{"title":"Steve Kuhn","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003eSteve Kuhn grew up in Newton, Massachusetts, started classical piano lessons at five under Madame Chaloff, was accompanying her son the baritone saxophonist Serge Chaloff on professional gigs at fourteen, held down a six-nights-a-week job in Harvard Square while studying at Harvard, and graduated with a degree before continuing at the Lenox School of Music alongside Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry, studying under Gunther Schuller, George Russell, John Lewis and Bill Evans. It was at Lenox that he met Kenny Dorham, who hired him for a year-long stint in his band. He left Dorham in 1960 when John Coltrane invited him to join a new quartet, an opportunity Kuhn had generated himself by simply calling Coltrane and asking for an audition after learning the saxophonist had left Miles Davis to go out on his own. He played with Coltrane for eight weeks at the Jazz Gallery until McCoy Tyner took over the piano chair. That sequence, from Dorham's band to the founding Coltrane quartet in the space of two years, defined how Kuhn was positioned in jazz for the next six decades: a musician of unquestionable inside connections who nonetheless built a career on his own terms. He worked with Stan Getz from 1961 to 1963, whose rhythm section at one point included Scott LaFaro and Roy Haynes, then spent a year with Art Farmer's group before forming his own trio with bassist Steve Swallow and drummer Pete La Roca. The 1966 Impulse! album \"The October Suite,\" a collaboration with vibraphonist and composer Gary McFarland built around Third Stream ideas absorbed at Lenox, made a direct impression on Manfred Eicher and shaped his thinking as he developed ECM. Kuhn moved to Stockholm in 1967, returned to New York in 1971, and began his long relationship with ECM directly: \"Trance\" and \"Ecstasy\" (both ECM, 1974) documented his working quartet with Swallow, Steve Slagle and Bob Moses, recorded at Tonstudio Bauer in Ludwigsburg. A later quartet with singer Sheila Jordan produced the ECM albums \"Playground\" and \"Last Year's Waltz.\" He has continued recording into his late eighties, most recently for ECM and Sunnyside. He is still active.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"steve-kuhn-trance-1984-japanese-ecm-vinyl-lp","title":"Steve Kuhn - Trance (1984 Japanese ECM Vinyl LP)","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eSteve Kuhn - \u003cem\u003eTrance\u003c\/em\u003e | Vinyl LP - 1984 Japanese ECM pressing (25MJ 3347, Polydor K.K.)\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSteve Kuhn holds a small, strange place in jazz history: in 1960 he was the first pianist in John Coltrane's quartet, playing the Jazz Gallery for about eight weeks before Coltrane replaced him with McCoy Tyner. He went on to a long career with Stan Getz, Kenny Dorham and Art Farmer, and it was his lyrical, harmonically rich writing that caught the ear of Manfred Eicher. \u003cem\u003eTrance\u003c\/em\u003e, cut over two days in November 1974, was Kuhn's debut for ECM and the first record he built entirely from his own compositions. He plays acoustic and electric piano, joined by Steve Swallow on electric bass, Jack DeJohnette on drums and Sue Evans on percussion. The music is classic mid-seventies ECM: open, lyrical and unhurried on the title track, Latin-inflected on \"Something Everywhere\", with Swallow's bass guitar threading through it all. It even ends with Kuhn reciting a strange, echoing spoken piece on \"Life's Backward Glance\".\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eTrance \u003c\/em\u003ehas become one of the quietly treasured records in the ECM catalogue, the sort of album collectors pass along in a lowered voice as a lost classic. It launched a run of strong Kuhn albums for the label through the seventies, and the rapport here with Swallow and DeJohnette, two of the most responsive players around, is a large part of why it holds up. For years it was hard to find on vinyl outside the Japanese pressings, which is part of why those pressings are so sought after now. This is one of them, the 1984 Japanese edition on ECM, manufactured by Polydor K.K. as part of its ECM Collection series and mixed, like the original, by the label's Jan Erik Kongshaug.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"ECM Records","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44075714838587,"sku":null,"price":100.0,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0630\/3203\/3339\/files\/IMG_8411.jpg?v=1788088784"}],"url":"https:\/\/lushliferecords.com.au\/collections\/steve-kuhn.oembed","provider":"Lush Life Records","version":"1.0","type":"link"}