Search & Destroy: John Coltrane

yeah — i mean, the urge to overrate it is probably high, but even on something as laid-back / workmanlike as "slow blues" (which they probably did just to blow off steam), it's wonderful to just luxuriate in the sound of this band. elvin jones! best drummer ever?

god this really was the best band ever

garrison's bowed solo in the first track, my god

I'm glad I have this thread bookmarked so I will be repeatedly reminded that I need to get this new one

this is really great, and i'm generally hot/cold on Coltrane

The full Antibes Love Supreme set is on the deluxe edition from 2002.

A couple good Coltrane tribute songs are. . .

Cliff Jordan — 'John Coltrane' (1973)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Znr4KRw2au8

Abdullah Ibrahim — 'For John Coltrane' (1992)
https://vimeo.com/82702349

So friggin' excited to hear the "new" record.

Wasn't bowled over by the first "new" track tbh

but I mean, this is an unfuckwithable era of the quartet and there was nothing bad about it either, looking forward to hearing the whole record

I went through a phase when I had Live at Birdland on nonstop and this seems like the studio analogue to that record afaict

Good piece by Lewis Porter here:

http://wbgo.org/post/deep-dive-lewis-porter-considering-john-coltranes-lost-album-all-directions

this one popped up in my youtube subs, i'm liking it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJcpBWry04w

Got my copy of the 2CD version in today's mail.

this is really great, and i'm generally hot/cold on Coltrane

― Hotdogs Killcars (dog latin), Friday, June 29, 2018 10:10 AM (two days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

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Listening to Ole Coltrane today (first track, on repeat) and it's McCoy's album, or at least it's him I think of when I summon an aural image of the album. He's so in charge and oceanic. Then it's the knotted basses and Dolphy taking flight. I barely think of Coltrane and Elvin at all. Puzzling.

Poor old Freddie doesn't even get a look-in.

Hubbard?

Aye.

I picked up "Concert in Japan" last night and it's pretty great, fidelity and chopped up sequencing notwithstanding. Rashied Ali is unreal on it.

Are you referring to this one? I have had it for possibly a decade and have listened to it maybe once. It's pretty crazy.

That's the one! I had never heard it. It is indeed pretty crazy.

olé is sometimes my favorite coltrane album and it’s largely bc of its rhythm so it’s hard for me to listen to it and not focus on jones, also coltrane’s playing is so fucking mesmeric at this point that i can’t imagine not noticing him either! fair point that the interlocking basses kinda steal the show though

I think I undersold how much I love Ole! It makes me want to run up mountains with a bull on my back.

I wonder if it's that I've listened to it so much that when I focus on it, I sort of hear through it to the bottom now. Anyway, what an astonishing thing. I wish he'd done more with that particular ensemble.

OK ILM you've made me want to hear this again, it has been a few years. That title track, damn. It really doesn't get better than this, does it?

Also--maybe a nice thread idea but I don't think it would be very popular--are there many other examples in jazz of a well-known musician using a pseudonym for contractual (or other) reasons? I can't think of too many other examples, though there are obviously quite a few blues players who did this

McCoy was listed as ".Etc" on Joe Henderson's 'Page One' and other Blue Notes of the time owing to his conflicting contract with Impulse. And there's "Ed Kelly & Friend" and Leon Thomas' "Spirits Known & Unknown", both of which feature an pseudonymous Pharoah Sanders, listed as "Friend" and "Little Rock" respectively.

Did not know about any of those!

the cover for the Ed Kelly record is great

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51ngiwSpTEL._SY450_.jpg

oh and Pharoah is also credited as "Mystery Guest" on Larry Young's Lawrence of Newark

Oh cool!

https://jazzdiscography.com/fitzgera/pseudo.htm

I love all the pseudonyms that jazz guys used. Charlie Parker used Charlie Chan, Cannonball Adderley used Buckshot LeFonque. . . there's lots of them.

omg who remembers Branford Marsalis's project Buckshot LeFonque? That hadn't popped into my mind for maybe two decades?

Preemo AND Buckethead, lol

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckshot_LeFonque

Olé and Africa/Brass are my favourite Coltrane albums. His discography's so vast though, and I've only started exploring it a few years ago.

I did not know about the key changes in Giant Steps, well explained in this awkwardly titled video from Vox:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62tIvfP9A2w

Adam Neely is a Coltrane obsessive. He did this video a while back and it blew my mind:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J98jwtm5U4E

Adam is really smart. I took some lessons from him for a little while a few years ago and loved talking to him.

Poor Tommy Flanagan. I thought they should have mentioned that he played Giant Steps on every gig he could after that, just so people would know he got it together (or at least I remember hearing that anecdotally).

Great video otherwise.

Feel like “most” “serious” fans have gotten beyond that, but maybe that is just wishful thinking. By the time I was seeing him I don’t recall him playing “Giant Steps” and don’t really remember too many people bringing it up in conversation.

This new 1963 box set Impulse is putting out seems like kind of a ripoff to me - it's the tracks from that "lost album" they just released, with John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman, Live at Birdland, and I think some other previously released stuff tacked on.

Ah, good to know, James.

I’ve been geeking out to his solo on But Not for Me from My Favorite Things lately. He does stuff in there that already sounds like “late” Coltrane

Urrr, brainfart, I meant Summertime, not But Not For Me

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEftw9o1joo

semi kicking myself for not picking up whichever European tour was £15 in FOPP.
Did get Village Vanguard though just realising that I probably had most of it since i still have most of teh box set somewhere.
Want to pick up most of his Impulse lps and probably a few of teh Atlantic ones.

Also should have grabbed Pharoah Sanders' Elevation when I saw it in Honest Johns.

Do love Afro Blue Impressions since chancing on it on vinyl in Belfast 28 years ago & I assume the European tour material is going to be pretty similar.

& I assume the European tour material is going to be pretty similar.

It mostly is, but the first disc-and-a-half is with Eric Dolphy. I haven't checked, but I wouldn't be surprised if you could find just the Coltrane/Dolphy live European stuff as a standalone disc.

(sorry, to clarify: the first disc-and-a-half of the Live Trane: The European Tours box)

Man, Interstellar Space is really peak music

listening to that prestige '58 box .. it's often quite familiar stuff, but still so good.

Kenny Burrell, Donald Byrd, Paul Chambers, Jimm Cobb, Tommy Flanagan, Red Garland, Louis Hayes, Freddie Hubbard - literally fucking top notch '58 combos!

Coltrane w Kenny Burrell was one of my first jazz records and I love it so much

It's sort of interesting in jazz how since these guys all did so many sessions in short periods of time, it can be sort of arbitrary which one you wind up starting with and that one often becomes a favorite.

uh hi dere

Now comes word of another new album by the classic John Coltrane Quartet, with McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass and Elvin Jones on drums. Blue World will be released on Impulse!/UMe on Sept. 27, and like Both Directions it offers an unexpected view on a pivotal period in the band's evolution. It was recorded at Van Gelder Studios on June 24, 1964 — a few weeks after the quartet put a finishing touch on the album Crescent — as the soundtrack to a Canadian art film. Because the date had gone unnoted in session recording logs, this music has occupied a blind spot for Trane-ologists, archivists and historians.

https://www.npr.org/2019/08/16/751516859/a-lost-album-from-john-coltrane-is-found-with-thanks-to-a-french-canadian-direct

fuuuuck