Soutrane [Original recording remastered]

This album does not contain the song "Soultrane" written by Tad Dameron as an honor to John, but the tunes on this album makes the listener understand how "soul" and "Trane" are to be juxtaposed if not merged into one.

Trane is a perfectionist: Everything he does has to be "tight' to work, and that's the case here. This is a lesson he apparently learned from Miles. No one slacks around on a John Coltrane set: He sets the tone, the sound and the spirit, and all are "dialed in" at high intensity.

Red Garland and Art Taylor understand Trane's sentimentality and his soul; they don't have a choice. And that's why this is one of the best albums in Jazz. Trane demands the same discipline of his sidemen as he demands of himself and that is to "go all out, at all times."

This is probably the last album before Trane went off into another direction, into his sheets of sound and trying to milk a chord out of every note. After this album, it gets deep.

Ten Stars

I'm surprised at the casual dismissals of this recording by some reviewers. The playing of everyone on the date is as strong as that on "Blue Trane" or, for that matter, any of the dates preceding "My Favorite Things." In fact, I can think of more expendable recording sessions by Coltrane after "Giant Steps" (definitely indispensable) than his always fresh and daring earlier work on Blue Note, Prestige, and Columbia. Beginning with "My Favorite Things" Coltrane's music would find a larger audience, especially among young listeners who, though strangers to the jazz tradition, became fascinated by the urgent, spiritual dimensions of Coltrane's playing, which could be numbingly repetitious (thank goodness that the 33-rpm format put time limits on it),

For musicians who had followed the music from Armstrong to Hawk to Lester to Bird, it was sessions like "Soultrane" that established Coltrane's credentials and "entitled" him to the innovations and experiments in his music 1960-1967, a time during which there was no shortage of pretenders assembled under the "free jazz" banner. The opening track, Tad Dameron's "Good Bait," is one of Coltrane's complete and satisfying performances, a comparatively short solo in which his harmonic-melodic vocabulary is exhaustive and his sound never more penetrating yet controlled. The next track, Billy Eckstine's "I Want to Talk About You," is a tune that would obsess Coltrane right up to 1965's "A Love Supreme." The lyrical and lovely performance of the ballad on "Soultrane," Coltrane's first recording of it to my knowledge, is a revelatory complement to the especially memorable performance on "Live at Birdland" (Impulse, 1963), on which the tenor giant concludes the tune with a breathtaking, absolutely stunning cadenza (his best performance on record, imo). Still, it's possible to begin with the later recording and to be equally appreciative of the earlier performance on "Soultrane."

"Soultrane" is also a reminder of the brilliance of Red Garland, before he was all but forgotten during the sonic assaults of the 60s. Though not as harmonically advanced as Coltrane, he turns in a double-time solo on "Good Bait" that's suggestive of Bud Powell at his best. Finally, "Soultrane" might be thought of as the "master takes" of the session that also produced "Traneing In." Both recordings, moreover, feature Coltrane layering mighty sheets of sound on Irving Berlin tunes ("Russian Lullaby" and "Soft Lights and Sweet Music").

1957 was the watershed year for John Coltrane -- on earlier recordings with Miles Davis and others, he occasionally sounded tentative or overambitious. But by the time he went into the studio in February '58 to record Soultrane, he had made the transition from being just another hard bop saxophonist to becoming one of the most revolutionary musicians in jazz. He sounds confident and full of fresh ideas on each of the five selections here, his playing has increased in density ("sheets of sound"), and his rhythm section (Red Garland, Paul Chambers, Art Taylor) always swings. The quartet takes Tadd Dameron's "Good Bait" at a bouncy, mid-tempo pace. Coltrane's first recording of Bill Eckstine's "I Want to Talk About You" is also on the record; it's beautiful and respectful but lacks the passionate intensity of later live versions. The album closes out with a moving elegy to alto saxophonist Ernie Henry ("Theme for Ernie") and a torrential version of Irving Berlin's "Russian Lullaby". This isn't a masterpiece on the level of Blue Train, but it is one of Coltrane's best recordings on the Prestige label and features him at the beginning of his "sheets of sound" period. It also provides a nice complement to the classic Milestones album which he recorded at about the same time with the Miles Davis sextet.

[This review is based on the K2 20-bit remaster, which had great sound. I have not heard the 2006 reissue. The tracklists are identical.]