is always cause for celebration round these parts...and in this case, looks there is two new Coltrane CDs coming to the office soonest.
From the Family Closet, a New Coltrane Album
Ravi Coltrane talks about the release of the striking new John Coltrane album, “One Down, One Up: Live at the Half Note,” and his path to the Coltrane legacy....Yet [Ravi Coltrane ] has also served, unassumingly, as a steward of his father's music, a background role that is both personal and increasingly public - as illustrated by the release today of the striking new John Coltrane album, “One Down, One Up: Live at the Half Note” (Impulse!) , featuring a pair of performances by the Coltrane Quartet in the spring of 1965.
“This Half Note material really comes at a summit,” Mr. Coltrane said by phone recently from Rotterdam, the Netherlands, where he was on tour. “It's the high point of a sound that the band had been cultivating, basically, since 1961. The music that was recorded there comes at the strongest point of that band, playing that sound. Right after that, they start changing and going other places.”
Fortunately for jazz fans, the Half Note album comes on the heels of more newly issued Coltrane: “Thelonious Monk With John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall,” a 1957 concert recording discovered in the Library of Congress in February and issued on Blue Note Records a few weeks ago to wide critical acclaim. As a rare document of the saxophonist's most storied apprenticeship, the recording has been heralded as a missing link in the chain of modern jazz.
One Down, One Up: Live at the Half Note
and this also sounds intriguing:
Every year sees a crop of newly found jazz gems, but rarely are listeners treated to anything as special as this 1957 concert recording of Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane, which was accidentally discovered in an unmarked box by a Library of Congress engineer early in 2005. Until now, fans could only dream of hearing these two immortals play together beyond the three studio tracks they left behind. But here they are, hitting their stride at an all-star benefit concert, basking in the chemistry they had developed in Monk's quartet during the preceding weeks at New York's Five Spot. Coltrane's playing is a revelation. He's both an inspired accompanist and a galvanizing soloist, taking the music to new heights with his bold, brilliantly challenging, and sometimes jaw-dropping phrases, note clusters, and blasts of power. Sharing with Coltrane a newfound sense of freedom following the personal and professional troubles that had plagued them both, Monk is clearly tickled to be in the tenorist's presence, injecting humorous commentaries and otherwise asserting his eccentric genius as a pianist. The material, which was very well recorded by the Voice of America, includes Monk classics like “Epistrophy,” “Monk's Moods,” and “Evidence,” as well as a striking rendition of the standard “Sweet and Lovely.” This is music that not only bears repeated listenings, but also demands them--the ultimate definition of a classic.
Thelonious Monk With John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall
Update to include a review from the NYT 10/10/05:
In the spring of 1965, John Coltrane's quartet played several gigs at the Half Note Club in Manhattan, some of which were recorded for WABC-FM radio. Tape traders have long known about them, and the music has circulated since the late 1960's, but generally not in complete form, and not sounding nearly as good as they do now.On “One Down, One Up” (Impulse) - the radio recordings from two nights at the Half Note - we're about six months before the last phase of Coltrane's career, before the moment when he changed his band, stopped for the most part playing in nightclubs and made his music generally more jarring and oceanic. Here his quartet is still intact, with McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass and Elvin Jones on drums; as far out as it may get, the internal logic of a great band holds fast.
The album includes four tightly wound performances at the club, which was on Hudson Street near Spring, across from where the Jazz Gallery now stands. Taken as a whole, it amounts to an amazing display of controlled volatility in jazz. This is not the Coltrane of million-selling appeal; it's more fervid and rattling than studio records like “A Love Supreme.” But by other measures it is the band at its peak, each member contributing an equal part to the sound, playing hard and loud and at the top of his imagination.
If there was ever a place to marvel at the connection Coltrane had with Jones - a connection that drove the band - this is it. Each of the four pieces is remarkable, but the killer is “One Down, One Up,” in which the band reduces to just saxophone and drums for a 15-minute stretch, and then reduces even further because Jones's bass-drum pedal breaks midsong.
It doesn't matter. Coltrane and Jones are singing through their instruments in their own complex, dense language, with Coltrane's rapid, jagged phrasing and Jones's layered rhythm. (To situate it stylistically within Coltrane's work, “One Down, One Up” takes the fast, nearly incantational delivery of his “Chasin' the Trane” improvisation from 1961, a few notches higher.) And though the musicians slip around each other's patterns, weaving and dodging, it's as if an identical sense of time is wiring them together.
