February, 2024

Coltrane smokes a pipe while taking a break from recording “A Love Supreme” at Van Gelder Studios, Dec. 1964. Photo by Chuck Stewart.

By Matt Silver

1963 chronicled a version of Coltrane’s Classic Quartet navigating between at least two worlds — the highwater mark of the group’s avant-garde experimentations, as heard on 1961’s "Live" at the Village Vanguard and Impressions, and 1962’s tidal recession to the more, shall we say, accessible repertoire of Ballads and the eponymously titled collaboration with Duke Ellington. It's a split-the-baby-in-two type scenario: you’ve got more adventurous sessions at Birdland as the year’s bookends — and, sandwiched between, the velvety lyrical decadence of Trane’s collaboration with Johnny Hartman AND six months of gigs with a substitute drummer, Roy Haynes, who filled in admirably for Elvin Jones, most memorably at 1963’s Newport Jazz Festival.

In 1964, there’s less vacillation, more incantation. Less compromise; more contemplation. Less soul searching; more satisfaction. More grounding and even more gratitude. 

And more happiness. In Coltrane’s career, but also in his life more generally. 

There are several ways to think about Coltrane’s experiments with dissonance and atonality and multiphonics and other concepts that may or may not have been instructive to CIA enhanced interrogation protocols. It’s fun to speculate about what exactly Coltrane was trying to do; what abstract truth he was trying to render more material by pushing his horn — and himself — to the absolute limits of expression. 

Coltrane pictured here sitting for an interview in 1961. It was a year that included one studio album and one live album with a new label, in addition to his last album as a sideman for Miles Davis and last as a leader for Atlantic. Plus a monthlong engagement at the Village Gate with Eric Dolphy at the end of the summer and an extended engagement at the Village Vanguard before a European tour at the end of the year. A moment in contemplative repose would’ve been rare for John Coltrane in 1961.

By Matt Silver

By early 1961, John Coltrane had wrapped My Favorite Things and soon its release would make it both a critical and commercial sensation. Coltrane had taken a schmaltzy, waltzy show tune and made it the height of hip sophistication. He was on the precipice of no longer being just another artist on a record label’s roster, about to become what Reggie Jackson would aspire to be in 1977: the straw that stirred the drink. 

Even though he’d already released “Blue Train” and “Giant Steps” as a leader, this final tour with Miles Davis might have been the very thing John Coltrane needed to become a fearless leader.

By Matt Silver

Imagine Sting playing just one more sold-out gig with Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers as The Police. Or maybe Alexander Hamilton and George Washington getting together to teach the new country they built how to say goodbye, just "one last time."

If Miles Davis and John Coltrane — The Final Tour (Legacy, 2018) is any indication, not all fantasies of unlikely artistic reunions need be consigned to oblivion, even if the artists, corporeally speaking, have been.

Long live posthumous releases, because this compilation captures the two most iconic performers in the history of jazz performing live together, in venues across Western Europe, for the final time.

Still the best selling jazz record of all time, “Kind of Blue” is the point of entry into jazz for generations of music listeners, from casual listeners to serious ones to people who have the album because they know it’s culturally significant but don’t really know why.

By Matt Silver

On December 26, 1958, John Coltrane led a recording session that produced enough music for 3 LPs: The Believer, Stardust, and Bahia. These would be his last recordings for Prestige Records; Trane’s contract was up.

 *which, actually, isn’t a quintet anymore, but a sextet, with the addition of alto giant Cannonball Adderley.

There are many John Coltranes. But when you think of his "Sheets of Sound" period, you think of his 1958 recordings for Prestige Records. Photo by Francis Wolff.

By Matt Silver

1958 is a new time for Coltrane to do old things in new ways. To start the year, he plays his first instrument, the alto, on a Prestige All Stars date led by Gene Ammons. But the old horn sounds like the new Coltrane — almost like a tenor — and it’s the first and only commercially recorded instance of Coltrane soloing on alto. 

Next, it’s back to Miles’s band.

KSDS will be celebrating a different kind of President today.  Join us as we salute the "PREZ," Lester Young. We will play his music throughout the day focusing on the different periods of his illustrious career. And, at 7PM (Pacific), Loren Schoenberg, one of the foremost experts on Lester Young, will delve deep into Lester's career. There will be rare recordings, clips, interviews, and, of course, music. KSDS gets Prezidential- beginning at 7am. 

The photo that became the cover of “Blue Train,” 1957. Photo by Francis Wolff.

By Matt Silver

By mid-September of 1957, John Coltrane had been kicked out of Miles’s band, he’d kicked heroin, and he’d kicked his musical development into overdrive. First by joining Thelonious Monk’s Quartet for a transformative six-month run at The Five Spot in New York City and then by making up for a relatively late debut as a leader by pumping out Prestige recording dates in volume. This prolific recorded output for Prestige would continue in earnest through 1958; it’s no accident that one of those sessions came to be titled Settin’ the Pace.

Coltrane circa 1955-56 while recording “’Round About Midnight” with Miles Davis’s First Great Quintet

By Matt Silver

From June to August 1954, John Coltrane records in Los Angeles with the first saxophonist whose sound he sought to emulate, Duke Ellington’s legendary alto man Johnny Hodges. Up to this point, with the exception of his bebop stint with Dizzy Gillespie from 1949 to 1951,  most of Coltrane’s formal gigs — with Earl Bostic, Billy Valentine, Gay Crosse and even with Johnny Hodges — had been very blues and dance party oriented.

This all changes in the Fall of 1955.

Photograph of The Coltrane House in Philadelphia. Located near the intersection of 33rd and Oxford Streets in the city’s Strawberry Mansion neighborhood, Coltrane lived here—first with his cousin Mary, then with his first wife Naima and adopted daughter Syeeda—from 1952 to 1958. Photographed here in 1992 by the prolific chronicler of all things Coltrane, Yasuhiro Fujioka.

By Matt Silver

There was something happening in Philadelphia during the period John Coltrane came of age there. He arrived in 1943, shortly after his high school graduation and stayed until late 1957. After kicking heroin in the Strawberry Mansion house he shared with his cousin Mary, first wife Naima, and daughter Syeeda—all soon to be immortalized on Giant Steps — he did as one must when on the cusp of stratospheric artistic innovation; he moved to New York City. He hooked up with Thelonious Monk and, together, they transcended what jazz conception had been to that point. Then it was back to Miles and the new thing, the modal phase. And a year later: Kind of Blue.