John Coltrane 100: Stellar Regions

 

By Klaus Kitzinger

Reflections on Stellar Regions (1967/1995)

Around the end of the year 1995, a „new“ album of John Coltrane, posthumous of course, was announced to be released. Alice Coltrane(AC), generally referred to in the press as Coltrane‘s widow and archive keeper, had found a previously lost tape of a 1967 recording date (and given titles to the tracks), we learned.

As a relative newbie to modern, avant-garde jazz, you would generally resort to sources like „Das Jazzbuch“ by acclaimed writer J.-E. Berendt from your local public library (in Lower Bavaria, in my case). As to Coltrane’s music, you would probably have already taken Soultrane and Blue Train as a starting point, passed by Giant Steps und initiated yourself into the Impulse-/classic quartet period with, for instance, Live at the Village Vanguard . You would have learned that A Love Supreme was the peak of his creative work and a great milestone of modern jazz in general. Going on further to Ascension, probably tempted by Mr Behrendt‘s description of it „as an orgasm lasting 40 minutes“, it was, however, not for me. It was simply too much for me to take at that time, especially the lack of any „song structure“, I did not find an orgasm, but a collective, cacophonic mess lasting 40 minutes, to be honest.

With that background, learning that the announced release, titled Stellar Regions , was originally recorded in 1967, it caught my curiosity nonetheless. Not only was this my birth year, it would also be interesting to see: how had Coltrane developed from 1965 on? And, sadly, we could expect to listen to some of his last recorded music, just five months before his death,

Some raw facts: All the music assembled on Stellar Regions was recorded in the Van Gelder Studio in one day’s work on 15 February 1967, and the released material comprises everything recorded in that session*, with his regular group members of that era: AC on piano, Jimmy Garrison (JG) on bass and Rashied Ali (RA) on drums. But at this date in the absence of saxophonist Pharoah Sanders(PS), thus reducing the late period quintet of Live at the Villard Vanguard Again! to a quartet. After this studio date, Coltrane would return there exactly one week later on 22 February for a duo recording with RA (Interstellar Space) and in March for three more tracks to be released in late September 1967 on Expression. All but one of the tracks on Stellar Regions were unreleased before (I knew none of it anyway), as #5 Offering had already been used to complete the Expressionalbum. And by the way, the title track #3 (alternate take #9) was an early version of Venus from the duo session with RA one week later.

What is going on here?

Having my CD copy of Stellar Regionsin hand, what did I get?

As an obvious statement already from the back of the cover: Shortness. A return to a noticeable format and compositional structure. 11 tracks (including 3 alternate versions) with a maximum length of just under 9 minutes (#1 Seraphic Light), well … that sounded fairly familiar to me, even compared to a Genesis or Dire Straits LP (which, in the meantime, had found a place a bit farther behind in the rack).

On first listen: Conciseness. Cohesiveness. Control, even constraint. The contrast to Ascension and even more so (although unknown to me), the sprawling marathon improvisations of his live 1966 work (the non-stop concerts of the 1966 tour in Japan!), becomes evident from the start. These pieces are tighter and more concise, the emotional bursts more focused.

Lyrical clarity. Spiritual atmosphere. Much to my surprise. While intense and free, these pieces are balanced with moments of meditative calm. I found lyrical beauty on #1 Seraphic Light, #5 Offering and #4 Iris -the latter being a gorgeous ballad, pleasant rediscovery on re-listening and easily the most traditionally and melodically accessible track on the album.

Is it „free“ jazz“ actually?

Is this free jazz, I wondered? While I have no doubt, that this is a true free jazz album and the right stuff for the readers and makers of the Free Jazz Blog, this album still sits quite on the border for me. Needless to say, by February 1967, Coltrane had abandoned traditional chord progressions and swing rhythms.

Why it may justifiably be called free jazz:

- The protagonist does of course not abandon the extended techniques he had developed over the years - overblowing, shrieking altissimo notes and multiphonics.

- RA displays his non-metric drumming and plays multidirectional rhythms, creating a fluid, rolling wave of percussion rather than playing a traditional steady swing beat.

- The musicians as a whole are not bound by traditional chord progressions. They play with harmonic openness, outside the conventional harmony.

And what makes it distinct from other works of the period, so it may be not:

- Unlike his live performances of this time, Stellar Regions has clear, distinct thematic melodies at the beginning and end of most tracks, providing structural anchors.

- JG‘s bass playing also acts as a massive anchor. Because he uses repetitive and modal tools to anchor the root note, the musicians never fully detach from a tonal center.

- AC‘s chord playing on piano provides a harp-like, meditative harmonic cushion. It is free-form, but it’s deeply melodic and highly tonal as well.

Conclusion:

Stellar Regions uses the vocabulary of free jazz (energy, microtonality, open rhythm, non-metrical drumming) but pours it into shorter, concise and deeply spiritual tone poems, finding a balance between freedom and structure. Instead of plainly breaking the rules or „tearing down walls“, it is all about using freedom to achieve an emotional and spiritual state.

What stands out

I like the more lyrical pieces on this album very much. They really define this album and give it a distinct place in Coltrane’s late period timeline. They a show us a side of Coltrane’s final months that makes already a shift to a more spiritual atmosphere. They touch my heart and make me wistfully curious if more of that kind would have come flowing out of that musician.

