John Coltrane 100: Exploring the Archives

John Coltrane - One Down, One Up: Live At the Half Note (recorded 1965, released 2005), My Favorite Things: Coltrane At Newport (recorded 1963 and 1965, released 2007), Offering: Live At Temple University (recorded 1966, released 2014), A Love Supreme: Live In Seattle (recorded 1965, released 2021), Evenings At the Village Gate: John Coltrane with Eric Dolphy (recorded 1961, released 2023)

 

By Lee Rice Epstein

1965 was remarkably transformative year in Coltrane’s history. Thankfully, through its ongoing archival releases, Impulse Records has continued to fill in the picture of how, as an artist, he continually pushed himself and his band, deeply and passionately giving his all at all times. One Down, One Up takes us right to March 26, 1965, where Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, and Elvin Jones play an astonishingly high-wire, high-energy “One Down, One Up” that runs nearly 30 minutes. The electricity crackling between players says exactly why Coltrane still matters, why he’s still adored, and why countless players of all kinds continue to study and revere him. The set’s recapitulation on the Newport stage months later (the second half of My Favorite Things: Coltrane At Newport), more clearly shows how the group was thinking about and working through their headiest ideas. That the Newport set was released with a 1963 performance featuring Roy Haynes in the drummer seat gives some additional dimensions to the quartet’s changes over time. Tyner and Jones moved on by the next year, while Garrison held down the Alice Coltrane, Rashied Ali, and Pharoah Sanders group. Reportedly, he didn’t play with them in the fall of

1966, when Coltrane led a phenomenal set at Temple University. Offering has been alternately reviled and lauded, cited by some as a polished but unnecessary bootleg for completists only. But, if one just takes a step back and considers Offering happening the same season as Albert Ayler’s seminal European tour—with the quintet of Ayler, Donald Ayler, Michel Samson, Bill Folwell, and Beaver Harris—and if one wants to get really interested in sympathetic wavelengths, you hear Coltrane singing reportedly for the first time ever during “Leo” on November 11, 1966, while Ayler was recorded doing the same on a performance of Sanders’s “Japan” the previous night, November 10, 1966. That Ayler later screamed during his memorial performance for Coltrane would be too on the nose if someone manufactured it. The two shared both intellectual and spiritual bonds, a beautiful thing we’re scarcely able to know of or understand even partly.

As the saying goes, it would have been enough to get these first three albums, but the 2020s has produced two seemingly impossible sessions: a live recording of “A Love Supreme,” also from 1965, and an unissued session with Eric Dolphy from 1961, featuring “Greensleeves” and “Africa.” What, truly can be said about Coltrane and Dolphy that doesn’t lead to a mountain of what-if or if-only hypotheticals? The hour-plus set is fiery and rich with ideas in motion. If someone told me this was 1963 or ’64, I wouldn’t doubt it. By ’61, both Coltrane and Dolphy were already well out in front of many contemporaries, and the mutual support demonstrated during their brief time together is beautifully realized here. On A Love Supreme (fascinatingly, recorded a couple days after Live In Seattle),Coltrane leads a kind of crossover group, with Tyner, Garrison, and Jones as the core quartet, joined on the tour by Sanders and Donald Garrett on bass, with Carlos Ward jumping in on sax at Coltrane’s invitation. Both Coltrane and Sanders add percussion along with Jones’s drumming, and if Offeringrepresents some kind of approaching end point in Coltrane’s art, the Seattle performance of “A Love Supreme” leads in the same direction, ever forward.