Record companies continue to dig into their troves to pose yet another variation on an old question: how much Coltrane is enough? Along with Miles Davis, he has the most popular catalogue in jazz -- at last count, four separate Coltrane compilations were on Billboard's Top 25 jazz album chart, along with Miles's "new" The Complete "In a Silent Way" Sessions (Columbia/Legacy). The seven-CD Live Trane: The European Tours (Pablo) offers mostly previously unreleased material. And only a fragment of The Olatunji Concert: The Last Live Recording (Impulse!) has been released before (on Rhino's two-CD The Last Giant). Its significance lies mostly in that it was recorded in April 1967, a mere three months before Coltrane's death, of liver cancer, on July 17, at the age of 40.

Live Trane captures the "classic" Coltrane quartet (McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, Elvin Jones) between November 1961 and November 1963, as well as a couple of dates with Eric Dolphy on alto and flute and Reggie Workman on bass. Pablo has issued four albums of this material before, but here's the whole enchilada: 17 titles, including five versions each of the Coltrane compositions "Impressions" and "Mr. P.C.," four of "Naima," and six versions of his epochal take on Rodgers & Hammerstein's "My Favorite Things." All but one of these "Things" last clock in at under 20 minutes.

It's easy to argue that Live Trane is unnecessary, and if you're buying up classic quartet-period Coltrane, there are plenty of other "complete" sets to gather before this one: The Classic Quartet: Complete Impulse! Studio Recordings (which includes the epic suites A Love Supreme and First Meditations), The Complete 1961 Village Vanguard Recordings (or its abbreviated Master Takes single CD), and the relatively modest single-disc Newport '63 (all are on Impulse!). And, of course, those single-CD Pablo titles of these live dates are still available.

The previously rejected cuts on Live Trane include a blown note here or there, a few moments when Coltrane was off mike. You have to adjust to the recording quality of the first couple discs -- the drums sounding a bit thin, the bass almost inaudible (perhaps as indicative of the difference between Workman and Garrison as of the sound engineering). But before long, you're held in the usual Coltrane thrall: that big, sweeping, soulful tone, the mastery of dynamics and articulation, the bursts of speed, and, most of all, the forward momentum that rarely lets up, even on the endless two-chord vamp of "My Favorite Things."

"My Favorite Things" (which he first recorded as a 14-minute piece in 1960) had been a major breakthrough for Coltrane. Until the time of his work on Miles Davis's Kind of Blue (Columbia), in 1959, Coltrane had been navigating increasingly dense patterns of chord changes (pretty much reaching the limit with 1959's "Giant Steps"). But Kind of Blue's "So What" and Davis & Coltrane's work with Bill Evans and composer George Russell had shown the way to a modal, scalar playing that tended to reduce pieces to the relatively static harmony of a two-chord vamp while the soloists improvised on scales. The overall effect was to create a more spacious "Eastern" sound -- Coltrane's nasal soprano sax combined with the simplified harmonic set-up conjured both Indian ragas and a muezzin's wail. The technique freed Coltrane melodically and even rhythmically. "My Favorite Things" was not only an æsthetic breakthrough but a commercial one, making his Atlantic LP of the same name a hit.

"My Favorite Things" opened a new way of playing -- and of hearing -- for Coltrane, and on Live Trane it sounds at times as though he were trying to push for yet another breakthrough. At a November 1962 Stockholm date, he hits an "off" note and holds it, then hits it again, as though he were trying to see how far he can push tonality. At other times, his phrasing suggests a huffing impatience while Tyner hits the 3/4 vamp with the rest of the rhythm section in what Live Trane liner-note contributor Neil Tesser aptly calls an "incantatory stasis." It's the longest "Favorite Things" of the set, 23:55.

Sonny Rollins has said that sometimes when he plays an especially long solo, it's not because he's "into it" but because he can't quite get into it and is searching for inspiration. With Coltrane, that questing garrulousness has a spiritual dimension -- no jazz musician has ever been more explicit about the links between his music and his spirituality (consider the titles of his major pieces: A Love Supreme, Ascension, Meditations). Although Rollins's music certainly isn't without spirituality, it's also about humor and physical strength and technical mastery as wit. Coltrane, especially in his later recordings, is all about that deep, blues-drenched spiritual quest, and his repeated trills and rhythmic figures, his endlessly questing scales and arpeggios, are like mantras.