Offering (# 5) is a majestic ballad, the emotional center of the session and arguably the most structurally complete composition on the album. The track opens with a beautiful, hymn-like melody, played on tenor with incredible tenderness, sounding like a religious lament. AC enters with resonant low-register block chords. Coltrane’s solo moves away from the melody into intense, microtonal and split-tones. However, because AC sustains chords instead of playing dissonant clusters, Coltrane’s own fiery playing never sounds angry or harsh, but soulful, like a spiritual cry. The track concludes with a return to the opening theme. By the time the melody returns, the storm has cleared, leaving a sense of exhausted peace.

Seraphic Light (#1). If Offering is a grounded prayer, Seraphic Light,the album’s starter, is pure cosmic ascension. While it has a more active, rolling rhythm play from RA, it remains one of the most texturally dense tracks on the album. This track begins not with a saxophone melody but with a rumbling of drums and cymbals from RA. AC establishes a continuous tremolo on the piano, while JG plays an aggressive, bowing bass drone. RA provides a rapid, metrically free tapestry of cymbals and snaredrum hits throughout. When Coltrane enters on saxophone, he plays short, declarative motifs that rise upward in pitch, bypassing a traditional jazz melody entirely. On this track, AC abandons all traditional piano performance boundaries. She does not simply play chords to back up a soloist, but creates a massive swirl of sound. The track builds to a peak where Coltrane‘s solo moves into the stratosphere, played in the extreme altissimo register of his instrument. Yet even throughout this peak, JG‘s grounding bass and AC‘s rolling waves prevent the track from becoming exhausting. It remains radiant and luminous.

Does this album show us a path to the (unrealized) future?

Now, as this year marks the 100th anniversary of John Coltrane’s birth and these recordings are almost his last notes to be captured on tape, it is a compelling „what if“-question: Where would he likely have moved to from here? Does this February 1967 recording – especially its lyrical core (see above) - give us a blueprint of what would have come?

That is open for debate. Coltrane, sadly, recorded this music just five months before his death. We will never definitely know for sure how his music would have evolved if he had lived on. In his Allmusic review (4 ½* by the way), Scott Yanow argues that Stellar Regions offers no real hints of a future path.

However, it may as well be stated that these recordings „represent a suggestion of the evolution his music would have taken had his life not been cut so short“ (David S. Wild, author of the liner notes, June 1995). Stellar Regions implies that Coltrane was heading toward a "chamber free-jazz" where total freedom was guided by internal discipline and structured devotion. Also, Stellar Regions suggests that the 1970s version of John Coltrane would have been less aggressive and far more compositional, spiritual and influenced by eastern aesthetics. It would have been intriguing to see him join his wife Alice in making the shift to World and Spiritual Jazz. Coltrane was already moving toward the cross-cultural, transcendent, meditative music of the 1970s, as evidenced in Alice Coltrane‘s (Journey in Satchidananda, 1971) and Pharoah Sanders‘ albums recorded after his death.

This session from mid-February 1967 still proves that avant-garde music can be profoundly beautiful, universal and divine.

*The liner notes from June 1995 by David S. Wild confirm that the track To Be, released on Expression, with Coltrane on flute and PS rejoining him on piccolo flute, was not actually recorded on that same date, although being credited to that date on its original release.

Also note: a contemporary review in German by Konrad Heidkamp from 09.12.1995, DIE ZEIT 50/1995, is still available for registered readers of DIE ZEIT.  

--- 

Klaus Kitzinger, born in 1967 in Landshut, Lower Bavaria, Germany. Still lives and works there in his daytime job as a lawyer specializing in construction law. A faithful follower of FJB, he got his first hold of free jazz as a teenager in the early to mid 1980‘s, when one enthusiastic pub operator actually brought luminaries like Archie Shepp, Sam Rivers, Joseph Jarman, the Sun Ra Arkestra, Jimmy Lyons/Karen Borca and Andrew Cyrille (spelled „Grille“ in the local newspaper) to his provincial hometown. Besides free jazz, he has an interest in (nearly) everything related to Japanese culture, traditional and modern, thanks to being married to Yuka. 

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John Coltrane 100: Transition and Sunship

By Brian Earley

 

When John Coltrane died in 1967 the jazz world felt a startling void. With the release of Expression, Coltrane’s final studio album, it must have felt like a narrative had been cut short of its intended ending. After all, unless Trane had recorded material that had never been released, that was it: no more new music from John Coltrane. 

 

We know the story 100 years after Trane’s birth, however. And did he ever record material that had yet to be released! Alice Coltrane worked relentlessly to preserve John’s towering musical legacy, and we know from Andy Beta’s incisive book on her life that after a long day of raising four children on her own, she would put the kids to bed, sit in meditation, and practice the music that meant so much to her and her late husband. What she also did was listen to unreleased recordings by John and prepare them for release.

Among the recordings made public in the immediate years following John’s passing were two absolutely stunning (I can’t emphasize this word enough–stunning!) recordings by the famed Classic Quartet of Trane, McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, and Elvin Jones: Transitionin 1970 and Sun Ship in 1971.

