RECORD REVIEWS
John Coltrane’s career as a bandleader can be divided, with haphazard tidiness, into three periods. His so-called classic quartet with pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Jimmy Garrison, and drummer Elvin Jones, which deserves every bit of its legendary status, dominates the 1962–1965 middle section and encompasses Coltrane’s greatest achievements. Before that was the ramp-up and after lay the free jazz experiments.
Real life, of course, wasn’t so simple. In 1997, the fantastic four-disc set expanded the, showing the whole of the four-night run with eight musicians in various combinations before the emergence of what became his working band. We don’t have such documentation for the post-quartet transition, but , recorded in 1965 and released for the first time in October, helps elucidate the period leading up to his radical transformation.
