JAZZ GEM UNEARTHED
Coltrane album resurfaces
A long-forgotten album recorded by John Coltrane is due to be released more than 50 years after his death.
Both Directions at Once: The Lost Album has been compared to “finding a new room in the Great Pyramid” by fellow saxophonist Sonny Rollins, who performed with the legendary jazz musician. Coltrane, along with pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Jimmy Garrison and drummer Elvin Jones, spent a day recording at the Van Gelder Studios in New Jersey on March 3, 1963. They laid down 14 tracks, which have been turned into one standard and one deluxe CD and will be released June 29.
The record’s substance will make some wonder why it has taken so long to emerge: it is not a collection of demos or musical sketches, but a string of compositions laid down several times over by Coltrane and his Classic Quartet.
Some of the tracks were never recorded again, making them unheard by the public.
Following the recording, Coltrane and the quartet went back to business: performing their twoweek run at the Birdland jazz club. Four days later, they recorded the John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman album with the jazz singer. The tapes from the previous session, however, lay undisturbed for 54 years.
Two were made: the master, which stayed at the Van Gelder Studios and has never been found, and a second, a reference tape, which Coltrane took home to his first wife, Naima.
This has become the basis of Both Directions at Once: The Lost Album. It’s unclear why the lost album has been unearthed now. Impulse! Records, which signed Coltrane in 1961, approached the family and found that Naima Coltrane’s tape was in sufficiently good condition to be mastered for release.
Ravi, Coltrane’s son with his second wife, the pianist Alice Coltrane, helped define the track listing of the final albums, which includes an original recording of Nature Boy, which had changed considerably by the time Coltrane recorded it again in 1965.
The album also includes a version of Impressions, one of Coltrane’s most famous compositions, in which Tyner’s piano part is absent.
Coltrane’s prolific career was cut short a few years after the recording session: he died in July 1967, aged 40, after suffering from liver cancer.
He left behind a legacy that has defined jazz ever since and expanded to other genres.
He enjoyed his most prolific years with Impulse! Records, including the release of A Love Supreme in 1965 — one of the most acclaimed jazz albums ever. The release of Both Directions at Once: The Lost Album is expected to further join the dots between Coltrane’s releases in the early ’60s.