Transition

 

 

 

McCoy Tyner related to writer David Wild that sometimes John would give them two notes, or maybe just a scale, as the basis of a composition before they recorded. The title track to the album Transition,recorded in the spring of 1965,certainly could be such a piece. The work features a tightly focused quartet that absolutely opens up the gates and begins to tear down the fences. “Transition” is one the group’s wildest, most ferociously open pieces. It’s as though the catalytic power of Ascension or Om has been concentrated into a narrow and controlled conduit. Both the kinetic energy coursing through that conduit and the narrowness of the channel itself create the conditions for tension and combustion.

 

The “Prayer and Meditation Suite,” on the other hand, is an absolute masterwork. I am of the persuasion that comparing works of Trane to other periods in his life can dangerously undervalue some of his accomplishments. Any suite, be it Meditations or “Prayer and Meditation” would beg comparison with A Love Supreme. Forget all that. “Prayer and Meditation” would stand as one the great works in the jazz canon if it were the only piece Coltrane and the Quartet created. Movement II: “Peace and After” is the sound of a quest for peace complete with all the pain inherent in that search. Movement IV: “Affirmation” picks up where “Transition” left off and rings with crisis, explosiveness, and spiritual urgency.

 

Violence was always slinking nearby during Coltrane’s life, as it is for us today, and his music embraces this reality, but I would never describe his music as “violent.” Just note the third remaining song on   Transition   : “Dear Lord.” It is hard for me to imagine there ever existed a world without this vulnerable dedication to peace. Urgency and catharsis. Peace and vulnerability. The circumstances without and the transition within.

Sun Ship

 

In the nighttime hours of August 26, 1965, John Coltrane and his classic quartet walked into an East Manhattan studio. That year Martin Luther King and hundreds of peaceful protestors were arrested in Selma for wanting voter registration fairness. Malcolm X was shot to death. The first massive contingent of US ground troops landed in Vietnam, and the United States would slaughter tens of thousands of people before the year ended using machine guns and missiles fired from military jets. In Los Angeles, unemployment rates for black Americans grew to levels greater than during the Great Depression, housing discrimination was bolstered by law, and Watts exploded in rioting after a violent encounter between police and a black man.

 

John Coltrane placed his mouth around his horn and blew. The sound that emerged, a passage of lyrical melody deeply tender and filled with solace, titled “Dearly Beloved,” lifted into the air. John embodied serenity and the path to it. People were dying and being denied their humanity by a power structure that required their destruction, and John never pretended this was not the case. The path to peace traveled through pain, not around it. People are dying right now as you read this, but life’s powerful play goes on, in all of its tragedy and real joy. Afterall, John’s baby boy Ravi had just been born, and John had assembled this collection of musicians to record at night because that day he was busy celebrating his first son, John Jr. 's, first birthday.

 

Attaining does not come without suffering, but it also arrives with beauty.

Attaining. Sun Ship. Ascent. Amen.

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John Coltrane 100: Live at the Village Vanguard Again

By David Cristol

 

So much has been written about John Coltrane and he's such a widely acknowledged and worshiped figure - one of jazz's top two most iconic artists, along with his once employer Miles Davis - that I don't feel I have anything new to bring to the table. Asked to comment on a favorite Coltrane album, however, I comply, for what it's worth. The first Coltrane album I purchased - a secondhand 1987 CD release - was Live at the Village Vanguard Again, recorded May 28, 1966. Prior to this, I had only heard Coltrane on Miles Davis' Kind of Blue.

 

 Village Vanguard Again was a punch in the gut, a puzzle for the mind and the record that won me over to free jazz for good, although it didn't happen overnight. I initially didn't understand what was going on, what to make of it. But was soon repeatedly attracted by the unhinged, torrential sounds unleashed on lengthy versions of "Naima" (a tender ballad with exquisite chords, here exuding rage and sorrow) and "My Favorite Things" (a distinctly lighthearted song from the movie "The Sound of Music", here given a terminally outrageous, or wonderfully out there treatment, according to your inclinations) interspersed with a six-minutes Jimmy Garrison bass solo. Each time I pressed the play button, I was unable to stop listening until the end of the total running time. The album held some arcane truth I couldn't live without anymore. It was music I had to sort out for myself, keep to myself, not music I could share with friends or relatives, let alone spin at parties... The line up had Alice Coltrane on piano, Pharoah Sanders on tenor sax and flute, Rashied Ali on drums, with Coltrane on tenor, soprano and bass clarinet. I was unaware there was a much-loved Coltrane "classic quartet" then, and that this was not it! Some of the Impulse! catalogue was being reissued at that time (the mid-90s), Sanders' "Tauhid" and "Karma" among the batch, both also expanding my musical outlook. Coltrane's albums and archival releases were dropping in quick succession, each new one a mandatory listen. I stumbled on small-priced, worn out LP copies of "Transition" and "Kulu Se Mama" (both recorded in 1965). I was hooked, although none of those albums, and no other Coltrane record I heard after the 1966 live set, had the same definitive, life-altering effect, or reached the same high as that first exposure to the work.

 

Could it be that I had started with a peak, a logical conclusion to what had come before? The music was

equal parts perplexing, intimidating, meaningful, dark, luminous, an unrelenting war machine yet brimming with sensitivity, not quite inviting if you were not ready to surrender to its revolutionary approach, but fully uplifting and cleansing if you were. 

