The New York First Company - Impeccable Gifts and Unique Wonders

Open since 1907 and first used primarily as a residence for wealthy New Yorkers, the French Renaissance building at the southeast corner of Central Park is one of the city's most treasured spaces. Symbol of the Jazz Age and New York City itself, the Plaza Hotel has perhaps the most famous history of the world's great hotels, appearing in everything from F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby to Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest.

The Plaza, like the music of Miles Davis, was (and is) synonymous with taste, elegance, and sophistication. “Jazz at the Plaza” features Miles Davis on trumpet, Bill Evans on piano, Paul Chambers on bass, Jimmy Cobb on drums, and the amazing saxophone duo of John Coltrane on alto and Cannonball Adderley on tenor, recorded at the famed hotel on September 9, 1958.

This remarkable CD documents a group of musicians on the verge of greatness, beginning to feel each other's tics and idiosyncrasies, forming the bonds of a sextet that would soon alter the history of jazz forever.

It is doubtful that the venerable hotel had ever hosted jazz as up-to-the-minute, hard-swinging, or deeply beautiful as the music captured here.