John Coltrane

By the time this session was recorded, Coltrane had already been through the Miles Davis Quintet, was in the middle of his most serious period of personal struggle, and was simultaneously developing what would become one of the most distinctive voices the tenor saxophone had ever produced. You can hear all of that pressure on this record. It doesn't sound like a man who's relaxed. It sounds like a man who is working something out.

The lineup is a little unusual, Sahib Shihab on baritone gives the ensemble a different weight than the typical hard bop front line, and Mal Waldron's angular, deliberate piano is the perfect complement to where Coltrane's head was at. "Straight Street" is the one to start with: hard, bright, relentless, Coltrane soloing like he's running through something he needs to get to the other side of.

What makes this record valuable is the transitional quality of it. He hadn't yet discovered the harmonic approach that would define Giant Steps, and he wasn't yet in the fully modal territory of his Atlantic period. But the raw materials are all here, the sheets of sound, the fierce forward momentum, that tone that sounds almost too big for the instrument. You're hearing a talent that hasn't found its final form yet, which is its own kind of excitement.

Paul Chambers is brilliant throughout, as he always was. Tootie Heath drives the session with more fire than you'd expect. This is a four-star record on a page full of five-star records, but that's no insult, it's one of the most honest albums in the Coltrane catalog precisely because he hadn't started editing himself yet.

This is Coltrane's only album as a leader for Blue Note, and it's the kind of record that makes you wonder what might have happened if he'd stayed. Five tracks. Recorded in a single session. One of the greatest hard bop albums ever made. The title track alone earns the record a place in any serious collection, that opening head is one of the most recognizable things in all of jazz, the kind of melody that bores itself directly into your brain stem on first listen and never fully leaves.

Lee Morgan was twenty at the time and already sounding like he'd been playing forever. His solo on "Blue Train" is aggressive and beautiful in equal parts, and he matches Coltrane's intensity without trying to replicate his approach. Curtis Fuller on trombone fills out the three-horn front line with that buttery, unhurried sound he carried throughout his whole career. Kenny Drew and Philly Joe Jones lock in behind them like a door closing.

"Moment's Notice" deserves its own sentence. Coltrane wrote it, and the harmonic complexity in the head, the rapid chord changes, the specific way the melody navigates them, foreshadows what he'd do on Giant Steps two years later. He was already working it out. You can hear the gears turning in real time.

The ballad "I'm Old Fashioned" is where Coltrane shows you the other side. That burnished, warm tone, unhurried, completely certain of itself. He was in the middle of personal turmoil and professional transition when this was recorded, and none of that shows, only the music, and the music is immaculate.

This is a compiled record, sessions from two different dates in 1956 and 1957, which gives it a slightly stitched-together quality that the best Prestige albums don't have. But the playing is too good to hold that against it. Red Garland is the star here in a supporting role way: his comping is so harmonically rich and rhythmically natural that it creates a kind of cushion under Coltrane that lets him push harder without losing the swing.

"Traneing In" is the centerpiece, twelve-plus minutes of blues at a medium-up tempo that goes somewhere different every time Coltrane takes it around. He's building his solo architecture here in ways that would become more formalized later, but at this point there's a looseness to it, a sense of following wherever the music leads. Paul Chambers and Art Taylor hold it down with that particular Prestige efficiency, never flashy, always there.

The ballads are gorgeous. "While My Lady Sleeps" is played with the kind of intimate care that reminds you Coltrane could be tender when he wanted to be, before the sheets of sound approach made people sometimes forget that. He knew exactly when to hold back, and he holds back here in all the right places.

If you're working through the Prestige period in order, this is essential. If you're starting here, start with "Traneing In" and let it pull you in the direction it wants to go.

This is the Prestige album that doesn't get enough attention. While everyone's focused on Blue Train or working their way toward Giant Steps, Soultrane sits in the middle of the catalog being quietly extraordinary. The same quartet as the Red Garland Trio date, but something is different here, there's more urgency, more commitment, more of a sense that Coltrane knows exactly what he wants and is going after it directly.

