John Coltrane recorded his first album as a leader in 1957, only ten years before his death at the age of 40. In this ten years, he — sorry for the cliché — changed jazz forever.
If I had to choose three of his albums to take to a desert island, it would be Blue Train, Africa/Brass and The John Coltrane Quartet Plays. Why? Because I can listen to them from beginning to the end, any day.
Happy 100th, Trane.
Blue Train (1958)
Africa/Brass (1961)
The John Coltrane Quartet Plays (1965)
One day in April 1949, a 22-year-old trumpeter called Miles Davis received an unexpected phone call. His friend Kenny Clarke invited him to play at the Paris International Jazz Festival. After initial reluctance Miles, who had never been abroad before, accepted the invitation. In Paris he met the actress and singer Juliette Gréco and... Did I say too much?
How come that two Spaniards authored and published this book first in French, as Miles et Juliette, and the Spanish version second, I wonder. The dialogue in the “original” must be in Franglais because in Miles en París it is in Spanglish, or even Franglañol. So what?
Today, Yuri brought me a hand-made greetings card with a postscriptum:
P.S: Your age is the answer to life, universe and everything, according to “Hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy”.Hmmm. Let’s see what they were up to 42 years ago.
One of the advantages of vinyl over CD is the absence of so-called “bonus tracks”. Almost by definition, the “bonus tracks” are the out-takes which, at the time, were not included into the original albums. If you grew up listening to albums (not compilations), there’s very little added value in bonus tracks, which are either not as good as the rest of the album, or sound out of place. Of course, from a CD-centric point of view, it is an utter waste of CD space not to put there any extra material.
Here’s a commendable solution to this problem (how to make a completist happy without offending a purist): Deluxe Edition of Coltrane’s Ballads. Disc One is the original album as released by Impulse! in 1962: eight tracks, just about 32 minutes of music. Disc Two includes 14 tracks, of which 13 were never released before. Now, this one is really for Trane fans only: apart from Irving Berlin’s They Say It’s Wonderful (“which he <Coltrane> abandoned after only one complete take”, according to Francis Davis’s liner notes), the rest are the alternate takes. I mean, do you really want to hear five takes of Greensleeves (I prefer this version from Africa/Brass Sessions to any of those) or seven takes of It’s Easy to Remember? I stick to the first CD, which is a masterpiece.
