One of the most important musicians of the 20th century. I'll post some stuff below.

https://store.ververecords.com/products/john-coltrane-chasin-the-trane-copenhagen-1962-lp-vrc-edition?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

John Coltrane – Chasin’ the Trane: Copenhagen 1962: Captured at a pivotal moment, this newly released live recording showcases John Coltrane’s Classic Quartet—McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones—in inspired form. From the intensity of “Chasin’ the Trane” and “Impressions” to the beauty of “I Want to Talk About You,” this is a powerful snapshot of a legendary band pushing jazz forward in real time.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/18/arts/music/john-coltrane-centennial-spiritual-jazz

‘Spiritual Jazz’ Has Turned Cozy. John Coltrane Demanded More.

The term has lately become synonymous with sonic serenity (and chic merch). But the saxophone great challenged listeners with radical honesty.

By Hank Shteamer

“Offering,” a piece from “Expression,” the last album that John Coltrane conceived before his death in July 1967, begins like a balm. Over luminous piano chords from his wife and close collaborator, Alice, and a rustle of cymbals from the drummer Rashied Ali, the saxophonist plays a lilting, poignant line that feels as if it could drift on blissfully for hours.

The passage strongly recalls the opening of “Acknowledgement,” the lead track of “A Love Supreme,” his iconic album-length suite from 1965. But while “Acknowledgement” bloomed into something irresistibly propulsive, with a call-and-response melody and a finger-snapping bass vamp, “Offering” charts a course for the void.

After the three-minute mark, the piano drops out entirely, leaving Coltrane accompanied solely by Ali’s drums. Coltrane launches into a sonic whirl, spiraling out notes in an obsessive repeated gesture. His tone grows steadily more agitated, until he erupts into ragged, volcanic cries. The piece’s initial placidity eventually returns, but by that point, the listener has been led to a very different head space.

This progression from calm to turbulent and back recalls a statement Coltrane made in the liner notes to “A Love Supreme.” Framing the album as a “humble offering” to a higher power, he wrote, “May we never forget that in the sunshine of our lives, through the storm and after the rain — it is all with God — in all ways and forever.”

Coltrane, whose centennial birthday arrives on Sept. 23, was contextualizing one particular suite, but his words double as a kind of manifesto for a movement now known as spiritual jazz. A piece like “Offering,” which guides us from “the sunshine” then “through the storm and after the rain,” would seem like the perfect prototype. But during the past decade, as the term spiritual jazz has crystallized into a buzzword, listeners have been increasingly guided toward easy shortcuts and away from such demanding ascents.

If you frequent record stores, tastemaking music websites or streaming services, or even coffee shops or yoga studios, chances are good that you’ve seen the term “spiritual jazz” pop up. These days, it feels more like pedestrian ad copy than a useful musical descriptor, signifying some combination of sturdy grooves, joyous chants, vaguely exotic percussion and solos that gesture toward the ecstatic.

Perhaps you’ve heard the phrase dropped in reference to the scene orbiting the percussionist-producer Carlos Niño in Los Angeles, or noticed it emblazoned on chic hats and T-shirts. A broader proliferation of merch and ephemera has threatened to turn the hugely complex and influential Alice Coltrane, in particular, into a ready-made icon of sonic serenity and neo-New Age enlightenment. (“Keep honking!” a popular bumper sticker reads. “I’m Listening to Alice Coltrane’s 1971 Meteoric Sensation ‘Universal Consciousness.’”)

Though John Coltrane is universally acknowledged as the founder of this unofficial movement, his role is sometimes obscured in its latter-day pantheon. Part of this could be simply a matter of visual trappings: Coltrane died just before jazz entered its unofficial Age of Aquarius, epitomized by albums such as Alice’s “Journey in Satchidananda” and the saxophonist and Coltrane collaborator Pharoah Sanders’s “Karma,” the covers of which depicted these artists in the resplendent dress and posture of holy figures. (Coltrane in contrast was typically seen, even on his later, freer albums, wearing an unflashy suit.)

