John Coltrane: Coltrane [IMPULSE]

Why you'll love it

This remastered 180g reissue comes in a gatefold jacket, produced for reissue by Michael Cuscuna. It's the first studio album by the quartet of Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones, the line-up that went on to make A Love Supreme.

This edition

• 180g vinyl
• Remastered
• Gatefold jacket
• Stereo mix

About the album

Plenty of jazz records carry a leader's name. This one simply carries his surname, which tells you how settled John Coltrane felt by 1962. With Jimmy Garrison now on bass beside McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones, the quartet had found its shape, and producer Bob Thiele brought them into Rudy Van Gelder's studio to prove it. Coltrane had recently taken up the soprano saxophone, and he was eager to show what it could do alongside his tenor.

"Out Of This World" takes the Harold Arlen standard and stretches it into a long, rolling modal journey over Jones's churning drums. Mal Waldron's "Soul Eyes" is pure ballad tenderness, "The Inch Worm" turns a children's song from the film Hans Christian Andersen into a soprano saxophone meditation, "Tunji" is dedicated to the Nigerian drummer Babatunde Olatunji, and "Miles' Mode" sends the band off at a sprint.

It sits between the live fireworks at the Village Vanguard and the spiritual heights still to come, and it might be the warmest place to meet this band. If you've been told jazz is difficult, put on side one and see how long that theory lasts.

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

Tracklist

Listen

On Impulse! (cat# IMP-215), a reissue of the 1962 album.