 

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John Coltrane 100: John Coltrane in Detroit, June 1966

John Coltrane Memorial in Hamlet, N.C.
Photographer unknown.

By Stuart Broomer

If I can write anything meaningful about the music of John Coltrane, it may be about the context in which I came to experience his work live, in 1966, after listening intently to his work for four years on record and writing reviews of some of it as well. One’s juvenilia is embarrassing almost by definition, but that’s my particular gateway here to a world in which Coltrane was playing live a few feet in front of me. 13 months later he passed away. I write this hopefully to communicate something of the challenging world in which Coltrane made his music, that ever more intense, more radically free music, as testimony to his courage and vision as a great artist, as large a person as one might be in that world.

The John Coltrane Reference (Routledge, 2008) by Chris DeVito, Yasuhiro Fujioka, Wolf Schmaler and David Wild, edited by Lewis Porter (Routledge, 2008) is a monumental work of scholarship. After the introductions, there’s a Chronology of Coltrane’s life and career that runs to 357 large pages of fine print, followed by a Discography of 404 similarly sized pages in identical print, followed by 49 more pages of appendices, index, etc.

Very near the Chronology’s conclusion, there’s an entry for the John Coltrane Quintet’s appearance at Detroit’s Drome Lounge from June 17-26, 1966. The personnel, then consistent, is identified as Coltrane, tenor and soprano saxophones; Pharoah Sanders, tenor saxophone; Alice Coltrane, piano; Jimmy Garrison, bass; Rasheid Ali, drums, Friday to Sunday, matinees on Sunday. Reviewed in Coda (“John Coltrane Quintet – Drome Bar—Detroit” by Stu Broomer, Aug-Sept., 1966, pp.32 - 33). The review is represented by just a few of its sentences, but I’ll restrict myself to the Reference editor’s choices and their punctuation as well.

“This is probably the most moving working band in America (…) Tenor saxophonist Farrell “Pharoah” Sanders is now the most important soloist in the group. (…) When (Coltrane) first heard Albert Ayler in 1962, Coltrane told him he had heard himself playing like that in a dream once. (…). This band has recorded five times but nothing has been released. Perhaps Bob Thiele is hoping Coltrane will return to his old-time sanity. I for one hope he will not”. (Reprinted by permission of the author. All Rights Reserved).

What I’m trying to get at here about John Coltrane is an essential drive for expression and liberation, for liberation from every constraint to discover what’s real or what’s at least possible. If my memories from 60 years ago mean anything, they’re about the value of revolt and the horror of the norm, the judgmental restriction of cultural norms, in some places becoming more restrictive than anything I might have felt 60 years ago (a festival of liberalism by comparison). As a result, I want the music more intense, more personal, more unpredictable and I’ll stand up for it anywhere. But it is not without ambiguities.

As a teenager in the 1960s, I became obsessed with free jazz. It was a promise of freedom from restraint as well as constraint, an explosion of mixed emotions from great sorrow to ecstasy, in effect, perhaps, a promise too far. My absorption in jazz had begun in childhood with the 1957 TV special The Sound of Jazz and followed with the eventual LP. More television: I saw the Robert Herridge Presents episode with Miles Davis and John Coltrane in 1960 and loved it. My brief initial puzzlement and rapid-onset rapture with free jazz started when I picked up the September 1961 Metronome at the corner variety store. It included an epic essay on the jazz avantgarde by the then LeRoi Jones (I still have the essay somewhere — stapled together — the issue is gone). The writing was abstract, mannered and strange but also enchanting (I had already read a paperback of Kerouac’s Tristessa), its subject an arcane revolution. By the time I had purchased Ornette! and Free Jazz a few months later, Metronome had ceased to exist. I had only Down Beat, a magazine at the time sufficiently reactionary to condemn John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy as anti-jazz in a cover story. A few years later, circa 1965, I started writing for Coda, then Canada’s only jazz magazine.

If there’s a shock in that original account (in bowdlerized form), it’s likely the ranking of Sanders’ performance over Coltrane’s. Without digging for the original, I recall moments from that night when I was listening to the dense, tumultuous music and focussing on the brilliant screaming mayhem of the two saxophones, only to open my eyes and discover that John Coltrane was intently hitting a cowbell with a drumstick and Pharoah Sanders was the only person playing a saxophone. This isn’t a criticism of Coltrane. He was one of the greatest musicians who ever played jazz, but we all know now that he was seriously ill and still carrying a heavy musical load. Other memories: I already had certain knowledge that Jimmy Garrison’s solos, as memorably powerful as they were, depended heavily on the bass’s tuning in fourths, and the complex, droning solos dependent to a significant degree on the use of open strings (I was a bass player at the time). At one point in the evening, Coltrane spoke quietly to him (I was sitting at a piano-shaped stage, my ear within four feet of their mouths) specifying the key for one of his extended introductions. Garrison then looked upset, arguing for another key. I wasn’t surprised by the issue. I was surprised that it was happening about four years into Garrison’s tenure in the band.

Another and crucial surprise goes to the heart of the history of free jazz. My party (myself and three others, young musicians from Toronto, three Caucasian, one Japanese) were, in effect, insiders (however “out” we might feel in the Drome). We arrived early, conveying Rashied to the venue since we were staying in the same place, the Detroit Artists Workshop. Arriving early, we found a strange mix of conviviality and formality. Standing just inside the foyer, Jimmy Garrison was shaking hands with patrons as they entered. Even to a bass player, Garrison’s right hand (the plucking one) came as a shock: it felt like a bundle of sticks.

