It was likely a byproduct of diligence, restlessness, exhausted possibilities, obsession and counter-obsession. The best way to visualise this – aside from watching footage of Jones, Tyner and Garrison themselves in full flow – is to imagine a tree in summer, moving, if such a thing is possible, in a gale-force breeze: every leaf twitching separately, all of them swaying together. For me, it's because of the packaging. From April 1962 to September 1965, while under contract to the record label Impulse!, John Coltrane led a more or less consistent working group with the same four musicians. Nature Boy is one of two tracks – Impressions being the other – in which Tyner lays out. Seven months later came Ascension, a clamorous declaration of freedom featuring an extended ensemble that still commands awe even if listening to it is no longer the essential rite of agonised passage it once was. Even at its most liberated, ‘Both Directions At Once,’ never descends into self-indulgence. There is the idea of the “new,” and then there is something like this track, which transcends the burden of newness. In an ideal case, both qualities are overrated anyway. The Van Gelder studio, in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, can be considered part of the framing device. The extent to which you believe the record’s subtitle—The Lost Album—might be the extent to which you are excited by the news of Both Directions. The notion advanced by Ravi Coltrane, Trane’s son and the co-producer of “Both Directions at Once,” that the March 6, 1963 date was “a kicking-the-tires kind of session” rings truest. With regard to the new numbers, it’s hard to imagine the gorgeous melody of Untitled Original 11386 – featuring Coltrane on soprano – being played with more snap. So completely were they living within the process of music-making that they could pick things up at a moment’s notice. called for two records a year. Of course jazz, in Coltrane’s final phase, became the opposite of pretty (any tears in it scald like molten lead) or at least part of the challenge of listening to it is in finding residual prettiness among the screech of bent metal and cosmological holler. Since his recording of “My Favorite Things” in 1961—a hit by jazz terms—Coltrane had become recognizable. The tape has survived in good condition but the way we hear it now has changed significantly in the 55 years spent in limbo (in care of the family of Coltrane’s first wife, Naima, apparently). A fair amount of Coltrane’s music has been released after the fact, but nothing that would seem, from a distance, quite so canonical as Both Directions At Once, which is 90 minutes worth of (mostly) previously unheard recordings made at Rudy Van Gelder’s studio on March 6, 1963—the middle of the classic-quartet period. A repeated pleasure on this session is hearing Elvin setting up those complex mid-tempo grooves that he could maintain till the end of time (where, in a conceptual sense, he and Trane parted company). First, he phrases in bare, hesitant strokes, using negative space; then he begins to whip phrases around, repeating them up and down the horn in rapid, shinnying patterns, reaching for inexpressible sounds, getting ugly. Coltrane was already building albums from disparate sessions, a practice that would soon yield 1963’s Impressions and Live at Birdland, two records that set live and studio tracks side by side. It's just that good. But Coltrane turns himself inside-out. This article was amended on 23 July. If “Vilia” was intended for that role, it isn’t strong enough. What’s it saying? (Impulse! It is redeemed by the quality we always associate with him: intensity. It's just that good. It’s no “better,” really, but it’s better to have more of it, and better recorded. “Impressions,” on Both Directions, in its first known studio recording—especially take 3—sounds sublimely focused. After his death in 1967, this group—Coltrane on tenor and soprano saxophone, McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass, Elvin Jones on drums—became known as Coltrane’s “classic quartet.” The group was powerful, elegant, and scarily deep. And with that said, the music included on "Both Directions at Once" doesn't break new ground for Coltrane or the Quartet, but it IS something I believe that everyone that loves John Coltrane and the great quartet will want to hear. Whatever the plan was, Both Directions at Once isn’t just a treat for the hardcore, either in terms of Coltrane or jazz more broadly; that’s something borne out by its astonishing first-week sales figures, which have propelled it to number 21 in the U.S., 16 in the UK and 3 in Germany, all on the album chart proper. His subsequent working relationship with Bob Thiele, the head of Impulse!, was based on the notion that he could expand that audience, not shrink it. There is no narrative here, as there sometimes was with Coltrane’s originals; it is not expressly about love or hardship or religious joy. It is possible to take in Both Directions At Once, some of it middling by Coltrane’s standards and some of it extraordinary by anyone’s, without much thought about sellability or progress. It can give you new respect for the rigor, compression, and balance of some of his other albums from the period. Coltrane and his quartet strike a balance between the ages to come after the album’s 1963 recording, and the ages that birthed it. It is possible to take in Both Directions At Once, some of it middling by Coltrane’s standards and some of it extraordinary by anyone’s, without much thought about sellability or progress. Here the circles are not lead but brass, with the attendant capacity to retain sunlight, as Coltrane, Garrison and Jones make over the tune, “creating it every moment afresh”. The newly discovered, unreleased album from 1963 featuring the “classic quartet” finds the jazz giant thrillingly caught between shoring up and surging forth. 11386 also demonstrates how, in jazz, “pretty” – pretty notes, pretty tunes – has always been compatible with high seriousness. Coltrane and his quartet strike a balance between the ages to come after the album’s 1963 recording, and the ages that birthed it. That same struggle can be heard on Both Directions at Once, where Coltrane, together with McCoy Tyner, Jones, and Garrison, explored what jazz could be and how it could fit into a broader musical spectrum. Coltrane’s quartet, by contrast, come powering out of the blocks. But the corpus is only what we have been given to hear. The last major archaeological discovery in the ongoing Coltrane dig was Offering, a live performance from 1966 released four years ago which, like much from his final phase, tests the listener’s nerve and loyalty. (McCoy Tyner’s solo, directly following Coltrane’s, is tidy and elegant, thorough in its own radically contrasting way.) It made an artist with great ambitions easier to understand. “Slow Blues” is the one. The sense of strength and inevitability we associate with Coltrane’s music didn’t just tumble out. Coltrane’s contract with Impulse! He passed through serial phases of exploring harmonic sequences, modes, and multiple rhythms; when he acknowledged one phase in an interview, he was generally looking for the next. The 1963 answer is unknown, and probably more complicated. The effect is reminiscent of “the leaden circles dissolv[ing] in the air” at the start of Mrs Dalloway (of all places!). It’s a little caught between shoring up and surging forth. What he meant by “another ‘Favorite Things’” might have been a similar act of counterintuition: a sweet, sentimental tune made paranormal, a curiosity that could break out beyond the normal jazz audience and anchor a hit record. Written by Mark Smotroff • July 23, 2018 • 4:54 am • Audiophile Music. And with that said, the music included on "Both Directions at Once" doesn't break new ground for Coltrane or the Quartet, but it IS something I believe that everyone that loves John Coltrane and the great quartet will want to hear. As it moves inexorably from ballads, blues, and folk songs into abstraction, the classic-quartet corpus can seem an index not only for the range of acoustic jazz but for possibly how to live, gathered and contained, as if it were always there. That which had not existed is now dated: literally in the sense that we know the date, but also because it has been made to sound older by virtue of what Coltrane went on to do. He was entering the popular artist’s paradox of striving to repeat a past success and trying not to run aground on retreads. Both Directions at Once: The Lost Album by John Coltrane is out now on Impulse!. Missing presumed lost, Both Directions at Once is a newly discovered session recorded on 6 March 1963 by John Coltrane with Elvin Jones (drums), McCoy Tyner (piano) and Jimmy Garrison on bass. This has now been corrected. Two of the original songs are untitled, their melodic themes are perhaps a shade fuzzy, the band is vigorous but loose. Read honest and unbiased product reviews from our users. Half a century later we are still measuring the effect of this comet streaking through our world: its light, its holiness, its kind of love – and the darkness left by its passing.
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