John Coltrane Quartet

Oh, man, this guy's killing it right now.

So it's a little bit different when you find a new jazz album because for me, so Ballads by John Coltrane, I think it's his, yeah, the John Coltrane Quartet, 1963.

Ballads has been, I think I sent it in Discord the other day.

It's been an album I've been going back to a lot.

I am going to go with one.

You might not initially think of when you see me or, you know, kind of, my musical likes but i'm gonna go with perhaps the greatest in his field at the time and you could argue in the top two or three all time that's john coltrane and the John Coltrane Quartet and his album Ballads.

For anybody unfamiliar with John Coltrane, John Coltrane was perhaps the supreme saxophone jazz player of certainly his generation, although Miles Davis might tell you otherwise.

his smooth songs he also did a lot of frenetic music people might be familiar with the love supreme or blue train or these are a few of my favorite things this album is phenomenal if you ever need if there's anybody out there dealing with anxiety with or you're just wanting to clear your head You've got a lot of things going on.

The first work Shipp chose as being formative for him was Atlantis by McCoy Tyner.

well I first of all as a pianist McCoy Tyner was a fundamental figure for me in so many ways I was a devotee of the John Coltrane quartet so obviously as a pianist I'm going to gravitate towards his sound but for me he represented because if you listen to his very first album of inception there's definitely a philadelphia kind of post bud pal bebop sensibility to it and so the question then arises how did mccoy tyner get to the sound or to the style that he had with the john coltrane quartet um from going from that first album which was a very bebop-oriented sound, or kind of post-bebop sound, to the way he sounds with Coltrane.

And then there's the question of what's the weight of his work after Coltrane dies, when he starts recording with his own groups, and how is that related and not related to his work with the Coltrane quartet.

So I think this is without talking about that specific album.

One thing about Tyner that I found really fascinating is both that his sound has a very African oriented approach to rhythm or what I consider an Africanized sound.

There's something about the, the, the grooves on that out and the album grooves to it really grooves, um, the grooves on that album that his compositional vision for me kind of really is, um, crystallized on that wholly.

And, um, the group sound kind of, um, brings everything to the floor.

I mean, I hear, I hear kind of like the whole impulse of the Coltrane spirituality in it, but completely in a different way than it happened in the Coltrane quartet.

So I'm sure that it would be worth your time to explore those.

John Coltrane, Africa/Brass.

So this is an interesting album.

He brought together a really large band, not a standardized big band like an Ellington or Basie big band kind of style, but he had some unusual instruments in there like tuba and horn and baritone, and I think bass clarinet, in addition to some extra saxes and some trumpets and trombones, but not in the normal configuration.

He also uses two basses for some of the pieces.

But the thing is, it still feels like, and the album cover says The John Coltrane Quartet, Africa/Brass.

And it does really feel like it's the quartet playing the same kinds of stuff that they play on their own, just with these kinda backgrounds in the, all the other instruments that are providing kind of a different sorta texture.

And that's how Pretty much all of the first piece, "Africa," sounds.