"Good Bait" opens the record at a tempo that should feel comfortable but somehow doesn't, Coltrane treats it as a challenge from the first bar, piling phrases on top of each other with that ascending, searching quality that was becoming his signature. By the time he finishes his first chorus you know you're somewhere specific. Red Garland's response is perfect: he swings with this lightness that makes the density of Coltrane's lines even more striking by contrast.

The ballads are the real revelation. "I Want to Talk About You", a song he'd return to many times over the years, gets one of its most straightforward readings here, the melody honored rather than deconstructed, Coltrane's tone warm and enormous and completely in control. The later versions are more complex, more exploratory. This one is more in love with the song itself.

If you know Blue Train and Giant Steps and want to hear what was happening between them, start here. It's one of the five or six essential recordings of his career, and it doesn't make enough lists.

Paul Quinichette was nicknamed "the Vice Pres" because his sound was so close to Lester Young's that people did double takes. That's not a criticism, it's actually one of the most loving acts of stylistic devotion in jazz history. The problem is that by 1957, Coltrane was already pointing somewhere so different that pairing them in a two-tenor format creates an almost philosophical contrast: here is where jazz came from, here is where it's going.

Quinichette holds his own. His tone is genuinely beautiful, his lines unhurried and lyrical. But listening to the two of them trade on "Exactly Like You" or "Vodka" is a little like watching two very good painters with completely different techniques try to finish the same canvas. There's mutual respect, but the aesthetic gap is real and neither player tries to close it.

Mal Waldron is the perfect middleman on piano, he'd worked with Billie Holiday and had an approach that sat comfortably in either world. Ed Thigpen is authoritative and efficient behind the kit. The rhythm section doesn't take sides.

This is a minor entry in the Coltrane catalog, but it's not a bad record. It's more interesting as a document than as a listening experience, a photograph of two approaches passing each other in a hallway, each on the way to a different destination.

There is before Giant Steps and there is after Giant Steps. That's not hyperbole, it's just the accurate description of what this record did to harmony in jazz. The "Coltrane changes," the system of rapid major third substitutions that the title track and "Countdown" and "Spiral" are built on, rewrote what was possible on a chord chart. Every jazz musician who came after had to either master this language or consciously choose to work around it. There was no pretending it hadn't happened.

Tommy Flanagan was one of the finest pianists of his generation and he was genuinely caught off guard by the complexity of these changes at the session, you can hear him finding his footing in real time on the title track, slightly behind the curve in a way that's fascinating rather than damaging. It was that new. Coltrane, by contrast, plays the changes as if he invented them in his sleep, which is essentially what happened: he worked them out at home, over months, until they were as natural to him as a blues.

"Naima", the ballad he wrote for his wife, is the record's exhale, and it's one of the most beautiful things he ever recorded. No complicated changes, no sheets of sound. Just a melody and a man who means every note of it. After everything that comes before it, the simplicity is devastating.

This is one of those records that gets called important so often that people forget to talk about how good it sounds. It sounds extraordinary. The invention and the feeling are inseparable here. Put it on and listen to the title track three times in a row and see if you can explain why it still sounds new.

This is a record caught between two worlds, recorded in the same months that produced Giant Steps but pointing somewhere different, back toward standards, toward the kind of open, swinging playing that the new quartet was already learning to do together. McCoy Tyner appears on some tracks, and his arrival is audible: even in 1959, his voicings had a richness and an openness that changed the temperature of whatever he was playing on.

"Little Old Lady", a Hoagy Carmichael tune from the 1930s that no serious jazz musician had any business covering, gets transformed into something genuinely interesting, Coltrane treating the changes as a skeleton to build on rather than a melody to interpret. The rhythm section is still finding its identity here; Pete La Roca's drumming is solid but not yet the specific fire that Elvin Jones would bring to the classic quartet.

What makes this record worth your time is that it captures the moment just before everything locked in. Within a year, Coltrane would have Tyner, Jones, and Jimmy Garrison playing behind him, and the classic quartet period would begin. This is the dress rehearsal, played by people who didn't know it was a dress rehearsal.

