Coltrane: Both Directions At Once (lost album)

[Scott Dolan]

Listened to the Deluxe Edition this morning. 

It’s...fine. 

To appropriate one of the greatest lines I’ve ever read from All Music Guide concerning another artist, “As far as John Coltrane albums go, this is another one”. 

Thank goodness for streaming, because this is a one and done album for me. 

[jcam_44]

2 hours ago, Scott Dolan said:

Listened to the Deluxe Edition this morning. 

It’s...fine. 

To appropriate one of the greatest lines I’ve ever read from All Music Guide concerning another artist, “As far as John Coltrane albums go, this is another one”. 

Thank goodness for streaming, because this is a one and done album for me. 

I certainly didn't expect much from this one, but I was pleasantly surprised by it. I've give 4 spins between work and the commute yesterday and a final listen when I got home last night. Haven't cracked the second disc yet but much more than a "one and done" for myself. 

The Sonny Rollins quote seems a bit excessive though haha. 

I wonder what Andrew White's analysis of this is. Is he considered the foremost authority on Trane's music?

 

[AllenLowe]

just re Richard Brody of the New Yorker, mentioned earlier; as a jazz critic I find him pretty clueless.

Edited June 30, 2018 by AllenLowe

[Scott Dolan]

59 minutes ago, jcam_44 said:

I certainly didn't expect much from this one, but I was pleasantly surprised by it. I've give 4 spins between work and the commute yesterday and a final listen when I got home last night. Haven't cracked the second disc yet but much more than a "one and done" for myself. 

The Sonny Rollins quote seems a bit excessive though haha. 

I wonder what Andrew White's analysis of this is. Is he considered the foremost authority on Trane's music?

 

That’s cool. I’m glad you’re digging it. The only tune that stood out to me was Slow Blues. He really did some interesting things on that one. 

I guess I’m just Coltrane’d out. I have his entire Prestige, Atlantic, Pablo, and Impulse! catalogs, as well as his lone Blue Note outing. I’ve heard everything he had to say hundreds, if not thousands, of times over again. It’s almost as though I’ve read the story, seen the movie, and digested all ten seasons of the tv show based on the movie. It’s become a contained and closed chapter in my life. 

[CJ Shearn]

26 minutes ago, Scott Dolan said:

That’s cool. I’m glad you’re digging it. The only tune that stood out to me was Slow Blues. He really did some interesting things on that one. 

I guess I’m just Coltrane’d out. I have his entire Prestige, Atlantic, Pablo, and Impulse! catalogs, as well as his lone Blue Note outing. I’ve heard everything he had to say hundreds, if not thousands, of times over again. It’s almost as though I’ve read the story, seen the movie, and digested all ten seasons of the tv show based on the movie. It’s become a contained and closed chapter in my life. 

I hear you.  I really enjoyed this one myself, nothing earth shattering but a nice addition.  The way you feel about Trane now and how you digested is like how I devoured Jimmy Smith's work.  Of course I still listen, but, the way I think of it is now different.  "Slow Blues" is indeed interesting , how he fuses his almost Prestige era and Atlantic styles with what he had been doing, those short rocket blast "sheets of sound" phrases.  I watched a YT vid of a gentleman reviewing the album which was sponsored by Impulse! (which tells you all you need to know really) he said Trane had been rather sensitive to criticism of that approach, so he wasn't employing it as much, I am not sure I buy that view, but the album is what it is, solid.

[bertrand]

So does 11386 sound like a known tune to anyone, possibly by another composer?

[BillF]

Wonderful music. Superbly co-ordinated jazz group (and it must be one of the greatest in the music) playing with incomparable relaxed swing. Yes, nothing startlingly new here; there are echoes from several of the many albums they made, but where are we going to hear music of this quality today?

What we have here is like the beginnings of an album: tunes yet to be titled, perhaps a theme and title for an album to be found, several takes from which to make a final selection. So it's an insight into the album process.

I love it! 

[Scott Dolan]

Perhaps my Coltrane ear isn’t attuned and dialed in as much as it once was, but 11386 does indeed sound like a Coltrane tune, IMO.  

If I’m wrong, I’m good with that. 

Oddly enough, it has somewhat an Africa/Brass feel to it. 

[Ken Dryden]

I've enjoyed disc 1 and while there is nothing earth-shattering, it definitely merited being released. At least the producers wisely omitted false starts and breakdowns that seem all to common on comprehensive packages. 

