Jazz Wax, thank you, once again. 

Picture via Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York. 

Over at the New York Review of Books, Geoffrey Dyer writes about John Coletrane:

Offering: Live at Temple University offers further evidence of the catastrophe of the last phase of John Coltrane’s work. “Last” rather than “late” because he became ill and died too suddenly (on July 17, 1967), too early, to have properly entered a late period. He was forty. In any other field of activity that would be a desperately short life. Only in jazz could it be considered broadly in line with actuarial norms. So there’s no late phase in the accepted sense of Beethoven having arrived at a late style, only a sudden ceasing of the unceasing torrent of sound.

The interest of recordings from this final phase—in which Coltrane’s playing became increasingly frenzied and the accompaniment more abstracted—lies partly in what they preserve and partly in any hints they contain as to where Trane might have headed next. Given the composition titles from the last studio duets recorded with drummer Rashied Ali in February 1967—“Mars,” “Venus,” “Jupiter,” “Saturn”—and released posthumously on Interstellar Space, the question might reasonably be asked, where was there left to go?

This latest discovery—more exactly recovery since parts of the concert have circulated as poorly produced bootlegs—in the ongoing archaeological dig of Trane’s work was recorded in Philadelphia, on November 11, 1966. There’s a degree of irony about the date, Armistice Day, with its traditional Minute’s Silence, given the shrieking, screaming, and wildness—the ferocious anti-silence—of the music. Three of the concert’s six songs—“Crescent,” “Leo,” and “My Favorite Things”—are over twenty minutes each. Only the title track, a short and devastated ballad, offers respite from the extended wailing and overblowing.

[Photo Via: Photomusik]

Monday Love:

[Photo Credit: Jim Colls via MPD]

Head on over to The Smithsonian’s website and dig this coolness. 

Photograph by Chuck Stewart.