The fourth and moodiest album by the 1965-’68 Miles Davis Quintet, Nefertiti is one that takes a while to grow on you. The title track reverses the polarity of traditional jazz composition: The horns (Miles on trumpet, Wayne Shorter on tenor sax) repeat a simple, moody melodic figure over and over again, with minimal variation, as behind them, the rhythm players (Herbie Hancock on piano, Ron Carter on bass, Tony Williams on drums) go through all kinds of elaborate twists, turns and eruptions. It’s utterly compelling, relentless and almost hypnotic.

The album’s five remaining tracks are more conventional in structure: melodic statement, solos, recapitulation, out. But they vary substantially in tempo, and degree of abstraction. Oh, and Davis didn’t write any of them. Three (“Nefertiti,” “Fall” and “Pinocchio”) are by Shorter; two (“Madness” and “Riot”) are by Hancock; and “Hand Jive” is by Tony Williams. Still, the album has a unified feel — listening to it is like sitting in a room made entirely of highly polished, dark wood, looking out the window and watching the sun go down. It’s an astonishingly subtle record, one totally dependent on group interplay. Even when one player is soloing, the others are chopping things up in the background in a way that keeps everything just slightly unsettled, and forces the listener to stay focused, particularly on Tony Williams, whose command of the drum kit is as breathtaking as ever, aggressive but utterly controlled.

Nefertiti, released in March 1968, was the last fully acoustic studio album of Davis’ career. Beginning with Miles In The Sky, four months later, electric instruments (most prophetically, guitar) would begin to appear, signaling the start of what would be an inexorable change, and eventually a total abandonment of jazz, in favor of a much less classifiable sound. But Davis clearly hadn’t lost interest in acoustic jazz just yet; the music on Nefertiti is some of the most beautiful of his career.