The quantity and diversity of great jazz albums recorded in the 1960s means that any list of great albums that claims to be in any way 'definitive' is on very shaky ground. Nonetheless, the albums highlighted below are benchmarks in the history of jazz on record and if you are discovering jazz for the first time then you've just found the perfect place to start. Let's start with a masterpiece...

No matter how many times you approach this album it’s always greater than the sum of whatever parts you compile. Yes, it’s perfect, yes, it’s ambitious, yes it crosses over far from the usual jazz conceptions, yes it is couched as a suite of meditations-in-kind that give it a formal design way beyond 99 per cent of jazz albums. Yes, Coltrane plays like a man inspired by something more than the job immediately to hand, as do the other three musicians involved, and yes the themes are unremittingly sober. But that only scratches the surface of this album’s achievement. You can’t lay it at the door of Coltrane’s aspirations, because good intentions often lead to artistic disasters in music as well as every other aesthetic discipline, but it is possible that his own complete commitment to his testimony of spiritual re-birth happily coincided with a day in the studio where he was truly touched to open his soul through the medium of his saxophone, for his playing on this record is almost terrifyingly open, intense and soul-shattering, even when he is simply stating a theme.

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