John Coltrane 100: Soul Junction & First Meditations

By Richard Blute 

The Red Garland Quintet Featuring John Coltrane and Donald Byrd - Soul Junction (Prestige, 1960)

Culinary writers frequently refer to comfort food. Soul Junction is my comfort music. I go to this album when I’m not in the mood to be blown away by wild flights of improvised fury or complex compositions or arrangements. This is an “end of an exhausting day” or a “reminder that maybe all will be well” kind of an album.

I love the relaxed, bluesy feel of it. Listen to Garland’s piano on the opening title track. It’s pure bliss. George Joyner’s bass is understated perfection. The piano trio portion of the track goes on so long and is so hypnotic that you’re to be forgiven if you forget there’s a sax and trumpet still to come.

Hey, there’s the saxophone. It feels like Trane was digging Garland’s playing and was dying to join in. Recorded in 1957, Trane hadn’t perfected his style yet. But his genius is right there to hear. He’s fantastic on Dizzy’s classic Birk’s Works. Donald Byrd doesn’t get much mention on this website, but I love a lot of his Blue Note music. He’s the perfect trumpeter for this session. Garland wisely gives the two of them lots of space to play, and they take every advantage of it.

John Coltrane- First Meditations (For Quartet) (Impulse!, 1977)

As far as I’m concerned, A Love Supreme is the greatest jazz album of all time and Coltrane’s classic quartet the greatest group. First Meditations (For Quartet) is a beautiful piece of music and a fascinating document of a band just on the verge of transforming, both in terms of its personnel and its approach to music. (I prefer to say “transforming” to “ending”.)

The first track, Love,clearly recalls A Love Supreme,as if that classic album is the starting point of this new music. Trane is stunning as always and McCoy is the perfect accompanist. The best track, Joy, is relatively calm and peaceful, until it isn’t. It begins as any number of other tracks from this quartet and then Trane sits out. He’s let the remaining trio play some (for this group) fairly straightforward piano trio music. But then he returns with an absolute roar, as if he wants to break constraints the rest of us can’t see. This is one of several places you can see the seams of the band starting to tear. It’s fascinating to hear.

Much of this music was reconsidered on the subsequent album Meditations with Trane’s new group. A comparison of the two albums and the approach of two different groups to the material is fascinating, the second album justifiably being the more renowned of the two. But I find the first to be the one I keep returning to, as if I don’t want to say goodbye to this quartet.

I genuinely love this album, but I had an ulterior motive for writing about it here. It gives me the opportunity to tell the story of the time I met Elvin Jones. He had been doing a drum demonstration and a line formed afterwards for autograph seekers. When I arrived at the front of the line, I barely refrained from doing “We’re not worthy”, but I did tell him how much his music meant to me and said I’d be honored if he’d sign this album. He took the CD booklet from me, looked at it and asked “Did I play on this?”. (I assume that since the album wasn’t released until 10 years after it was recorded, he never saw the album cover.) I showed him his name in the booklet, he laughed and signed it, making this album all the more special to me.