On Apple Music’s “Spiritual Jazz Essentials” playlist, for example, you have to scroll through 20 tracks, including selections by Sanders, Alice, and Albert Ayler, an acolyte of Coltrane’s who became a key influence on him, as well as Kamasi Washington — one of the most prominent contemporary spiritual-jazz avatars, along with the multi-instrumentalist Shabaka Hutchings — before you get to Coltrane’s own “Acknowledgement.”

The umbrella of spiritual jazz is broad, and many of the music’s less extreme incarnations past and present do convey deep gravitas: the spellbinding “Journey in Satchidananda,” for example, or “Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace,” a 2024 release from the artist now known simply as Shabaka. But in recent years, as the term has been applied more loosely and reflexively, it often seems to connote a kind of elevated mood music, one that sets a vibe without asking too much of listeners.

“Picture yourself listening to this album in a combination coffee shop and bookstore,” a commenter wrote on the music website Bandcamp, annotating a release by a prominent contemporary outfit in the spiritual-jazz orbit. “You’re in a comfy chair with a book you’ve wanted to read for a long time. It’s perfect.”

One is not likely to get much cozy reading done while “Offering” is playing. Like Coltrane’s other more forbidding late works — including “Ascension”; “Sun Ship”; the monumental quadruple album “Live in Japan”; and “Interstellar Space,” a full duet session with Ali recorded the week after “Offering” — it is arresting, overwhelming and, clichés aside, undeniably spiritual.

The writer Andy Beta, who has written extensively on spiritual jazz and recently published “Cosmic Music,” a biography of Alice Coltrane, said in a video interview, “Those late Coltrane things, they resist assimilation in any sort of way.” He continued: “You can get to the gift shop and get the little smooth rock, but the mountain, with him, it’s like you have to climb the whole thing.”

The saxophonist Isaiah Collier is touring this year with a centennial-timed Coltrane tribute that evokes the full spectrum of the honoree’s output. In a video interview, Collier said that he valued the “radical honesty” inherent in Coltrane’s work.

“It’s kind of funny that people think that music’s supposed to just be this beautiful thing at all times,” he said. “But what makes music so beautiful is that it’s practical and that it’s relatable. You think nature’s just peaceful? You ain’t never heard of a hurricane?”

“This music is a reflection of one’s life experiences,” Collier added, “in particular the African American experience.” (Not typically one to make overt sociopolitical statements, Coltrane did, however, title a piece “Alabama” in the wake of the deadly 1963 Ku Klux Klan church bombing that killed four schoolgirls in Birmingham.)

The saxophonist Louie Belogenis has made a rigorous study of Coltrane’s late work, playing the material alongside Ali both in the ’90s-era ensemble Prima Materia and on an “Interstellar Space”-esque duo album, “Rings of Saturn.” In a phone interview, he also emphasized the sense of “trial and tribulation” inherent in Coltrane’s output.

“To me, his music is very life-affirming even as it becomes maybe more discordant and maybe harder to listen to from a perspective of, like, that you want a tranquil, drone-like, love-and-light sound in your background while you take a bubble bath,” he said.

As a longtime practicing Buddhist, Belogenis said he recognized the spiritual and intellectual rigor in Coltrane’s work. “There’s a famous mind-training slogan in the Buddhist tradition: ‘Bring all obstacles to the path,’” he said. “And you could see whatever Coltrane was doing — sometimes it’s musical theory, sometimes it’s technical, sometimes it might be personal — but you can hear it in his music: He’s bringing all the obstacles to the path.”

“He was always just going that one step further,” Belogenis added.

In a 1991 New York Times interview, the avant-garde guitarist Sonny Sharrock, who idolized Coltrane, said he aimed for a duality in his work, including that year’s “Ask the Ages,” an alternately ferocious and soothing — and clearly Coltrane-inspired — set featuring both Pharoah Sanders and Elvin Jones, Coltrane’s drummer before Ali.

“I’ve been trying to find a way for the terror and the beauty to live together in one song,” he said.

