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[snip] Posted With Permission of Don Ross. Recorded at Trinity United Church in Cannington (Ontario, Canada) on Saturday, September 15, 2001. Tuning: DADFCE [/snip]Wall of Glass (Don Ross) | 6:54Bruce Head | 553 subscribers | 19,596 views | March 17, 2007

Recorded at Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in September 1957, ‘Blue Train’ is one of John Coltrane’s masterpieces.Recorded on September 15, 1957, John Coltrane‘s Blue Train is an album revered, cherished, and loved by many… and there are others who cannot quite see what all the fuss is about. I am firmly in the former camp. Granted, some controversy surrounds the recording and critics argue that both Lee Morgan and Curtis Fuller have done much better work elsewhere. Yet such judgements seem overly harsh; this is, after all, a Coltrane album. Nonetheless, Billboard’s review of Blue Train was positive: “A provocative...

John Coltrane’s sessions for the Prestige label proved to be supremely fertile and prolific, marking the saxophonist’s creative rebirth.It’s 1958 and John Coltrane is looking to rebuild his career. The reputation of the Philadelphia-raised musician, then 32, had seemed in serious jeopardy a year earlier, after his heroin addiction got him fired from Miles Davis’ group. As a rising star of the tenor saxophone – the man who had lit up a clutch of Davis albums recorded for both Prestige and Columbia during 1955-56 – the high-flying Coltrane seemed an indispensable component of the trumpeter’s band, but the shock of...

The jazz saxophonist worked closely with John Coltrane and was a pioneer of the avant-garde movement.Pharoah Sanders, the jazz saxophonist who worked closely with John Coltrane and was a pioneer of the avant-garde movement, has died. He was 81 years old. No one played the tenor saxophone quite like Pharoah Sanders. When he blew his horn, it was as if he was a dragon breathing fire. He played it so loudly and with such a fierce intensity that what came out of his horn was a startlingly eerie howl, like a hurricane crossed with a flame-thrower; a sound that...

John Coltrane’s sessions for the Prestige label proved to be supremely fertile and prolific, marking the saxophonist’s creative rebirth.It’s 1958 and John Coltrane is looking to rebuild his career. The reputation of the Philadelphia-raised musician, then 32, had seemed in serious jeopardy a year earlier, after his heroin addiction got him fired from Miles Davis’ group. As a rising star of the tenor saxophone – the man who had lit up a clutch of Davis albums recorded for both Prestige and Columbia during 1955-56 – the high-flying Coltrane seemed an indispensable component of the trumpeter’s band, but the shock of...