes of filler, at least you don't have to get up and turn the vinyl over.