As popular, as great, as John Coltrane was, there was a fundamental divide in the audience about the shape his music was assuming, that was apparent from the time the music began (a shock perhaps influenced by the very music that Impulse was choosing to release). In essence there were two audiences. In the Drome it happened largely along racial lines, generally slightly older blacks on the one hand, and the white audience, many significantly younger, significantly suspended between hip and hippie. One audience looked disgruntled, offering spare, obligatory applause; the other clapped wildly with exclamatory shouts. Late in the evening, Coltrane broke into the opening phrase of his anthem, “My Favorite Things”, its bright coiling phrases instantly recognizable from the first note. It was amazing. With my back to the rest of the audience, I could actually feel the room lift, so strong was the shift in mood, comparable, for a brief instant, to the sun breaching a cloud cover. Within a couple of minutes, the sonic tumult had taken over again, and one could feel, even more intensely, the mood of the room dropping, to frustration and disappointment, perhaps, and most intensely, I felt, the abandonment, the sense of betrayal.

In total, (expanding on Coltrane's grimly disappointed Black audience) the trip seemed at times to be about race but things would get much darker, or should I say lighter (toxic metaphors lurk in our tongue) -- I had gone there with three other young Toronto musicians with whom I played. I had an association with John Sinclair (then in jail on drug charges -- not sure how current John's name is, but his greatest moment of celebrity came when imprisoned during Woodstock: Abby Hoffman interrupted the beginning of the Who's performance with a comment to the effect that Woodstock didn't mean shit while John Sinclair was in jail; then Pete Townsend hit Hoffman with his guitar for trying to take over the Who's stage). In John’s absence, his partner Leni Sinclair was running the Workshop.

I knew The Detroit Artists Workshop through shared performances between Detroit and Toronto, performances arranged by John Sinclair and the Toronto poet Victor Coleman of the Bohemian Embassy, a Toronto coffee house and performance space. Shared performances had included members of Detroit trumpeter Charles Moore’s MC5 with featured musicians that had included Marion Brown and Andrew Hill (through which I got to play bass with Andrew for a weekend among other playing associations). I had also published a poem and a record review in John's mimeo'd music journal Changes, which I think may have only gone to two (or maybe three) issues.

The Workshop was the epicentre of radical culture in Detroit whether the issue was music, race, drugs, economics or language. Later it was the spawning ground of the MC5, of "Up Against the Wall Motherfucker" fame, who John Sinclair managed. He later was a founder of the White Panther Party, a Black Panther support group. When I met the members of [Ahmed] a few years ago in Guelph, talk turned to Detroit. Some members were thinking about visiting Detroit, and Pat Thomas and I found ourselves reminiscing about John, whose poetry Pat had accompanied during an Amsterdam performance. John's contract, Pat recalled, required a private pot smoking loft.

A few days before our group arrived in Detroit, a young inter-racial couple from the Workshop had been violently attacked on the street by the sons of a former Mississippi sheriff whose property adjoined the Workshop at the rear. While we were staying there, the sheriff had invited the residents of the Workshop to a get together/ barbecue to make peace. None of the Workshop residents (naturally) wanted to go and Leni Sinclair asked our Toronto group (whom they were temporarily housing, four males sufficiently groomed to get across the border without close scrutiny) to go as their representatives. We accepted with a certain reluctance, though things (barbecue, blanched pleasantries) went civilly enough.

An hour later, on the way out of Detroit, we stopped at an ice cream outlet before we hit the border. The sons and their wives and children were there as well. On neutral ground, none of us acknowledged the existence of the other. 

Charles Tyler, Stuart Broomer + Perry Robinson, 1966 
©2014 Bill Copeland

AN AFTERWORD: 60 years on, I frequently listen to John Coltrane recordings, probably more than to any other historical jazz artist. I have the complete runs of the Prestige and Atlantic recordings and most of the Impulses on CD and the recordings with Monk and Miles Davis and isolated one-offs like Blue Train on Blue Note. My usual listening choices run the gamut from the Prestige and Atlantic recordings (especially Olé, the last of them, with Freddie Hubbard, Eric Dolphy and Art Davis added to the working quartet of McCoy Tyner, Reggie Workman and Elvin Jones). My listening range ends with one of my favorites, Meditations, with the “classic” quartet augmented by Rashied Ali and Pharoah Sanders. I hardly ever, if at all, listen to much that came later. Whether that’s because the actual experience of the last quintet live was enough – sufficiently intense -- to satisfy my need for that music, or that the music is so unstable or destabilizing that I don’t feel a need to hear it in its “frozen” form. The sole exception made among recordings of the last stage is Interstellar Space, the recording of four duets with Rashied Ali, recorded in February 1967, though it too is rarely played, singled out perhaps for the relative coherence of the music and the focus of its intensity.

