John Coltrane at 100: Part 3 — A Few of My Favorite Things

by Fritz Byers

The Essential Coltrane. If you go looking for that, whether by talking to mavens or mining what these days passes for Intelligence, you’ll get variations on the same core of recordings: Giant Steps, A Love Supreme, probably My Favorite Things, maybe the live Vanguard recordings.  Nothing wrong about any of that.

But “essential” is an interesting word — per the OED, “Absolutely necessary, indispensably requisite.” Sure. Also, “Of or pertaining to essence, specific being, or intrinsic nature.” Right again.  

You can do your own simple search, and you’ll get selections that accord with the former definition. With a little refinement, you may encompass a broader swath, veering a little more toward the latter. Eventually, you’ll be led toward all sorts of John’s recordings that will draw you in, fill your ears and, if you allow, your spirit, and leave you wanting more.

Here, I’m thinking I’ll do something a little different, although complementary: mention a few records that get crowded out by the famous ones, the essentials, but that have as much to say about who John Coltrane was, what he could do, what he was trying to say, as anything on the canonical shelf. I’ve chosen these not because they’re hidden — none of them could be considered a secret — but because they don’t get the attention that their music deserves.

Africa/Brass (1961)

This record shows John not just the soloist, but as a big-band leader which is fun; amid the deluge of his soloing, it’s easy to forget he could write charts of sprawling musical complexities and then organize an ensemble that would create from them enveloping sound. Recorded not longer after John left Miles to form his own group, Africa/Brass pairs the new quartet with a large brass ensemble built around John’s own conception of what a broad, dense harmonic wash under a soloist could do. The title track runs over sixteen minutes on a single droning pedal point, the horns rising and receding like weather while John searches overhead — it’s modal playing on an orchestral scale, something closer to what Gil Evans did for Miles than to anything else in John’s own catalogue. He never made another record anything like it, so it’s worth hearing for that reason alone, and also to get a glimpse of a whole other career he could have had.

Crescent (1964) 

Here’s a parlor game: If A Love Supreme didn’t exist, what would the Coltrane salon deem his classic-quartet masterpiece? Crescent is my answer. So why don’t we talk about it that way? Recorded in the spring of 1964 with McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, and Elvin Jones, this is the classic quartet at its most balanced and unified, before it was staggered by the devotional weight of the music John would turn toward eight months later. There’s no suite here, no liner-note prayer, no framework inviting you to share in spiritual praise. Rather, the album is four uncannily well-suited musicians, familiar with one another from two years of ceaseless playing together, operating at the peak of their rapport, working out on original compositions of real beauty — the title track’s long, unhurried melody, “Wise One”’s hymn-like tenderness, the aching lyricism of “Lonnie’s Lament.” I said earlier this week that John’s reputation sometimes prevents us from hearing his music whole, that the sainthood can crowd out the sound. This is the record I most had in mind in saying that: strip away the mysticism and you’re left with some of the most complete quartet playing ever recorded.

Ballads (1962)

Yes, Ballads turns up on plenty of “starter Coltrane” lists, so calling it underappreciated is a stretch. But I wonder whether it’s recommended for a different reason than the one I have in mind, as training wheels for listeners who might find the rest of the catalogue too demanding. That’s legitimate, of course, but I’m mentioning it here as proof of a claim I made to open the week, that beneath every later innovation was a tone of extraordinary, unforced beauty. From start to finish, Ballads is a restrained, romantic, faintly classical record, John applying that lush sound of his to some gems in the American repertoire, with total commitment and not a wasted note.  

A friend asked if I was going to mention ’Trane’s album with Johnny Hartman. So, yes, I am. That record, made the year after Ballads, belongs right alongside it. There, John plays almost entirely in the service of someone else’s voice, something I don’t think he had done before, or would ever do again. He offers introductions, filigree, the briefest of solos. It may be the most purely generous performance of his career.  

With these two records, you get an hour and a half of proof that the man who in the few short years he had left took the idea of saxophone sound almost entirely apart had a peerless capacity for simple, direct tenderness.  

The Last Trane (1965) and Coltrane Plays the Blues (1962)

These two share a pedigree: neither was really an album John made, in the sense of sitting down with an intention to make a record and a unifying sequence in mind. Rather, both are vault releases, assembled and issued by record labels that John had abandoned, leaving behind troves of unreleased tunes. The Last Trane is Prestige, in 1965, reaching back into unissued 1957-58 sessions, years after he’d left for Atlantic; Coltrane Plays the Blues is Atlantic doing the same thing in 1962, after John had gone on to Impulse, pulling material largely from the October 1960 dates the produced My Favorite Things and Coltrane’s Sound.   

Calling the latter a “blues” record is a bit of stretch, because, in the strict sense, the tunes aren’t classical blues forms. But the material is shot through with a blues inflection, a rootedness that sits underneath the modal explorations of the period. I don’t know if there’s a word for this genre, or a color that hints at its tonality, its emotional pull. But I know the record is one of my favorite things.