[jazzbo]

As there seems to be someone else injecting his voice and perhaps his ideas into the mix on the untitled tune. . . I'll entertain the notion if it may be a Cal Massey tune. . . (so far I only have the single disc version, but Porter mentions "someone else" in his opinion not a band member ((and I presume not Thiel?)) audible on the alternates.)

Edited June 30, 2018 by jazzbo

[JSngry]

Cal Massey was who I first thought of also, just because. I still haven’t cracked the shrink wrap, got too much other stuff going on, but who else would Trane let run the band like seems to be happening here?

[jazzbo]

That was one reason I thought of him too. 

[ep1str0phy]

I'm surprised by the relative lack of discussion on this one. On the one hand, it is (mostly) new Coltrane not very far removed from the classic quartet's peak; on the other hand, this is another instance of impossibly large hype for a project whose present-day historical importance outstrips its relative value in the oeuvre of the artist in question. I'm on tour and have picked up the habit of perusing O and the Hoffman board between sets, and the general vibe is neither hugely positive or negative (or even ranty/cynical)--just somewhere in the middle. 

On the other other hand--Imagine an enthusiastic newcomer to Coltrane's catalog hearing, say, Giant Steps or A Love Supreme for the first time and trying to figure out where to go next--can you imagine listening to this before something like Coltrane's Sound, let alone a marginal classic like Crescent or even First Meditations? In my cursory and probably incomplete read, this is like third or fourth tier stuff, with the caveat that it's Coltrane in his heyday and, well, even lo-fi classic Trane at incorrect speeds is dope as shit. 

The familiar repertoire--like the takes of "Impressions" or the new take of "Nature Boy"--feels makeweight, and the "new" pieces have an unfinished character (offset, admittedly, by episodes of inspired soloing and committed ensemble interplay). Very little of this feels like it's down for posterity. It's like a '63 version of the Living Space comp--the intensity, conviction, and completeness of the band are what carry over the moments of maladroitness.

If there's a lesson to be glommed from this recording, it's that the mechanical stuff of Coltrane's individual voice--the wild harmonic interpolations, the calculated multiphonics, the devastating lyricism--is so thoroughly practiced that it speaks through even the least accomplished of the quartet's music. Time to practice, man. 

[paul secor]

Full page ad (with a quote from Sonny Rollins) for Both Directions at Once on the back page of The NY Times Arts section today.

[Rooster_Ties]

48 minutes ago, paul secor said:

Full page ad (with a quote from Sonny Rollins) for Both Directions at Once on the back page of The NY Times Arts section today.

Interesting. I'd be curious to see a copy. Full page? - goodness sakes.

[paul secor]

15 minutes ago, Rooster_Ties said:

Interesting. I'd be curious to see a copy. Full page? - goodness sakes.

Yes. Big money is obviously being spent on promotion.

[JSngry]

3 hours ago, ep1str0phy said:

On the other other hand--Imagine an enthusiastic newcomer to Coltrane's catalog hearing, say, Giant Steps or A Love Supreme for the first time and trying to figure out where to go next--can you imagine listening to this before something like Coltrane's Sound, let alone a marginal classic like Crescent or even First Meditations?

Sure I can. The way people listen today, I have no problem at all imagining that. I actually kind of envy that possibility, it's a luxury that only comes early in the journey (assuming that it even becomes a journey, and that's no guarantee, right?).

Hell, the very first Trane I heard was Transition, and then, maybe, George Russel's New York, New York, and then Kind Of Blue, and then Cannonball/Coltrane (in the Everest version), and then Live Again At The Village Vanguard (Pharoah on Naima FUCKED ME UP!), or some totally a-historical (or even historically informed) sequence like that.

And I think I heard Ayler, and probably Shepp, before I knowingly heard Coltrane - on "underground" FM and courtesy of what was in the cutout bins. My Wayne Shorter exposure was similarly "wrong". I heard him on Indestructable, In A Silent Way, the title cut of ESP (on Miles Davis' Greatest Hits, of all places) and the first Weather Report album almost at the same time. I just listened to shit as i sound it, and I found it quite randomly and only sometime purposely.

Hell, I was devouring Shepp and Maynard Ferguson equally, and had nobody to tell me not to do it like that. I mean, I figured shit out as time went by, but you want to know why I can still smile at one of Maynard's good records from whenever, that's why - because I had fun with it before I knew that I shouldn't be having fun with it.

OOOOPS!!!