© Stuart Broomer, 2026 

 

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John Coltrane 100: Exploring the Archives

John Coltrane - One Down, One Up: Live At the Half Note (recorded 1965, released 2005), My Favorite Things: Coltrane At Newport (recorded 1963 and 1965, released 2007), Offering: Live At Temple University (recorded 1966, released 2014), A Love Supreme: Live In Seattle (recorded 1965, released 2021), Evenings At the Village Gate: John Coltrane with Eric Dolphy (recorded 1961, released 2023)

 

By Lee Rice Epstein

1965 was remarkably transformative year in Coltrane’s history. Thankfully, through its ongoing archival releases, Impulse Records has continued to fill in the picture of how, as an artist, he continually pushed himself and his band, deeply and passionately giving his all at all times. One Down, One Up takes us right to March 26, 1965, where Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, and Elvin Jones play an astonishingly high-wire, high-energy “One Down, One Up” that runs nearly 30 minutes. The electricity crackling between players says exactly why Coltrane still matters, why he’s still adored, and why countless players of all kinds continue to study and revere him. The set’s recapitulation on the Newport stage months later (the second half of My Favorite Things: Coltrane At Newport), more clearly shows how the group was thinking about and working through their headiest ideas. That the Newport set was released with a 1963 performance featuring Roy Haynes in the drummer seat gives some additional dimensions to the quartet’s changes over time. Tyner and Jones moved on by the next year, while Garrison held down the Alice Coltrane, Rashied Ali, and Pharoah Sanders group. Reportedly, he didn’t play with them in the fall of

1966, when Coltrane led a phenomenal set at Temple University. Offering has been alternately reviled and lauded, cited by some as a polished but unnecessary bootleg for completists only. But, if one just takes a step back and considers Offering happening the same season as Albert Ayler’s seminal European tour—with the quintet of Ayler, Donald Ayler, Michel Samson, Bill Folwell, and Beaver Harris—and if one wants to get really interested in sympathetic wavelengths, you hear Coltrane singing reportedly for the first time ever during “Leo” on November 11, 1966, while Ayler was recorded doing the same on a performance of Sanders’s “Japan” the previous night, November 10, 1966. That Ayler later screamed during his memorial performance for Coltrane would be too on the nose if someone manufactured it. The two shared both intellectual and spiritual bonds, a beautiful thing we’re scarcely able to know of or understand even partly.

As the saying goes, it would have been enough to get these first three albums, but the 2020s has produced two seemingly impossible sessions: a live recording of “A Love Supreme,” also from 1965, and an unissued session with Eric Dolphy from 1961, featuring “Greensleeves” and “Africa.” What, truly can be said about Coltrane and Dolphy that doesn’t lead to a mountain of what-if or if-only hypotheticals? The hour-plus set is fiery and rich with ideas in motion. If someone told me this was 1963 or ’64, I wouldn’t doubt it. By ’61, both Coltrane and Dolphy were already well out in front of many contemporaries, and the mutual support demonstrated during their brief time together is beautifully realized here. On A Love Supreme (fascinatingly, recorded a couple days after Live In Seattle),Coltrane leads a kind of crossover group, with Tyner, Garrison, and Jones as the core quartet, joined on the tour by Sanders and Donald Garrett on bass, with Carlos Ward jumping in on sax at Coltrane’s invitation. Both Coltrane and Sanders add percussion along with Jones’s drumming, and if Offeringrepresents some kind of approaching end point in Coltrane’s art, the Seattle performance of “A Love Supreme” leads in the same direction, ever forward. 

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John Coltrane 100: The John Coltrane Quartet Plays

John Coltrane – The John Coltrane Quartet Plays (Impulse, 1965)

By Dan Sorrells 

Most of my listening hours are spent on freely improvised music. But when it comes to Coltrane, I love the classic quartet, 1965, right before things broke open (and the group, apart). The John Coltrane Quartet Plays is what I reach for most often. “Chim Chim Cheree” starts like another “My Favorite Things,” but less than a minute in, Coltrane’s already chafing against the melody, and after two he and Jones are fairly bursting out of Tyner’s measured vamp. “Brazilia” and “Nature Boy” enticingly point toward the searching explorations to come, where ideas were turned inside-out in dizzying, kaleidoscopic epics (something further evidenced by various surfaced recordings from the Half Note during the same period, where “Chim” and “Song of Praise” stretch to twice the length). The sense that traditional song forms must still be made to contain Trane’s increasingly frenetic probing lends indelible tension to the music; these songs are like swelling water ballons, but they’re filled with boiling water. For those of us in the future, it’s all the more heightened when you know just how far things will get pushed, even before the close of the year.

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John Coltrane 100: Live at the Village Vanguard

John Coltrane – Live at the Village Vanguard (Impulse, 1997) 

By Kenneth Blanchard

There are certain recordings that stretched my grasp of jazz (and indeed music). Andrew Hill’s Point of Departure comes to mind. Coltrane’s LVV collection is another. Recorded over four nights in 1961 at the Jerusalem of Jazz, only five of the originally recorded numbers were released in the following two years. The 1997 box set is a genuine treasure. The structure of the music remains within standard hop bop spaces, but the moods blossom into an entirely new ecosystem. The inclusion of Eric Dolphy was one of Trane’s most brilliant moves. On Naima, Spiritual, India , his low horns (also sax and bass clarinet) perfectly match Trane’s tenor and soprano sax. Trane’s interest in alternative spiritual and musical traditions is obvious enough. His famous “sheets of sound” slide in and out of every line. I find the articulation of Coltrane’s own personality to be as vivid here as on any of his recordings.