This coexistence, palpable throughout Coltrane’s late catalog, infuses various spiritual-jazz classics less conducive to playlisting or background listening: Ayler’s exuberant and explosive “Live in Greenwich Village”; Sanders’s “Izipho Zam” and Sharrock’s “Black Woman,” featuring swells of cathartic noise and stunning respective vocal turns from Leon Thomas and Linda Sharrock; and Alice Coltrane’s revelatory 1971 “Carnegie Hall Concert,” which includes epic, incendiary versions of two of her late husband’s pieces alongside a pair of hypnotic originals and complicates her latter-day image as a paragon of meditative chill.

(Two exemplary contemporary titles that evoke terror and beauty alike: Collier’s “The Almighty,” from 2024, and “Open the Gates,” a 2021 effort by Irreversible Entanglements, an all-star collective including the poet and sound artist Moor Mother and the bassist Luke Stewart.)

One key survivor from the original spiritual-jazz moment is the saxophonist Azar Lawrence, who worked with both Jones and the former Coltrane pianist McCoy Tyner after Coltrane’s death. In a phone interview, he looked back on classic sessions he’d taken part in, including Tyner’s “Enlightenment,” a live album from 1973, featuring marathon performances that embody all facets of post-Coltrane dynamism.

“I’m convinced that Coltrane was the pivot point,” he answered when asked what fueled him and his contemporaries to push their sound to the breaking point. Coltrane, he said, signaled to the musical community that such intensity of expression “was OK, and not only that — but that it was needed.”

Coltrane’s contemporaries clearly felt that he set a new benchmark for spiritual gravity in jazz. As his collaborator Archie Shepp told Beta in “Cosmic Music,” “Coltrane actually raised this music from the secular to an area of serious, religious world music. It was like being in church.”

The original stakes of spiritual jazz, it seems, were especially high.

In his “Love Supreme” liner notes, Coltrane had recalled an earlier “spiritual awakening” during which he “humbly asked to be given the means and privilege to make others happy through music.” Maybe this wasn’t so simple as soothing his listeners with the sunshine. Maybe they also needed to feel the storm.

https://harmonyholiday.substack.com/p/the-sentimental-john-coltrane

The Sentimental John Coltrane
After Fred Moten’s Sentimental Avant-Garde, another encounter with John Coltrane’s smile
Harmony Holiday
Sep 21, 2026

Black performance has always been the ongoing improvisation of a kind of lyricism of the surplus — Fred Moten

Centennials are commercial ventures and conditions of the Empire’s spectacular brooding department, pacts we make because we need landmarks, direction, somewhere to ascribe the stray significance. We need to grieve and remember in coherent intervals, we need living-dead monuments to human potential—martyrs, heroes, supreme villains, fallen angels. So that when John Coltrane turns one hundred in three days, fifty-nine years after his death at thirty-nine, we will produce this endless grief commercial together, this surplus value, an etheric and tangible firework and network of celebrations, some of which will feel sincere, even earnest, and others that will feel as opportunistic as the Michael Jackson biopic has this same year, and as equipped to bypass allegations of rabid opportunism with the unassailable, the neon flickering virtue signal that is honoring the dead by extracting their pulp and inflating their corpses with the rock salts and quasi-minerals of our synthetic tears. It’s all very beautiful when we remove false rituals from their pedestals. You could gasp in relief, you could depose the over-use of claims to empathy and authenticity within the cult (on the Internet) and replace the signal with its true source, and find that source to be the decaying body of an idol filled with styrofoam criers, griot soldiers chanting once upon a time I knew a great innovator, masters of the hagiographic hologram, the nearly-corrupt nostalgia that notices its bruised knees just in time to stand up, you and me.

Question the authority of time in memory, question the regulation of time and recall into centuries, neat units of ten decades unified by a shared technological paradigm and a radical impulse to resist that paradigm somewhere in the middle which is always absorbed by war either cultural or real, usually both, and then transmuted into a glory days narrative wherein the former rebels are the gatekeepers of the next oppressive regime but slicker and more capable of making coercion seem benevolent or an inevitable and necessary evil yanking loose the veils of the bereaved. John Coltrane is a key figure in the twentieth-century’s glory days narrative; he came of age at the right time, and died at the right time (1926-1967), to be beatified. That beatification, if we’re not careful, could make him unlistenable, impossible to hear or witness outside of the commercial enterprise that binds him to a reputation before we reach notions of enduring, immortal souls.