People listen to what they find when they find it, and hear it in context of what they've already heard, not what they should know about what they should hear first.

1 hour ago, paul secor said:

Yes. Big money is obviously being spent on promotion.

Well, yeah, and why not? It's legitimately new product, not some umpteenth bajillionth repackaging of 50-60 year old product. If it's not "revelatory", oh well, I doubt there's any more of that left to be had from any source.

[ep1str0phy]

22 minutes ago, JSngry said:

Sure I can. The way people listen today, I have no problem at all imagining that. I actually kind of envy that possibility, it's a luxury that only comes early in the journey (assuming that it even becomes a journey, and that's no guarantee, right?).

Granted the the gatekeeper-y nature of what I said, let me phrase things a different way: as someone who will listen to anything Coltrane at least once--and almost anything many times--listening to Both Directions at Once made me wish I could hear Interstellar Space or Transition for the first time again.

Of course you can listen to anything in any order, and any given person will hear something different from the next--but the eminence of Coltrane seems to dull the keenness of value judgements if and when they are useful. Clearly a subjective problem and not an objective one, but as someone who loves this music and has studied it as best I can, I'd love to hear more assessments of this stuff not only as pertains to some kind of canon but also in the way of what's useful and valuable there. I've seen a lot of "this is great" but not so much "this is what it adds to the picture," if that makes sense.

I'll qualify that by saying that while I think we've had enough as a culture in the way of endless dissection of tertian root movements, I'd love to know more about the Coltrane-as-thinker/philosopher that's much more abstract than Slonimsky patterns--the guy who derived synthetic scales from maps, and the guy who assembled the diagrams of cascading whole tone scales that resolve into a five-point star (the kinds of diagrams found in the packaging for Both Directions at Once, and with no explanation or detail).

Lost somewhere in the hagiography of all this is, to me at least, the notion that there's something deeper in there than the technocratic business that preoccupies so much Coltrane-informed jazz, and that time spent on a rehearsal tape could just as well be spent taking apart Stellar Regions or something. I say this as someone who should in theory be practicing/studying right now, (again) granted the fact that I wouldn't dream of having the brute force comprehension to take this stuff apart on my own. 

[chewy-chew-chew-bean-benitez]

so good!!!!!!!!

[BFrank]

NY Times full-page ad

[mjazzg]

33 minutes ago, BFrank said:

NY Times full-page ad

Major poster campaign on London's underground too. Something very reassuring about seeing Tranes's face on the way to and from work. First Jazz album I can remember (apart from Kamasi!!) to have such a campaign

[BillF]

Item the other week on the BBC radio Today programme (audience 7 million). Yes, big money is being spent and I suppose it will be the highest grossing jazz album of the year (doesn't take much), but when the product is so good (see me above), I have no complaint about this. Do you know, one or two young people might even buy it !!! (But only one or two.) 

[Stereojack]

Also saw two TV spots promoting the album this weekend during CBS Sunday Morning. How many new releases, in any genre, get this kind of hype? 

[Simon Weil]

Going back in time 50 years to get this wound up about a Great artist whose best work this ain't just reflects our low opinion of ourselves now.

[JSngry]

8 hours ago, ep1str0phy said:

I'll qualify that by saying that while I think we've had enough as a culture in the way of endless dissection of tertian root movements, I'd love to know more about the Coltrane-as-thinker/philosopher that's much more abstract than Slonimsky patterns--the guy who derived synthetic scales from maps, and the guy who assembled the diagrams of cascading whole tone scales that resolve into a five-point star (the kinds of diagrams found in the packaging for Both Directions at Once, and with no explanation or detail).

 

Coltrane as physicist, that's a very real thing. Just listen to Interstellar Space (which is almost totally built on playing that goes "goth directions at once" quite literally). If that's not physics put to sound then nothing is.

And/but who's going to talk about this in a world where nightclub music/is now essentially concert hall music? From selling drinks to selling tickets. You can sell culture any place, but who wants to invest in physics, in math? Awareness of Trane's science has been known to us in the "general audience" since, at least, the C. O. Simpkins book. It keepd popping up here andd there in interviews, but nobody seems to want to really engage it, I guess because, things like god and quest and journey and all this make for great comic books, whereas hard math and physics don't. But still, the knowledge lingers on. If they've put some of these diagrams in the notes of this package, great. That shows that the documents still exist in part, and leave open the possibility that some day somebody will get to them, research them in depth, and bury them iit in caly vessels in the desert,

Anyway, yeah, me too,