Red Garland Quintet: Soul Junction (Original Jazz Classics series) [CRAFT]

Why you'll love it

This Original Jazz Classics edition is mastered all-analogue from the original tapes, pressed on 180g vinyl at RTI and housed in a tip-on jacket with an obi strip. Rudy Van Gelder recorded the session in Hackensack on November 15, 1957, with Coltrane and Byrd in the front line.

This edition

• Original Jazz Classics series
• 180g vinyl
• All-analogue mastering from the original tapes
• Mono
• Tip-on jacket
• Obi strip
• Pressed at RTI
• Pressed in the USA

About the album

Red Garland had a habit of bringing out the best in horn players. The Dallas-born pianist had spent the mid-1950s in Miles Davis's quintet, and by late 1957 he was leading his own dates for Prestige, popularising the rich block-chord style that became his calling card. For this one he brought along two rising stars, John Coltrane on tenor and Donald Byrd on trumpet, with George Joyner on bass and Art Taylor on drums.

The title track is a long, slow blues that lets the band settle in and lets Garland take his time. Dizzy Gillespie's "Woody'N You" and "Birks' Works" give Coltrane and Byrd room to run, and Garland's reading of Ellington's "I've Got It Bad (And That Ain't Good)" is pure late-night tenderness. "Hallelujah" closes the set in high spirits.

Coltrane had cut Blue Train a couple of months earlier, and you can hear him hitting his stride. On this evidence he was not a man who believed in a lie-in.

Also at Kops: more Red Garland on vinyl · browse Classic Jazz

Tracklist

Listen

On Prestige / Craft Recordings (cat# CR00869), a reissue of the 1960 album.