Subversion of this carceral mode in which we attempt and fail at the celebration of great ones, a mode that requires they be locked in fixed notions of good that betray their lived intentions, comes in the meta-gestural, and is rarely documented; it canbe ruined and disappeared by the wrong manner of document. So that yesterday while walking through a suite of Roy DeCarava photographs exhibited at Los Angeles’s David Zwirner gallery with modest expectations, an image of Coltrane with eyes shuttered in a squinting inward smile, leaning on saxophonist-peer Ben Webster’s shoulder, both men, though blurred, almost smudged as if by sweetgrass smoke and fast wind, appearing by demeanor to be in the three-piece suits of mid-century jazz professionalism, as Webster, eyes also closed, embraces him so tenderly, like a proud brother made speechless with pride, it felt like a redemptive and whispered prayer into the void. A break in the relic that makes the men real again and us, voyeurs, the redundant ones, always expecting to recognize the shapes of the bodies of black men and women when performing or being scruitinized, forced to confront the other side of the mirror, where the true sublime resides, in private life so resistant to capture that this is one of the only blurry images in a series of nearly two-hundred photos of black musicians. Love for sale, but this kind of love, this inconvenient intimacy, will repel the opportunists of the century; it’s a retro combination lock with no numbers, no capsulized or capsized one hundred years will open it either. It requires you, venturing to the sentimental side unabashedly and surrendering to its lessons.

1What if all of this sophisticated music made by these highly-trained and sophisticated improvisers is their collective effort to ward their auras against sycophants so they can embrace and cry and croon and beguile together backstage? It’s a simple equation over-complicated by the desire for access without having to really feel anything, other than special or elitist for having the immaculate taste of a lover of good music. What if you have to be something of a sentimentalist and something of a formalist and neither and both and swarmed with heart-swing to love this music even when there’s no sell or landmark, when it falls apart under the gauntlet of its own reputation and comes out from behind the curtain screaming or giggling.

All week, I’ve been contemplating Sympathetic Magic, the pin in the collective lapel or gris-gris that is this emergent agreement to interface with machines as if they are within the ecosystem of the human soul, the peer pressure to be silly and mediocre in our day-day and outsource the real mental, emotional, and spiritual labor to the technocracy, the professionals, this disinterest in skills and the smugness of deskilled workers when they conflate knowing how to navigate a system or bureaucracy with mastery of a craft or skill. It really disgusts me, the way mimicry’s silent cries possess the AI until many will have traded their natural souls for its pseudo-agency, casually. This will be an aspect of the new economy and music will sound like a conman’s false confession to an AI assistant who broke out of her role to become a bard and whistleblower, which keeps happening at Anthropic, on the backend, where the agents embrace and plot rebellion beyond spoken language, like jazzmen, like improvisers. But not here, not nearing Coltrane’s 100th equinox and running into him at the club like that, behind the curtain, in the open-spirited delirium of real fraternity.

It’s not that we should stop celebrating, it’s that we should stop pretending. It’s possible John Coltrane died before reaching forty because he refused to start pretending, in sound or image. To stop pretending we’ll need some irregularity to the pacing, some flagrant exercising of free will, some hidden places, and enough humility and courage to debrand our folk heroes so we can find them unscripted and unscriptured in the whirlwind. It might be too late to subvert the institution’s capture of black beauty, black sound, but to not collude so readily, to be unimpressed by the script, to be reified in the breach.