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John Coltrane 100: A Sunday Morning Record

DUKE ELLINGTON & JOHN COLTRANE - s/t (Impulse!, 1963)

By Ferruccio Martinotti

Sunday morning. We weren't even looking through Trane’s records, we already had a clear plan for the centenary. Then we spotted it. Or rather, it was almost as if IT was looking at us. There it was, humble and elusive amidst some truly gigantic "neighbors": “Duke Ellington & John Coltrane”. When a title says it all. How long had it been since it last took a spin on the turntable? A long, long time. So, we not only dusted it off, rescuing it from obscurity and oblivion but also cast it as the star of our own humble contribution to the Coltrane forum’s tribute. A quick preamble. Our favorite Trane is the one who burned all his bridges behind and embarked on the Path of Spiritual Ascension alongside Alice, Pharoah, Garrison, and Ali: for us, THIS is John’s definitive group. Since we are certain that our colleagues will, as usual, handle albums like ‘Interstellar Space”, “Olatunji”, “Live in Japan” et al, with the utmost mastery, we opted for a record you won’t find on "100 all-time best" playlists or among the essential albums by either Duke or Trane, yet one that is nonetheless deeply compelling. First things first: when and how did this encounter (the only one, if we’re not mistaken) between two of the greatest musicians of all time take place? The date: September 26, 1962. The setting: Rudy Van Gelder’s Studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, a place so legendary that, like Atlantis, one wonders if it ever truly existed. The mastermind: Bob Thiele, a producer at Impulse! The Maestri arrived at the meeting from different trajectories, not just in terms of age, but artistically as well. Duke, at 63, as the old king of the jungle, having already changed the course of music history in the 1920s and 30s, he wanted to show the "young lions" that the time to end up in the zoo hadn't arrived just yet. And judging by the extraordinary “Money Jungle”, recorded right some weeks earlier along with Max Roach and Charles Mingus, he had every right to feel that way. Trane, meanwhile, aged 35, was in a transitional phase. Leading one of jazz’s most sensational lineups ever (Jones, Garrison, Tyner), he had just released his first album for Impulse! in 1962, a record where modal structures were handled sublimely, yet he had not entirely cut ties with a more “mainstream” approach to his music (though, given the musical context, quotation marks are essential here!). It was as if, mid-journey, he had paused to catch his breath and look back one last time, before lighting the fuse and blowing everything wide open. The two arrived at the studio bringing their respective rhythm sections: Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones for Coltrane; Aaron Bell and Sam Woodyard from Ellington’s orchestra. To glimpse a moment of that historic occasion, we can turn to bassist John Lamb, who was present that day: “There was no music on that whole date. Nobody had a chart. We came in and we were standing there, waiting to see what would have happen. Trane would go and sit on the piano bench with Duke. They didn’t talk but Duke would be singing and Trane would go. Then, after they did that for a few minutes, they got up. Trane would go to his microphone, Duke would start playing and the rhythm section, we had to do for ourselves, you know. That’s it. He didn’t even tell you the key. He could communicate without words and Trane could hear it.” The eight-hour session yielded seven tracks: “In a Sentimental Mood”, “Take The Coltrane” and “Stevie” (two sketches composed right there in the studio), “Angelica” and “The Feeling of Jazz” by Ellington; Billy Strayhorn’s “My Little Brown Book”; and Coltrane’s “Big Nick,” a tribute to tenor saxophonist Big Nick Nicholas. At work here are two living legends who set out not to change history, but simply to experience, with mutual respect and admiration, the intimate joy of music. No overbearing displays, no pointless academic showing-off or gratuitous virtuosity. Pure Magic. Even Elvin Jones puts down the sticks of dynamite and picks up the brushes. It is a "Sunday Morning Record", relaxed, atmospheric, and straightforward, reminding us that in our constant search for the ultimate, mind-blowing thrill (which, by definition, is NEVER the last one), we often lose sight of the wonder of simplicity. This is the perfect album to set that right. Let us leave the final word on this experience to Trane: “I was really honored to have the opportunity of working with Duke. It was a wonderful experience. He has set standards I haven’t caught up with yet. I would have liked to have worked over all those numbers again, but I guess the performances wouldn’t have had the same spontaneity. And they mightn’t have been any better.”

May the Journey be light for you, dear John.  

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John Coltrane 100: Olé & Monk

By Paul Acquaro 

John Coltrane - Olé (Atlantic, 1961) 

In the mid-1990s I had just graduated from undergrad with a degree in Journalism and absolutely no idea what to do next. I spent the following summer living in a shared house with five other people about my age, one of whom was a good friend and musical partner in our band called “Joe Joe the Dog Face Boy.” We were working, we were playing music, all in all, it was fine even if a bit of a confusing time in life.

In the living room of the house, next to my room, was a shelf with a bunch of records on it. The records belonged to my friend, who had just been gifted them by his father. He had placed them on the shelf not knowing what to do with them - I am not sure that he even had a record player at this point, as it was the heyday of CDs afterall. I, however, did have a record player that had been accompanying me all through college and would be my only constant companion for the next twenty years or more, so the records, a rather eclectic mix of music from the 60s and 70s, would end up often on my stereo. This was how I encountered Olé. 

