The perfect introduction - a three CD- set from Verve/ Impulse! features choice recordings from 1963, including the album John Coltrane made with the brilliantly expressive singer Johnny Hartman.
Born into a religious family in the town of Hamlet, North Carolina in 1926, the young Coltrane lost his father, his uncle and grandfather in the space of two years, after which his mother took him to live in Philadelphia. Inauspicious beginnings for a musician who would make a seriously mind-blowing impression on the New York jazz scene with wildly innovative albums like Blue Train and Giant Steps.
The year before these recordings were made, the musician had felt himself hampered creatively. Technical work done on his mouthpiece rather than improving the device, had `actually ruined it,’ to quote the man himself. Aside from that debilitating professional obstacle, John Coltrane's marriage was also failing.
1963 saw some kind of revival in creative fortunes and he was coaxed into sessions. His friends pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Jimmy Garrison and drummer Elvin Jones needed the money so producer Bob Thiele knew he could get him into Rudy Van Gelder’s famed studio. Roy Haines stepped in at the drum kit when Elvin Jones was obliged to repair to the Lexington Narcotics Hospital & Clinical Research Center from mid-April to late July of 1963.
The music is drawn from a number of sources, namely Newport ‘63 and Live at Birdland and sessions are also drawn from the studio albums Both Directions at Once: The Lost Album, John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman and Dear Old Stockholm, which was released posthumously.
CD 1 opens with two takes of Franz Lehar’s Vilia from The Merry Widow while Impressions, which features in four takes on CD 1, is a mellifluously lyrical gambol in jazz. CD 2 is a very different entity, featuring as it does the velvet-toned baritone voice of Johnny Hartman singing appealingly subdued readings of Lush Life, My One and Only Love, Autumn Serenade and Dedicated to You.
The third disc has over 17 minutes of Coltrane's buoyant reading of My Favourite Things and there is another feint at Impressions, lasting 15 minutes, pure bliss. The recordings, incidentally, can also be got as a lavish five vinyl album presentation.
Coltrane too had his encounters with Narcotics Centers of one kind of another and there were some years of heavy heroin addiction. The genius of the saxophone died in 1967, aged 40, of liver disease. These sessions are accompanied by an absorbing essay from David Wild along with an interesting selection of photographs.
