Jazz Articles about John Coltrane

About John Coltrane

Album Review

John Coltrane: A Love Supreme - Live In Seattle

Read "A Love Supreme - Live In Seattle" reviewed by Chris May

by Chris May
September 24, 2021

A Love Supreme: Live In Seattle comes from a gig at The Penthouse in October 1965. The recording, by a septet, is a radical reading of : John Coltrane's suite which has only previously been heard by friends and students of saxophonist and educator Joe Brazil, who taped it and who, few days earlier, had played flute on Coltrane's Om (Impulse, 1968). Brazil passed in 2008 and by a route not yet made public, the tape has been acquired and ...

Interview

Richard Brent Turner on Islam, Jazz and Black Liberation

by Lawrence Peryer
July 30, 2021

Richard Brent Turner is Professor in the Department of Religious Studies and the African American Studies Program at the University of Iowa. Since joining the faculty in 2001, Professor Turner has authored several books, including Jazz Religion, The Second Line, and Black New Orleans, New Edition (Indiana University Press, 2016), and Islam in the African-American Experience, Second Edition (Indiana University Press, 2003). The 2020 American Council of Learned Societies Fellow is also author of Soundtrack to a Movement: African American ...

Building a Jazz Library

John Coltrane: Top Ten Live Albums

by Chris May
May 13, 2021

This article is a companion piece to John Coltrane: An Alternative Top Ten Albums, which listed ten albums widely regarded as essential items in John Coltrane's discography and discussed another ten of comparable importance. John Coltrane: Top Ten Live Albums narrows the focus to club and concert recordings. Coltrane's live performances had a trajectory which was largely independent of his studio albums; he did not build set lists around his latest release. For instance, Coltrane never “toured" ...

Building a Jazz Library

John Coltrane: An Alternative Top Ten Albums

by Chris May
April 8, 2021

Miles Davis once said that you could recite the history of jazz in just four words: Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker. To that you need to add two more: John Coltrane. A giant during his lifetime, Coltrane continues to shape jazz and inspire musicians decades after he passed. No other player has come remotely close to eclipsing him. New tenor saxophone stars such as Britain's Shabaka Hutchings, Josephine Davies and Binker Golding have Coltrane as their key formative influence, while Nubya ...

Album Review

John Coltrane: Giant Steps: Remastered & Super Deluxe Editions

Read "Giant Steps: Remastered & Super Deluxe Editions" reviewed by Chris May

by Chris May
September 4, 2020

A date for your diary... 18 September 2020. That is when Atlantic / Rhino releases two cracking new editions of John Coltrane's first landmark album, Giant Steps (Atlantic, 1960). The main event is enhanced audio quality, which has noticeably more presence than any previous reissue. The double CD and vinyl Remastered Edition and digital-only Super Deluxe Edition consist of material which has been newly remastered by John Webber at Air Studios in London. The Remastered Edition includes ...

Jazz Poetry

My Uncle Played The Sax

by Louis Bryan
July 12, 2020

Russet face glistening from another realm, eyes dancing to, A Love Supreme, he be-bopped through my boyhood, fingering those keys like crazy, taking and making them notes his own, empyrean melodies to fill the whole room, my ears entirely, too-cool evocations of heroes who've remained mine, and so I still hear Charlie, John, Ornette, Rashan, Lester, all my ethereal idols whose music I first heard, coming from the bell of ...

Reassessing

Sonny's Crib

by C. Michael Bailey
June 7, 2020

From the outset, pianist Sonny Clark's sophomore effort as a leader is crisp, white-hot hard bop. Leading a standard bop trumpet-tenor saxophone quintet (Donald Byrd, John Coltrane), supplemented with trombone (Curtis Fuller), Clark and his most reliable rhythm section of bassist Paul Chambers and drummer Art Taylor carve five dictionary examples (with alternate takes on the CD) of the music evolving from bebop, principally on the East Coast (if we consider that cool jazz took root on the West Coast ...