John Coltrane: Coltrane (180g, green vinyl) [WAXTIME IN COLOR]

Why you'll love it

This WaxTime in Color pressing puts Coltrane on 180g green vinyl and adds two bonus tracks. It's the first studio album by his classic quartet with McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones.

This edition

• 180g vinyl
• Green vinyl
• 2 bonus tracks

About the album

By 1962 John Coltrane had a hit with "My Favorite Things" and a new home at Impulse!, and with bassist Jimmy Garrison settling in beside McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones, the band that would go on to make A Love Supreme was finally in place. The plainly titled Coltrane is where you hear them lock together, recorded across sessions in the spring and summer of 1962, with Tyner's ringing chords and Jones's polyrhythms already pushing their leader somewhere new.

"Out of This World" stretches a Harold Arlen standard into a long modal workout over Jones's rolling drums. Mal Waldron's "Soul Eyes" is one of the loveliest ballads Coltrane ever recorded, "The Inch Worm" gives a Frank Loesser children's song the soprano saxophone treatment, and "Tunji" and "Miles' Mode" show the quartet stretching out. Garrison's deep, steady bass anchors all of it.

Bob Thiele produced, and "Soul Eyes" has since become a standard in its own right. Green vinyl isn't how Impulse! did things in 1962, but we suspect Elvin Jones would have hit it just as hard.

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

Listen

On WaxTime in Color, a reissue of the 1962 album.