 

Olé, John Coltrane’s last album for the Atlantic label, released in 1961, was recorded with his long-time associates MyCoy Tyner on piano and Elvin Jones on drums, which already likely brings certain harmonic and rhythmic sounds to mind. Joining them was trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, bassists Reggie Workman and Art Davis, and the great Eric Dolphy on flute and alto sax. 

It was the title track that caught my ear. Extending over the whole side A of the album, it’s a modal feast that builds on a vamp derived from a Spanish folk song. Here, it starts with a single churning bass line and Tyner’s pulsating chords balancing on Jones' driving swing. Soon, Coltrane joins on soprano sax with an approach reminiscent of his playing on ‘My Favorite Things.’ Then, Dolphy lends his flute to the mix, paving the way for Hubbard’s solo, from which the track really takes off. It was rhythmically dense music, but not overly dissonant or harsh; however, for ears that could listen to jazz but were more attuned to rock, it was the perfect hook - a little more advanced than what I was used to, but not too steep of a climb. The B-side’s, ‘Dahomey Dance’ and ‘Aisha’ were a bit more rooted in the ‘jazz’ I knew. I enjoyed them, but it was the A-side that pushed me as a listener. 

Critics have called Olé a transitional album. Aside from the label change, Coltrane was also headed towards more experimental realms. For me, Olé and that pile of records also came at a transitional time, and helped reveal new paths and possibilities.

 

Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane (Jazzland, 1961) 

My plan was to next dig into something in that experimental realm. I had my sights on Offering: Live at Temple University, a live album recorded in 1966, shortly before Coltrane passed away, and released posthumously by Resonance Records in 2014. A funny thing happened, however, along the way. As I was pulling up the recording, I passed by Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane and stopped in my tracks. Also released in 1961 on the Jazzland label, this set of evergreen Monk tunes that had been recorded by Coltrane and Monk in '57 and '58 with changing rhythm sections. Two seconds of the opening ‘Ruby, My Dear’ and I knew I’d wanted to spend a little time awith this one again before moving on.

 

As the story goes, Coltrane was addicted to heroin and had just been fired from Miles Davis’ group. He took this break, and cleaned himself up and started to play with Monk. A residency at the Five Spot in NYC in ‘57 is the stuff of legends and a concert recording of the two from 1957 was discovered and released in 2005 by Blue Note, lends credence to the stories. Entitled Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall, it underscores the copacetic musical relationship found on the original release. 

Back to that recording: the tune that stopped me in my tracks, the slow moving ‘Ruby, My Dear’ begins with such a melancholic saxophone playing the yearning melody that it instantly romanticizes any space where it’s played. ‘Tinkle, Tinkle,’ with its playful and up-tempo melody gives Coltrane a chance to unfurl those ‘sheets of sound’ that he’s famous for. Similarly on ‘Nutty’, the sheets return in a generously flowing solo, studded at key points with with reminders of the melody. Drum and bass outlining the tune, Monk waiting to come back in with the melody, before abstracting it into Improvisational flurries. 

 

This album album is a high point in two musical catalogs that are festooned with them. 

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John Coltrane 100: Blue Train & More

By Nuno Catarino 

Like many others, my gateway into the Coltrane universe was the inevitable Blue Train, a 1997 CD reissue, with the cover altered with different tones from the original edition. I was beginning to discover jazz and, beyond the variations on the title track, it was the vertigo of “Moment’s Notice” that must have won me over at that early stage. And, of course, the free sound of the saxophone, and the fascinating process of its discourse construction in real time — fascinating for someone who, until then, knew nothing of any form of improvised music. From there, there were several landmark records, in a process that did not follow chronology: it went through the duet with Johnny Hartman, Live at Village Vanguard , the space journey of Meditations, all the way to the devotional magic of A Love Supreme, reading the booklet while following the music, and the pinnacle of Ascension. Along the way, an unavoidable landmark, Giant Steps (as with Ornette’s records, the title also announced the jazz that was coming) with its timeless title track and the melancholic sweetness of “Naima”. I was discovering the albums in no particular order, finding the records or having them find me in a random way, and then gradually organizing Coltrane’s journey in my head, as if piecing a puzzle together. In that process, my favorite album then remains my favorite to this day: My Favorite Things. Too mainstream, too easy, some might say. On ’Trane’s path, a milestone. Not yet the classic quartet, but almost there: McCoy Tyner on piano, Elvin Jones on drums, Steve Davis on bass (Jimmy Garrison would join shortly afterwards). Coltrane takes up the soprano saxophone and transforms a well-known popular melody into a piece of his own; starting from the original melody, he transforms it through a profound process of unfurling. From this point on, it would become one of his signature tunes, evolving into other, much more advanced and deconstructed versions. But this is the start. The LP setlist also has three songs that touch the soul of anyone who loves the history of jazz: one by Cole Porter, “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye”, and two by the Gershwins: “Summertime” and “But Not for Me”. In the context of Coltrane's quest and discography, My Favorite Things is a turning point. And, in my own listener's journey, it's music that affects me deeply. 

Nuno Catarino is editorial coordinator of jazz.pt since 2022. He contributes to the national newspaper Público, where he has written since 2007. He is the author, with Márcia Lessa, of the book Improvisando (2019).  

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