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John Coltrane will have been with the ancestors for fifty-one years this month. Yet he remains jazz\u2019s toughest act to follow. Many people, not all of them fans, insist that jazz history stopped moving when Coltrane\u2019s heart stopped beating in a Long Island hospital on July 17, 1967. Even those who were mystified, if not altogether alienated by Coltrane\u2019s headlong voyages beyond the stratospheric boundaries of tone and invention acknowledged him as a bellwether for whatever would happen next for the music. His death at just 40 years old seemed to signal that there would be no more \u201cnext,\u201d only whatever happened before.<\/p>\n
So it\u2019s hardly a wonder that a large crowd gathers whenever somebody uncovers Coltrane music that nobody\u2019s heard on record before. They all swarmed four years before when a 1966 concert of Coltrane\u2019s second, most experimental quartet was packaged and released to the public as Offering: Live at Temple University<\/em> (Impulse!\/Resonance). Though it was unavailable for digital downloads, Offering<\/em> was at or near the top of the Billboard jazz charts for several weeks. My guess is that a majority of those purchasers were just as confounded by the music at that concert as they were by such late-period Coltrane LPs as Kulu S\u00e9 Mama<\/em>, Expression<\/em>, Meditations<\/em> and Interstellar Space<\/em> (about which more later). But its success affirmed what now seems an everlasting attraction to John Coltrane as karmic messenger; it\u2019s as though we\u2019ve all agreed that somewhere in Trane\u2019s legacy there\u2019s something we\u2019re missing and we need only pay close attention when another such discovery is made.<\/p>\n Hence the buzz and jubilation surrounding this month\u2019s release of Both Directions At Once: The Lost Album<\/em> (Impulse!). These are never-before-released recordings of a March 6, 1963 studio session with Coltrane and his \u201cclassic quartet\u201d of pianist McCoy Tyner, drummer Elvin Jones and bassist Jimmy Garrison. The set, recorded at Rudy Van Gelder\u2019s legendary studio in Englewood Cliffs, N.J., includes several takes of Coltrane\u2019s \u201cImpressions,\u201d the standard he\u2019d built using the same harmonic baseline as Miles Davis\u2019 \u201cSo What\u201d on 1959\u2019s epoch-making Kind of Blue<\/em>. (Ashley Kahn\u2019s typically informative liner notes mention that Trane himself wrote \u201cSo What\u201d on the box holding the \u201cImpressions\u201d tapes.) There\u2019s also a three-minute-plus take on \u201cNature Boy\u201d and a couple of versions of \u201cOne Up, One Down\u201d (not to be confused with \u201cOne Down, One Up,\u201d which the quartet delivered with stunning abandon in a February1965 live broadcast at the Half Note previously released as part of a 2005 bootleg).<\/p>\n To me, the most fascinating of this \u201cfound\u201d album\u2019s storylines involves \u201cUntitled Original 11386\u201d (again, not to be confused with \u201cUntitled Original 11383,\u201d a hard-driving blues piece that opens the two-disc package and isn\u2019t heard from again, even though you wish you could). It\u2019s one of the quartet\u2019s more buoyant riff extensions and it exemplifies the principal pleasure offered by this release: Listening to each member of this exemplary group interact, enhance and add to each other\u2019s contribution whether it\u2019s Jones\u2019 loping and rolling combinations (especially when it\u2019s just his trap set and Trane\u2019s soprano doing a pas de deux), Tyner\u2019s unobtrusive, yet bracing comps and Garrison\u2019s sleek, powerful lines. Not that anybody needed to be reminded of this quartet\u2019s pre-eminence above all others in its time, but even the minor glories of this session seem especially portentous given what would from this point on prove to be the group\u2019s most productive and illuminating period (the Johnny Hartman sessions were a day away, the Birdland performances would be recorded in just seven months and the following year would yield the near-blinding sunburst that was A Love Supreme.<\/em>)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Sonny Rollins\u2019 vivid encomium for this package, \u201cThis is like finding a new room in the great pyramid,\u201d encapsulates every fan\u2019s enthusiasm for Both Directions At Once<\/em>. Still, while it\u2019s only proper to have Rollins\u2019 benediction on such an auspicious occasion and though I yield to no human in my devotion to the Colossus, I don\u2019t think there are any startling discoveries to be found here regarding Coltrane\u2019s genius. Beyond the renewed appreciation for the workaday brilliance of the quartet, of which there can never be enough examples (and is, by itself, no small virtue), I think the revelations of this disc have less to do with Trane and more to do with how jazz music used to produce both accessibility and adventure with both assurance and fortitude. The modal innovations pioneered and expanded by Coltrane have become so commonplace in jazz that it becomes easy to forget how exhilarating and easy to love its themes were.<\/p>\n Moreover, I think that when many listeners, whether jazz aficionados or not, embrace this music, they are consciously or not cleaving to a moment in time just before Coltrane decided to accelerate his inquiries into deeper, wider possibilities. Put less charitably, it\u2019s at or near the spot where even the most devoted and forbearing listeners said \u201cAdios\u201d to Trane as he soared headlong into what they believed were impenetrable regions of tonal and rhythmic chaos.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n So while I\u2019m hoping that this \u201clost album\u201d re-galvanizes the faithful while indoctrinating new generations to this quartet\u2019s glories, I\u2019d also commend all these listeners to use this occasion to slide over to where Coltrane began to press the edges of the envelope. I\u2019m referring to 1965\u2019s Ascension<\/em>, the polyphonic freeform ensemble piece that joins Coltrane, Jones, Tyner and Garrison with such avatars of what used to be called \u201cThe New Thing\u201d as saxophonists Archie Shepp, Pharoah Sanders, Marion Brown, John Tchicai and the enigmatic trumpeter Dewey Johnson, who played alongside Freddie Hubbard here and never recorded again. Those non-indoctrinated or hostile to free jazz hear nothing but random chaos in this piece. But if you pay attention from the start, you find that the whole sprawling, intermittently surging work can be viewed as the picaresque adventures of a five-note phrase \u2013 well, four<\/em> notes actually since one of them is repeated. But try to keep up with that phrase throughout and you may find that while the whole apparatus seems to take you all over the place, it can also keep you centered in surprising ways. Which I\u2019ve always suspected were Coltrane\u2019s intentions all along.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/07\/Coltrane-classic-quartet-300x247.jpg\")
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