Well-recorded performances of Coltrane's most noted works--"Naima", "My Favorite Things" and "A Love Supreme"--in superb concerts from Berlin in 1963 and Antibes in 1965 with his classic quartet of pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Jimmy Garrison and drummer Elvin Jones, revealing the expansion and freedom these compositions receive through the flexibility of live performance.
Label: ezz-thetics by Hat Hut Records Ltd Catalog ID: ezz-thetics 1134 Squidco Product Code: 31984
Format: CD Condition: New Released: 2022 Country: Switzerland Packaging: Cardboard Gatefold Tracks 1 and 2 recorded live in Berlin, Germany, on November 2nd, 1963, by Rodgers-Hammerstein.
Tracks 3-6 recorded live in Antibes - Juan-les-Pins, France, on July 26th, 1965.
"John William Coltrane played his final concert performance on April 23, 1967, at the Olatunji Center of African Culture in New York City. A final partial studio date took place twenty-four days later; the results lamentably lost to a fire. Two months after that, to the day, Coltrane succumbed to liver cancer. The saxophonist's abundantly documented output became both fixed and finite; the privilege to witness him in-person forever extinguished.
Fortunately, Coltrane experienced cumulative opportunities to play for thousands of people prior to his passing. From his Philadelphia beginnings as a nineteen-year-old section player in drummer Jimmy Johnson's band, through formative sideman dates with Dizzy Gillespie, Earl Bostic, and Johnny Hodges, and on to celebrated tenures with Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk, dovetailing with steady and prolific endeavors as a bandleader, Coltrane stayed intensely busy in concert contexts. Larger popularity in the public consciousness was comparatively gradual, but as with his approaches to practice and innovation, patience paid off.
Conventional consensus contends that none of the concert recordings that Coltrane left behind palpably match the magnitude of combined sensory magnificence that he and his colleagues could muster in the flesh. All that remains are partial facsimiles. Air shots, bootlegs, label-sanctioned albums, and rehearsals along with preciously scant footage. The provenances of the recordings are profuse and varied. So are the limitations, ranging from the minor intrusions of audience and venue noise to barely serviceable means of documentation and preservation.
The studio side of Coltrane's catalog has greater consistency in terms of caliber of aural presentation, but fewer occasions for extended improvisation and creation. This is particularly evident in an analysis of the recordings made of his Classic Quartet comprising pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Jimmy Garrison and drummer Elvin Jones. An ensemble that was a work in progress well before it was a finished cohort, Coltrane's most fertile band was also best suited to the hot house environment of audience-attendant performance. Most commonly clubs, with formal concert and festival stages intermittently included.
Selecting favorites from this inventory can involve any number of criteria, but the tally is a subjective one. Producer Werner X. Uehlinger chose the three performances for this survey with straight-forward motives in mind. "Naima" is his preferred piece on Giant Steps, Coltrane's 1960 debut for Atlantic Records. "My Favorite Things" holds his esteem for the saxophonist's fealty to the song's original melody. Coltrane forgoes the temptation to turn the tune into a contrafact and surprises instead by how he tailors it to the specific tonal properties of his straight horn. Both pieces received definitive renditions at the quartet's November 1963 Berlin concert.
Named after Coltrane's first wife, "Naima" is among the saxophonist's most intimately affecting ballads. The Berlin version adds uplifting ardor into the amorous ode, shifting from Coltrane's tender theme statement to an incandescent Tyner solo skirted first by Jones' beneficent brushes, then crashing sticks. Garrison is mostly an undulating pulse, and Coltrane's solo emanates cascading, coruscating patterns. A plenteous humanity pervades, with a return to pellucid placidity in the resplendent resolution.
Advancements articulated on Giant Steps signaled a magnification of Coltrane's significance to musicians, but it was the title piece to the subsequent My Favorite Things that found exponential purchase with the listening public. Coltrane's modal variation on Richard Rogers' technicolor paean to positivity opened inclusive avenues of extended jazz improvisation still clearly informed by melody and harmony.
In Berlin, Tyner is again central to the early momentum and development of the piece. Parallels to intricate raga structures are superficial, but still intimated in the diversity of melodic permutations pursued and construed by the band. The nasal-ized nature of Coltrane's soprano clarifies into a burnished Bedouin intensity as he returns repeatedly to the central motif, torquing it from elongated striations to comparatively cleanly stated component tones, eventually moving off-mic and back on as Jones' drums swirl and eddy around him. Tyner again serves as harmonic rudder with an answering and framing ostinato heralding the inevitable recovery of the theme.
Long believed the only complete concert iteration of "A Love Supreme" extant as a recording, the quartet's rendition from July 1965 at Antibes has since lost this distinction with the commercial appearance last year of another rendition captured in a Seattle club two months later and quite distinct from its studio and stage predecessors. Uehlinger prefers Antibes to the studio version foremost because of the difference in marshaled energy. This is especially evident in the realization of the suite's penultimate part, "Pursuance," where Coltrane and Jones converge in a titanic duet that builds to vital, Vesuvian release and presages another personnel sea change on the horizon.
By early 1966, Tyner and Jones were absent the roster, replaced by Alice Coltrane and Rashied Ali. Coltrane redoubled his commitment to mapping freer regions of improvision through these fresh associations. "Naima" and "My Favorite Things" were still part of the songbook and the often-augmented band even revisited the opening invocation of "A Love Supreme" at its Olatunji appearance, but these new renderings felt like far flung descendants indicative of the evolution that had ensued in the intervening months. Coltrane's ever-germinating argot appeared immune to curtailment or abbreviation. Mortality arrived as a calamitous corrective to that idealistic perception. And yet the instrumental vernacular Coltrane constructed persists, not only in collective memory, but through the innumerable musicians informed by the capacious repository of erudition that he left behind."-Derek Taylor, April 2022