A LABOUR OF LOVE SUPREME
Tracks by jazz legend, recorded for NFB’S French division, to be released next month
Lost Coltrane tapes for Quebec film see the light
Frédéric Savard was just a little excited Friday afternoon. The National Film Board employee was finally seeing five years of his efforts rewarded with the release of a landmark recording by famed jazz saxophonist John Coltrane.
Blue World, a collaboration between Impulse!/ume Records and the NFB, will be unveiled Sept. 27, it was announced Friday.
“It’s an exciting day,” Savard said. “I’ve been waiting for this day like it was Christmas. Even more so — it’s more exciting than Christmas.”
The previously unreleased, 37-minute collection features a total of eight versions of five songs Coltrane re-recorded with his classic quartet — pianist Mccoy Tyner, bassist Jimmy Garrison and drummer Elvin Jones — in 1964 for the late Quebec filmmaker Gilles Groulx’s first feature, Le chat dans le sac (The Cat in the Bag).
Contracted to make a short documentary about winter for the NFB, Groulx took the $75,000 budget and made a fiction film inspired by the French new wave and Quebec’s cinéma vérité movement.
It became the first feature produced by the NFB’S French film division.
Initially titled Chronique d’une rupture, the Montreal-shot movie uses the breakup between a young Québécois man and a Jewish woman as a metaphor for franco-anglo relations and Quebec’s burgeoning independence movement.
Groulx was a jazz lover who had a connection to Garrison through a mutual friend, so he boldly asked Coltrane to record a special soundtrack for his film.
Coltrane said yes and on June 24, 1964 — St-jean-baptiste Day, no less — Groulx drove down to New Jersey and sat in on the three-hour recording session at Coltrane engineer Rudy Van Gelder’s studio.
The movie premièred at the Festival international du film de Montréal, winning the Grand Prix du cinéma canadien, then sat quietly in the NFB vaults until the early 2000s, when the film board began going through its archives.
“(NFB employee) Carol Faucher came across the Coltrane recordings, which were misplaced (under the film’s working title),” Savard said. “He realized the music in the film was not previously licensed recordings, as a lot of people had previously thought.”
It turns out Coltrane had recorded the tracks on the sly — the recording session did not appear in the studio log book — outside of his contract with the Impulse! label.
The NFB “owned the tape, but not what’s on the tape,” said Savard, who began working at the film board a decade ago. A musician, jazz fan and record collector with a background in archival studies, he took a personal interest in the project.
“I became obsessed with making these recordings available to the general public,” he said. “I thought they should be part of the Coltrane canon and recognized internationally, along with Gilles Groulx.
“I knew by reaching out to the Coltrane estate and working with Impulse!, which owns a vast majority of the catalogue, we could make something happen.” And they did.
Blue World comes a year after Coltrane’s Both Directions at Once: The Lost Album (also released on Impulse!) Savard is listed as director of archival research for the new album.
The producer for the project is former Montrealer Ken Druker, vice-president of jazz development at Verve Label Group.
“I think it’s a really interesting snapshot of a period in the Coltrane quartet,” said Druker, now based in New York.
“We haven’t heard anything like this. It was recorded in June 1964 between two of his classic albums: Crescent, in April through June; and A Love Supreme, in December.
“His quartet was exploring more than ever before. This return to a different style was the first time he was playing compositions he had recorded earlier; he rarely did this.
“If you hear Traneing In, with Red Garland on the original in 1957, and then with Mccoy Tyner in 1964, it’s a very different approach to the song. And the studio recording of Naima (which first appeared on Giant Steps in 1960) is a unique snapshot of this group at this point.”
Much like the release opens a unique window onto Quebec cinema in 1964. The connection to Groulx’s film — which can be viewed for free on the NFB website — is detailed in the album’s extensive liner notes. And the video for Blue World (originally titled Out of This World) features a montage of imagery including scenes from Le chat dans le sac.
“I just hope it sends people back to watch the original film,” Druker said. “It’s a nice piece of Quebec history. It’s really worth people’s time.
“And the music speaks for itself.”