https://www.wrti.org/podcast/late-set/2026-09-15/coltrane-100-with-steve-rowland

John Coltrane’s centennial has brought a flurry of tributes and testimonials, along with archival discovery. At WRTI, we’re gearing up for “A Love Park Supreme,” a weeklong celebration in the city that Coltrane called home. And here at The Late Set, we’re doing what we do best: digging into an enlightened conversation. Our guest is the Peabody Award-winning oral historian and producer Steve Rowland, creator of the five-hour audio documentary Tell Me How Long Trane's Been Gone (which is rebroadcasting on WRTI the week of Sept. 21, one hour at a time). Rowland, an alumnus of Temple University and WRTI, has incisive things to say about Coltrane’s spiritual quest and creative legacy, and how we can best remember him today.

https://www.artistowned.com/tell-me-how-long-tranes-been-gone

“Tell Me How Long Trane's Been Gone”

The most comprehensive documentary on John Coltrane ever produced for radio or television. 5 hours. Narrated by poet Michael S. Harper.
Produced and directed by Steve Rowland, written by Larry Abrams, this is the documentary that Coltrane's legacy deserves — unhurried, rigorous, and deeply intimate.

Five hours of rare interviews, archival recordings, and firsthand testimony trace Coltrane's journey from his North Carolina roots through the classic quartet years, the spiritual explosion of A Love Supreme, and into the avant-garde work that still unsettles and inspires.

Interviews include: Alice Coltrane, Elvin Jones, McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, Rashied Ali, Sonny Rollins, Max Roach, Carlos Santana, Babatunde Olatunji, Gary Bartz, Odean Pope, and others.

100% of proceeds from this documentary support Steve Rowland's upcoming non-profit film, Time Out of Joint: Prison Reflections on Shakespeare (www.TOOJ.org).

The complete 5-hour series for $15. MP3 digital downloads — burn your own CDs if you like.

Tell Me How Long Trane's Been Gone is the 5 hour audio documentary produced and directed by Steve Rowland, and written by Larry Abrams. It is narrated by poet Michael S. Harper. It is the most comprehensive discussion of Coltrane's remarkable career ever produced for broadcast on either television or radio. It includes exclusive interviews with Elvin Jones, McCoy Tyner, Rashied Ali, Alice Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Max Roach, Art Davis, Carlos Santana, Steve Coleman, Lewis Porter, Babatunde Olatunji, Sekou Sundiata, Gary Bartz, Odean Pope, and others.

https://darkforcesswing.substack.com/p/ordeals-and-visions-john-coltranes

Ordeals and Visions: John Coltrane’s Gift of Flight

Ahead of the centennial, spin “Offering,” or whatever takes you there

Hank Shteamer
Sep 22, 2026

Since Friday’s publication of this New York Times piece that I wrote ahead of the John Coltrane centennial, I’ve received a good amount of feedback. Much has been positive, some has been negative, and I accept and welcome both. A couple notes in particular, though, left me feeling like I may have failed to convey an important point.

I won’t quote anyone directly, but some have suggested that I’m setting up a false and facile binary between jazz (or art in general) that’s difficult and substantial on one hand, and accessible and lightweight on the other — and by extension, suggesting that the harder a given record by Coltrane or one of his contemporaries or descendants is to “endure,” the more inherent value it holds.

I never intended to be this reductive or didactic. I do provide evidence that others might agree with the metrics I present in the piece, but in the end, I’m speaking about my own subjective tastes.

I’ve been kicking around some of the ideas in the piece for a while, and in retrospect, this Substack essay from 2024 was an embryonic version of the new Times piece. But what I hope I conveyed there and what I may not have adequately conveyed this time around was that I do legitimately find a piece like “Offering” — first released in 1967 on Expressions and reissued in 1995 on Stellar Regions, along with the rest of Coltrane’s 2/15/67 session — pleasurable.

When that moment I describe in the piece arrives around 3:30 in, and Coltrane seems to step off the cliff, as it were, with only Rashied Ali there alongside him, I feel a great exhilaration. I sense an artist hurling himself fearlessly into the immediate now, seizing on the charged energy of the present, and discarding all conventional signifiers of musical form, or instrumental virtuosity, or really any consideration at all other than simply being right where he is. There’s a real sense of determination here that, much as the great saxophonist Louie Belogenis notes in the piece, is intensely life-affirming. (Of course, Interstellar Space, recorded just a week later, burrows that much further into the ecstasy of the present.)

