John Coltrane – Interstellar Space
More so than any other record on this list, this one is just for me. Meaning, I'm not sure that I've ever listened to it with anyone else in the room. It's like the 'Macarena', it is deeply private. I listened to it religiously when I moved to Los Angeles from New York; the front cover was misleading – it looked like a classic New Age record, and being a later Coltrane release I thought it might be languid and minimal. Nope! Brutal as f. It reaches heights that no other record is capable of; Coltrane's playing is desperate, like he's screaming at the sky. It makes sense that this was one of the last (the last?) records he ever made. I heard that he was dabbling with acid at the time, and you can hear a pointed transition in those last few recordings, especially with Alice and Rashied Ali. This one is just Coltrane and Ali, streamlined in numbers but immense in energy. 'Saturn' is the most evocative piece of music I've ever heard, makes me cry.