Not the essential Coltrane record, that's the album after this one. But for anyone who wants to understand how My Favorite Things became possible, this is the explanation.

The first thing you hear on this record is the soprano saxophone, and if you didn't know that was coming, it stops you cold. Coltrane had been working with the instrument privately for some time, but this was its introduction to the jazz world as a serious vehicle, not a novelty, not a detour, but a second primary voice. That reedy, slightly nasal, ancient-sounding tone over Tyner's pedal-point vamp and Elvin Jones's layered rhythms: it's one of the most immediately recognizable sounds in the music's history.

The version of "My Favorite Things" that opens the record is thirteen and a half minutes long. The Rogers and Hammerstein waltz melody is stated, then Coltrane departs from it and doesn't come back for a very long time, following the mode, following what the music wants to become, Tyner's left hand holding the tonal center like an anchor while Elvin Jones creates a rhythmic environment so rich it sounds like more than two hands and two feet. This is what modal jazz could do that chord-based playing couldn't: it could breathe.

The other side of the album is equally strong, "Everytime We Say Goodbye" is genuinely moving, Coltrane on tenor now, the soprano put away for something that required more warmth. And "But Not for Me" is one of the great medium-tempo jazz performances of the era, the kind of track that makes you forget about categories and just listen.

This is the beginning of the classic quartet period. Everything from here through A Love Supreme is the sustained peak of a genius in full command of his powers. It starts here, on this record, with a Sound of Music tune played for thirteen and a half minutes on an instrument most jazz musicians hadn't touched since Sidney Bechet.

The title track is Billy Strayhorn's masterpiece, a long, harmonically complex song about sophisticated loneliness that Billy Holiday had claimed and Nat Cole had recorded and a dozen other major artists had approached and none of them had fully inhabited. Coltrane's version is something else entirely. He takes the melody's unusual structure, the thirty-two bar AABA with that chromatic bridge that sounds like falling down stairs, and finds in it something deeply personal, something that sounds less like interpretation than confession.

The record is split between two sessions, one with a full sextet including Donald Byrd and Pepper Adams, one as a quartet. The quartet tracks are where it lives. Just Coltrane, Red Garland, Paul Chambers, Art Taylor, no extra voices to hide behind. The arrangements are simple. The playing is not.

"I Hear a Rhapsody" is another revelation, a song that could easily be played as pure sentiment, given instead a searching, slightly restless reading that implies more than it states. Coltrane was always most interesting when he was treating a familiar melody like a question rather than an answer.

This isn't talked about as much as Blue Train or Giant Steps, and that's the Prestige tax, the label gets less prestige than Blue Note or Atlantic in the jazz mythology, even when the music is just as good. This is just as good. Don't let the label fool you.

Two very different sensibilities sharing the same space for an afternoon. Milt Jackson, "Bags", was the most lyrical vibraphonist in jazz, a swinger of the highest order, a man whose relationship to the blues was warm and direct and entirely without pretension. Coltrane in early 1959 was in the middle of developing Giant Steps, his head full of harmonic systems that he was testing at every opportunity. The miracle of this record is that neither of them moves toward the other, and yet the music sounds like a conversation.

Hank Jones on piano is the key to making it work. He's one of the most sophisticated accompanists in the music's history, and on this date he serves as a kind of translator, comfortable in the swinging world that Bags inhabits, and technically capable of following wherever Coltrane wants to go. Paul Chambers and Connie Kay, the MJQ rhythm section, provide the connective tissue.

"The Night We Called It a Day" is the emotional center of the record, Jackson's vibes shimmer under the melody in a way that sounds almost fragile, and Coltrane answers with lines that are longer and more complex but somehow equally tender. They're saying the same thing in different languages, and you understand both.

This is a collaboration that could have been uncomfortable, a meeting of two artists at very different points in their development, with different instincts about what jazz should do. Instead it's generous and warm and full of genuine listening. That's rarer than you'd think, even among the greats.