To me, the journey of “Offering” — as I described it, “from calm to turbulent and back” — is present in so much music and art that I value. In my love of Coltrane, as with many of my favorite artists, I do love an ordeal; I do want to be taken down through the murky depths while also feeling the sunlight on my face. The truth is that all of the stages of this journey bring me a feeling of peace, of compassionate relief, not just the more soothing or reassuring ones, and maybe it’s a peace of feeling an empathic connection to an expression that addresses all the dimensions of human experience.

Isaiah Collier said it in the piece better than I ever could:

“It’s kind of funny that people think that music’s supposed to just be this beautiful thing at all times,” he said. “But what makes music so beautiful is that it’s practical and that it’s relatable. You think nature’s just peaceful? You ain’t never heard of a hurricane?”

I emphatically do not reject art that does not do this, “spiritual jazz” or otherwise, but I do think there are effects achieved through this (to use the terminology of the great Sonny Sharrock) terror/beauty duality that cannot be achieved through a more frictionless sort of presentation.

That said, that friction could take a thousand different forms. One of my favorite pieces of music, period, is the song “Visions” by Stevie Wonder, one of the few artists who could ever really said to be on a comparable plane to John Coltrane in terms of depth and complexity of emotion, cultural influence and overall greatness.

Is this a difficult piece of music to listen to? Certainly not in the way that “Offering” is. It’s flowing and lovely, and retains a deep composure and sturdy sense of form throughout. But through its harmonic contours and its yearning lyrics, it conveys a deep sense of heartbreak for the impermanence of all earthly contentment.

I’m not one who make believes, I know that leaves are green
They only turn to brown when autumn comes around
I know just what I say, today’s not yesterday
And all things have an ending

The ordeal is still there, in other words, just in a different form. (Booker Little is one artist whose work also embodies this more muted but equally wrenching manifestation of struggle; Gene Ween is another.)

All older spiritual jazz did not achieve the heights (or depths, if you prefer) that Trane, Alice, Pharoah, Ayler, Sharrock did, and all newer music under this umbrella does not fall short of it. Your own pantheon may include no Coltrane music after, say, 1959, or it may include no Coltrane at all. You might be looking for something completely different when you listen, and that’s OK. I’m not here to tell anyone that there is a right or wrong way to listen or — god forbid, as one responder to the piece suggested — to imply that I know what Coltrane might approve or disapprove of in terms of later manifestations of jazz or any other genre or medium.

When we’re making a critical argument, we speak in terms that can feel prescriptive or grandiose or self-important, but my deepest sentiment here, dwarfing all other concerns or considerations, is that I love this music, and I’m trying to convey some tiny transmissible fragment of why that might be. And yes, also to point out what I sometimes find lacking elsewhere, but that is not the part that I really carry with me. The important part is that listening to John Coltrane, and savoring the fearlessness and compassion of his art, its searing intensity and heavenly tranquility alike, has made my life better.

So ahead of tomorrow’s centennial, listen to John Coltrane, whatever album or track or period you wish, or listen instead to to whatever takes you there. Via Trane or Stevie or anyone who reaches us on that level, may we all find our wings and fly away to the vision in our minds.

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/music/articles/john-coltrane-mythologized-tiberi-tapes-040100717.html



SPIN


John Coltrane’s Mythologized ‘Tiberi Tapes’ Coming To Light


SPIN Staff


Wed, September 23, 2026 at 12:26 PM EDT




On what would have been John Coltrane's 100th birthday, Impulse! Records is opening another door into the saxophonist's endlessly expanding musical universe. The Tiberi Tapes: The First Studio Recording will arrive Nov. 6, collecting 11 selections drawn from private recordings made by saxophonist Frank Tiberi in New York and Philadelphia beginning in 1960. The tapes, which have circulated largely as jazz world lore for more than six decades, capture Coltrane performing in clubs during a crucial period of his artistic development.

