ARCHIVE
JOHN COLTRANE
Another Side Of John
Coltrane CRAFT
8/10
Early sideman steps, mostly with Miles and Monk
John Coltrane’s journeyman mid-’50s has been examined before, but this collection focuses on audible growth under Miles and then Monk. He’s in Miles’ quintet on “’Round Midnight”, briskly busy next to the trumpeter’s shadowstreaked, romantic weariness, and bulling through already hurtling music elsewhere. Then Miles sacked him, and Monk became his finishing school in a transformative, unrecorded residency at New York’s Five Spot. Studio evidence includes “Monk’s Mood”, with the pianist in his world of slanting angles and stride survivals, and Coltrane imbibing his sense of time and space in a slow, dreamy duet. “Epistrophy” is tense and nervous ensemble playing, Monk meets Munch. Coltrane’s challengingly dense streams on “Trinkle, Tinkle” would soon be termed “sheets of sound”. By 1961, back with Miles, he’s firmly on his own path after a strenuous discipleship, and six years from death. There’s a lot of great music here.