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If a more significant, influential, and lasting result of a creative musical partnership exists than that of Miles Davis and Gil Evans' Porgy and Bess, society hasn't seen it. It's impossible to overstate the importance of the pair's collaboration on the landmark 1959 update of George Gershwin's opera. Transcending genre, time, and place, the profound statement finds Evans and Davis implementing modal approaches in a mainstream context and advancing jazz idioms that would become the foundation of the form's still-classic era. And that's saying nothing of the soulful playing – legendary performances by Davis' first great quintet that can now be heard in pristine detail courtesy of this definitive digital edition. 

Mastered from the original tapes and strictly limited to 3,000 numbered copies, Porgy and Bess attains previously unheard degrees of clarity, openness, immediacy, and depth on Mobile Fidelity's hybrid SACD. Here, the arrangements unfold amidst practically limitless soundstages and burst with multi-dimensional images. Separation between instruments allows you to locate individual band members and trace the decay of the notes. Davis' iconic solo passages take on borderline-surreal qualities of realism and shape. The magisterial scope of the Evans-conducted orchestra emerges with room-filling bloom, color, and dynamics. - Mofi