Walkin’ is a jazz tune that helped define the hard bop era through Miles Davis. It was recorded in 1954 at Van Gelder Studio in Hackensack during two sessions and was released in 1957 on the Prestige compilation Walkin’, which gathers material from the Miles Davis All-Star Sextet and the Miles Davis Quintet. The composition is credited to Jimmy Mundy and Richard Carpenter, though Miles Davis popularized the piece and Carpenter is listed as the composer in the copyright. On the album, Walkin’ appears as the opening track on side one, a 13-minute-plus performance by the Davis groups, with Horace Silver on piano, Percy Heath on bass, and Kenny Clarke on drums in the sextet, and J. J. Johnson and Lucky Thompson with David Schildkraut on the other side. The Walkin’ compilation—produced by Bob Weinstock—helps anchor Davis’s rise in jazz and the hard bop movement of the mid-1950s.
