John Coltrane: Blue Train (Blue Note Tone Poet Series, mono) [BLUE NOTE]

Why you'll love it

This Tone Poet edition presents Blue Train in mono on 180g vinyl, in a deluxe tip-on gatefold. It's Coltrane's one session as leader for Blue Note, four of the five tunes are his, and the album went gold in 2001.

This edition

• Blue Note Tone Poet Series
• Mono
• 180g vinyl
• Tip-on gatefold jacket

About the album

In September 1957 John Coltrane was playing nightly with Thelonious Monk at the Five Spot, and Blue Note did something unusual for the time: it paid the band to rehearse. The result, cut in one day at Rudy Van Gelder's studio in Hackensack, New Jersey, was the record Coltrane himself later called his favourite of his own up to that point.

He brought a crack sextet. Lee Morgan on trumpet and Curtis Fuller on trombone were young and hungry, while Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones, his rhythm section from the Miles Davis band, locked in with pianist Kenny Drew. The title track opens with that unforgettable bluesy horn call, "Moment's Notice" is a tricky, joyful sprint through the changes, "Locomotion" barrels along, and "Lazy Bird" nods to Tadd Dameron's Lady Bird. The standard "I'm Old Fashioned" is pure, unhurried beauty.

Blue Note's own reissue producer Michael Cuscuna called it Coltrane's first real mature statement. The Tone Poet series exists to make these sessions sound like you're sitting in Van Gelder's front room, and we're told he was very particular about guests touching the furniture.

Also at Kops: more John Coltrane on vinyl · browse Classic Jazz

Tracklist

Listen

On Blue Note (cat# B0035203-01), a reissue of the 1958 album.