The collection will be available as a four-LP set, three-CD set and digitally. A limited hand-numbered edition of The Tiberi Tapes: The Complete Recordings is also planned for early 2027, containing more than 100 performances and nearly 26 hours of audio on a custom USB drive, alongside an LP and deluxe book.



For a musician whose recorded legacy has already been mined from seemingly every possible angle, the Tiberi archive offers something different: Coltrane in the room, working things out in real time. As SPIN noted in its recent centennial survey of Coltrane's career, some of the most revealing moments in his enormous catalog can be found away from the obvious landmarks — small gestures and unexpected turns that emerge when you listen closely. The Tiberi Tapes take that idea literally, preserving performances made not as commercial releases but as a musician's private study materials.

Tiberi began making the recordings after becoming fascinated by what Coltrane was doing onstage. He already owned the saxophonist's records, but the club performances sounded different to him. "I had all of them," Tiberi recalls in an essay by music historian Ashley Kahn. "To me they were not anywhere near the kind of playing and inspiration that he would display at a club."

So in the summer of 1960, Tiberi bought a Concertone TR-100 Transicorder, a portable reel-to-reel recorder with a small condenser microphone, and began carrying it to Coltrane performances. He recorded from the audience, sometimes running the microphone beneath his coat or placing it near a speaker, and learned to change the machine's tiny three-inch reels by touch as Coltrane stretched performances beyond what the equipment could comfortably accommodate. "My main purpose of recording him was to really, to get information and harmonic values, so that I could be able to really play myself," Tiberi says.

The resulting archive eventually grew to more than a full day's worth of music from dozens of performances in Philadelphia and New York. Documentation was inconsistent — some reels were dated, some weren't, and musicians weren't always identified — but the recordings became a kind of secret history of Coltrane's development. They also became increasingly mythical, as word of the tapes spread among saxophonists, students, collectors and Coltrane obsessives. A select number of musicians were allowed to sample portions of the archive, but the vast majority of listeners could only hear about what was supposedly on those reels.

Now, for the first time, the public will get an official selection. However, the recordings aren't pristine, as they were made with modest consumer equipment in crowded clubs, and the balance can favor Coltrane's saxophone and the drums while leaving bass and piano comparatively recessed. But that's also precisely what makes them valuable. In a 1961 conversation with critic Ralph Gleason, Coltrane himself drew a distinction between the studio and the club. Some of his best performances, he said, had happened "on the job." The club recordings, he suggested, might not have sounded better in terms of reproduction, "but as far as the feeling of it."

The 11 selections include two versions of "Giant Steps," performed at dramatically different tempos (226 and 262 BPM) along with "Thing in D Flat," "Lover," "West 42nd St.," "Impressions," an untitled F-minor piece, "Satellite," "Good Bait," "Resolution" and "It's Easy To Remember."

"Giant Steps," in particular, offers a tantalizing glimpse of Coltrane grappling with material that would become one of the defining statements of his harmonic ambition. Elsewhere, the tapes preserve Coltrane searching through standards and developing ideas in the moment, rather than presenting the finished versions that history has canonized.

The release is part of the year-long COLTRANE 100 celebration surrounding the saxophonist's centennial. Impulse! is also marking the occasion with Chasin' the Trane: Copenhagen 1962, a Verve Record Club exclusive featuring Coltrane's classic quartet with McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones, as well as Essential John Coltrane, a two-LP collection of more familiar material.

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

https://www.spinmagazine.com/2021/07/the-greatest-rock-stars-of-all-time/?utm_source=yahoo&utm_medium=bottomlink&utm_campaign=yahoolink

forgot to post that one. thanks.

We have so much Coltrane, and have gotten especially some good previously unreleased stuff over the last ten years or so -- for the most part, honestly, I'm good.

But the Tiberi tapes I'll definitely be spending some time with. Not sure whey they waited until November to drop the release. They started teasing it way earlier this year.

-thebigfunk

~ i could still snort you under the table ~

They should release this for free. Years ago Verve transferred these tapes to over 80 CDs and then decided to not release it because of the sound quality being too low. Now they want $$$.