Live Trane as a whole may not be "necessary," but there's no performance here that I'd rate less than compelling. As a long-time Coltrane listener who's used to hearing his techniques echoed in virtually every living saxophonist, I'm always surprised at how easily I'm drawn back into his sound, even as those first tolling chords of "My Favorite Things" begin once again.

There is, too, the rest of the quartet: Elvin Jones's non-stop drive and dramatic climaxes so in synch with Coltrane and Tyner, Tyner's stentorian block chords and Coltrane-like "sheets of sound" in his single-note runs, Garrison's throbbing foundation. Live Trane captures the combination of edginess and serene confidence that characterizes the classic quartet. Perhaps my favorite of the five discs here is #5, from Stockholm, October 1961, with its variety of material, including the relatively short "Favorite Things" (13:55) and the only version here of the haunting Coltrane original "Spiritual."

Live Trane is still within the realm of the mainstream -- there's chordal relief from the incantatory drone of "Favorite Things" in pieces like "Bye Bye Blackbird" and Frank Loesser's "The Inch Worm," and rhythmic and tonal ties to the mainstream. The Olatunji Concert is "late" Coltrane at its most frightening. By now he's moved from the extended vamps of "My Favorite Things" and even the looser compositional frameworks of A Love Supreme (1964) and the long collective improvisation Ascension (1965). At this point, by most accounts (I'm using Lewis Porter's excellent John Coltrane: His Life and Music as my guide), Coltrane has organized his pieces around melodic lines and various tonal centers. Elvin Jones is gone, replaced by Rashied Ali, Tyner by Alice Coltrane. Only Jimmy Garrison is left from the old rhythm section, and saxophonist Pharoah Sanders has been added to the front line. At the Olatunji concert, two percussionists are added to the band, and only two pieces are played: a 28-minute "Ogunde" and a 34:38 "My Favorite Things."

If there's any single thing to which "late Coltrane" owes its daunting reputation, I'd say it's Pharoah. His shrieking reaches into the altissimo range and beyond and his "human" cry can be at times all but unbearable -- it's emotional, all right, but it's an acquired taste, and it won't suit your every mood. The Olatunji Center of African Culture, on 125th Street in Harlem, was a converted gymnasium, and it sounds it. The recording quality is crude, but it's not the usual muted crudity of home recording -- instead, everything is in your face, always on the verge of distortion. At times, one channel drops out completely; that may have been the recording engineer's attempt to deal with traffic noise from an open window (at one point the left channel cuts out right after a car horn sounds).

The argument against live recordings has to do with the loss of fidelity, and the frustration that nothing can truly capture what it was like to be there. But the Olatunji concert suggests exactly what it must have been like to be there -- the occasional shouts of band and audience members, the relentless energy captured as a reverberating clamor in a too-big, too-loud room, every sound disproportionate to its "compositional" intention.

That kind of emotional disproportion too is what The Olatunji Concert is about, so that it winds up being as seductive as any Coltrane on record. Ali is generally regarded as a more "out" drummer than Jones, but the roll of his snare drum and the wash of his cymbals have an enveloping lyricism. He and Garrison (now playing short, propulsive phrases rather than "walking" bass or other steady time) create the essential throbbing pulse while Alice Coltrane paints impressionist washes of chords (and takes a beautiful, McCoy-like solo on "Ogunde," with Ali providing restrained, sensitive support). After a few listens (and if you're in the right mood), even Sanders begins to have his appeal -- his building intensity on "My Favorite Things," starting with short, rhythmic phrases and building to full-throated screams, his signature watery warbles and trills on "Ogunde."

Coltrane, only months from death, sounds undiminished, even if his solos are not quite as marathon in length. He declaims the first notes of the Brazilian-based "Ogunde" on tenor with full-throated bluesiness (he'd always placed importance on making a good entrance). He returns after Alice's solo free but in control. Most instructive is his "My Favorite Things," especially after the six versions on Live Trane. His sweeping, cutting scales and trills are driven more than ever by melodic deliberation, long-phrased, arching lines rather than the running-in-place patterns of previous performances. It's as though he'd broken through.

Issue Date: November 23 - 29, 2001