The New Jazz Musings

In my search for articles I'm finding that quite a few are articulate, intelligent, incredibly insightful and interesting. None more so than this 1971 piece by Barry McRae, published in the Jazz Journal. McRae writes about John Coltrane - The Impulse Years, but expands further outside for perspective and his contemporary position during the 1960s. I've noticed some earlier British articles on Trane miss out versus US journals because it was more difficult to get all the albums. Here however, McRae references not just Trane's Impulse output, but also that of Pharoah Sanders and Alice Coltrane. John Coltrane - The Impulse Years by Barry McRae That jazz has moved forward in both spiritual as well as a musical sense in the sixties is an obvious fact. Preoccupation with aesthetic values has sometimes obscured the total evolutionary picture, however, and a great number of words has been dissipated on the significance of the music rather than its style and format. The early free f...

 A couple of weeks back on my Insta I posted the CD reissue of a 1977 double album of (mostly) tunes from Coltrane's Stockholm concerts in 1963. Two being from Berlin. Norman Granz had organised another annual tour of Europe for the John Coltrane Quartet, playing eleven venues in eight countries. They played two shows at the Stockholm Konserthuset, the first date on the tour. Four days later they played the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. The 2nd show didn't start until midnight and there seemed to be some issues. Perhaps Michael James was feeling a bit peeved due to the late start since his comments don't seem to gel with the actual recordings from a few days earlier. Having said that, perhaps the performance did suffer. Anyway, interesting review. The JOHN COLTRANE Quartet in Amsterdam by Michael James THE SCENE IN Amsterdam's Concertgebouw at midnight on Saturday, 27th October, was to my mind more typical of a rock-and-roll concert, and an ill-organised one at that, than...

1966 was a quieter recording year for Coltrane compared to the year before. He had evolved from his "Classic Quartet" and had settled into a new quintet format, but he still continued to experiment and add other musicians, especially at live concerts.  On Instagram I had posted all of Coltrane's output in vinyl from 1965. I then created two blog entries based on the posts :  1965 John Coltrane Recordings Part One  ,  1965 John Coltrane Recordings Part Two Having just created Trane's 1966 as six posts on Insta, I've now brought them together into this blog post. #1 of 5 for 1966. On Jan 23rd '66 Trane played at Stanford. Elvin and Rashied both on drums, but it was the night that Elvin called it quits, "The roof fell in". Click Link in Bio for a full description of the concert click here for link . The group minus Elvin then had a two week run at the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco, during which a recording session was held at Coast Recorders on Feb 2nd...

On January 23rd 1966 at Stanford University's Memorial Auditorium, the Thelonius Monk Quartet and the John Coltrane Octet performed. Canada's Coda jazz magazine reviewed the event at length. It's acknowledged that Trane's time as a regular with Monk was crucial to his growth as a musician and composer. But in the subsequent ten years, it is clear that the two musicians' trajectories were very different.  This was the couple of weeks Coltrane spent in California when he supplemented his group further with Juno Lewis on percussion and Donald Garrett on bass. McCoy Tyner had already left and the strain felt by Elvin Jones was apparent. monk and coltrane at stamford (sic) reviewed by Philip Jacka It was beautiful. Simply, this year Stanford University would investigate jazz. The scheme was not dissimilar to that Festival of the Arts which Brandeis University focused on jazz back in 1957 (hear "MODERN JAZZ CONCERT", Columbia WL127, or its twin-pack reissue, ...

In a blog post from May this year, I presented Jack Cooke's Late Trane retrospective from 1970. Link below. This time it's a feature written by John Norris, from the May 1968 edition of Canada's Coda magazine, which became a Coltrane memorial issue. If you are interested in a contemporary take on Coltrane's records from The John Coltrane Quartet Plays to Expression, read on.  Late Trane Retrospective From 1970 John Norris was a regular contributor to many jazz publications, including Coda, was jazz critic for the Globe and Mail, and was a jazz music host on Canadian radio and television. THE FINAL LEGACY by John Norris Until very recently, jazz musicians were static as artists. Every musician evolved a style and remained true to that, with minor variations, for the remainder of his career. In this sense the jazz musician paralleled the course of practitioners in other art forms prior to the Twentieth Century. Today it is much different. Musicians are trans forming thei...

Jazz Monthly published a very comprehensive Late Coltrane retrospective by Jack Cooke in its January 1970 publication. Cooke was a drummer in the 1950s who transitioned to journalism during the 1960s. He was a regular contributor to Jazz Monthly. Cooke, in his piece, makes many insightful observations and comments, especially on the final transition from the 'classic' quartet (on the album Meditations). This marked the final stage of Coltrane's experiment, with the new shape of his music becoming clear. Of course, in 1970 we didn't have the hindsight of the un-released albums, so as a Late Trane retrospective, it is incomplete for 2020. But nevertheless, it is the most comprehensive (contemporary) piece from the period I've seen. A really useful and insightful addition to this blog. LATE TRANE / JACK COOKE JOHN COLTRANE'S contribution to jazz, as an instrumentalist, bandleader and innovator, over the years of his career and in the hundreds of recording...