The 5-CD Side Steps follows two other Prestige box sets—the 6-CD Fearless Leader (2006) and 5-CD Interplay (2007)—which together catalogue saxophonist John Coltrane's recordings for the label 1956-58. The three boxes, each packed with extraordinary music, chronicle on parallel paths the years during which Coltrane's revolutionary style began to emerge, but before he achieved iconic status first, from 1959, on Atlantic, and then, from 1961 until his death in 1967, on Impulse!.

Fearless Leader collects Coltrane's albums as leader, Interplay his albums as co-leader, and Side Steps those albums featuring Coltrane as a featured soloist on sessions led by other musicians. The distinctions have blurred since the release of the original vinyl LPs: as Coltrane's star rose, some albums first released under other leaders' names were subsequently reissued by Prestige with Coltrane credited as leader or co-leader, and were on occasion also retitled. With this source of potential confusion in mind, the trio of boxes is a convenient way of archiving Coltrane's prolific recordings for the label.

None of the three boxes include Coltrane's contemporaneous work with trumpeter Miles Davis for Prestige, which are instead available on the 4-CD The Miles Davis Quintet: The Legendary Prestige Quintet Sessions (2006).

In the broad historical context, it should be remembered that the Prestige boxes do not, of course, include two important albums Coltrane made for other labels during the same period: Blue Train (Blue Note, 1957), which he led, and, with pianist Thelonious Monk, Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane (Riverside, 1957). The second of these has been joined by Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall (Blue Note), recorded in 1957 but lost in radio station Voice of America's tape library until its chance discovery in 2005.

Chapter Index

1. The Discs
2. The Booklet: New Insights from Bob Weinstock
3. 1957: Coltrane's Watershed Year
4. Closing Curiosities
5. Tracks and Personnel

The Discs

Side Steps programmes 12 albums featuring Coltrane, presented in session order over five CDs, which during the course of their six and a half hours playing time document, no less dramatically than either Fearless Leader or Interplay, the development of Coltrane's improvising style, from May 1956 through January 1958.

The albums are pianist Elmo Hope's Informal Jazz (1956); saxophonist Sonny Rollins' Tenor Madness (1956); pianist and composer Tadd Dameron's Mating Call (1956); pianist Mal Waldron's Mal/2 (1957) and The Dealers (1965); pianist Red Garland's All Mornin' Long (1957), Soul Junction (1957), High Pressure (1957) and Dig It! (1957); saxophonist Gene Ammons's Groove Blues (1957) and The Big Sound (1958); and tuba player Ray Draper's The Ray Draper Quintet featuring John Coltrane (1957).

The only exception to the session order chronology of the five discs is the 12-minute title track to Rollins' Tenor Madness (the only track on the album on which Coltrane played), which, presumably for maximum playing time reasons, is included at the beginning of Disc Two rather than midway through Disc One.

In addition to charting Coltrane's growth as a soloist, the 12 original albums are all early period hard bop works of the first order. As well as saxophonists Coltrane, Rollins and Ammons, and pianists Hope, Waldron, Garland and Dameron, the collective soloists include saxophonists Hank Mobley, Jackie McLean, Sahib Shihab and Pepper Adams, trumpeters Donald Byrd and Idrees Sulieman, flautist Jerome Richardson, and drummers Philly Joe Jones and Art Taylor. Greats all of them, here in hard bop's first flush of glory.

The material used at the sessions ranges from originals, mostly written by the leader on the date, to jazz standards, tunes from the American songbook, and barely rebooted, classic blues structures. Hope's Informal Jazz, Waldron's Mal/2 and The Dealers, and Draper's Featuring John Coltrane are each equal parts originals and songbook standards. Garland's four albums are mostly composed of bop and songbook standards. Ammons' session included three bluesy originals (written by Waldron, the pianist on the date) and one songbook standard. Dameron's Mating Call is the only album entirely composed of originals (a leading bop composer and arranger, Dameron had previously written the warhorses "Good Bait," "Our Delight" and "Hot House"). "Tenor Madness," written by Rollins, is a simple blues riff on which Coltrane and Rollins take extended solos and then trade fours.

The Booklet: New Insights from Bob Weinstock

The Side Steps box includes a handsomely put together 72-page booklet with rare photographs (that's pianist Elmo Hope on the open page of the illustation at the top of this review), a sessionography, an essay by the writer Ashley Kahn, the transcript of a phone interview Kahn conducted with Prestige founder/producer Bob Weinstock in 2001 (Weinstock passed away aged 77 in 2006), and fully reproduced original album cover artwork and sleeve notes.

Of the new material, the Weinstock interview is particularly valuable. The transcript suggests a conversation lasting perhaps 45 minutes, only fragments of which have previously been published, in Kahn's A Love Supreme: The Creation of John Coltrane's Classic Album (Viking Penguin, 2002). Not included, unsurprisingly, in Kahn's book, were those passages in which Weinstock talked about the A&R activities of Impulse! and Atlantic. Weinstock likens their modus operandi to those of "vultures," who with fatter cheque books than he or Blue Note's Alfred Lion, enticed promising artists away from the pioneering independent labels who "discovered" them. At another point, Weinstock rather unconvincingly asks to be reminded which label released Coltrane's A Love Supreme (1965), Impulse!'s all-time best selling album.

While still on the theme of major label "piracy," Weinstock takes a potshot at Columbia, with whom famously Miles Davis signed before the termination of his Prestige contract: "Even Ellington, as great as he was... the time he's on CBS, he's making all these dumb records."

Elsewhere in the interview, Weinstock talks interestingly about Coltrane, as a man and a musician, and about Prestige's recording aesthetic—no rehearsals, rejected takes erased from the tape and the tape re-used, and with engineer Rudy Van Gelder and the musicians effectively producing the music while Weinstock watched ballgames on TV, volume turned down, in an adjoining room. It's a fascinating read, on and between the lines.