John Coltrane - Soultrane (1977 Japanese Prestige Vinyl LP Mono)

Vinyl: EX
Sleeve: EX
Obi: None

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John Coltrane - Soultrane | Vinyl LP Mono - 1977 Japanese Prestige Reissue (SMJ-6559, Victor Musical Industries)

Five standards, no Coltrane originals, and a rhythm section that knew his playing from the inside. Garland, Chambers and Taylor had been sitting behind Coltrane in Miles Davis's quintet for three years, and three days before this session they had been in Columbia's 30th Street studio recording Milestones. Here, without Davis, the dynamic shifts. Coltrane is the only horn and has to carry everything. "Good Bait" opens at a medium tempo with Coltrane playing through Tadd Dameron's changes in long, flowing lines while Garland comps with that light, blocky touch. "I Want to Talk About You," the Billy Eckstine ballad, gets its first recorded Coltrane reading here, the beginning of a relationship with the tune that would last the rest of his career. His 1963 live version (with an unaccompanied cadenza that rewrites the entire piece) is better known, but this studio version is where the connection starts: warm, direct, the melody stated almost straight before the solo pushes gently outward. "Theme for Ernie," Fred Lacey's memorial to alto saxophonist Ernie Henry (who died in 1957 at 31), is the quietest piece on the album, Coltrane playing the melody throughout without departing from it.

Then "Russian Lullaby" closes side B at a tempo that makes everything else on the album sound like a ballad. Irving Berlin's tune becomes the vehicle for Coltrane's most concentrated display of the approach Gitler named in his liner notes: streams of notes pouring through the changes so fast they merge into something closer to texture than melody. Garland, Chambers and Taylor hold the rhythm steady while Coltrane pushes the harmonic vocabulary as far as the hard bop framework allows. This was Coltrane's last authorised release on Prestige. He had already recorded Blue Train for Blue Note and was moving into the period that would produce Giant Steps and everything that followed.

This is the 1977 Japanese mono reissue on Prestige SMJ-6559(M), from the Jazztime Now!! series, manufactured by Victor Musical Industries.