# A lost album from John Coltrane, with thanks to a french – canadian director: Photos, Video

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2019/08/20/a-lost-album-from-john-coltrane-with-thanks-to-a-french-canadian-director-photos-video/
- Published: 2019-08-20T12:18:23+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**“There is never any end,” John Coltrane said sometime in the mid-1960s, at the
height of his powers_. _“There are always new sounds to imagine; new feelings to
get at.” Coltrane, one of jazz’s most revered saxophonists, was speaking to Nat 
Hentoff about an eternal quest — a compulsion to reach toward the next horizon, 
and the next.**

More than half a century after his death, that restless pronouncement also carries
implications for us, the beneficiaries of Coltrane’s music. Not only because his
body of work represents a fathomless realm of insight, as his many admirers can 
attest — but also because it has recently yielded surprise discoveries from his 
prime.

Just over a year ago, Impulse! had a phenomenal success with _Both Directions at
Once: The Lost Album, _a startling assemblage of studio recordings made by the John
Coltrane Quartet in 1963. That two-disc set posthumously gave Coltrane his first-
ever debut on the Billboard 200, at No. 21; according to the label, global sales
have exceeded 250,000 copies.

Now comes word of another new album by the classic John Coltrane Quartet, with McCoy
Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass and Elvin Jones on drums. Blue World_ _will
be released on Impulse!/UMe on Sept. 27, and like _Both Directions _it offers an
unexpected view on a pivotal period in the band’s evolution. It was recorded at 
Van Gelder Studios on June 24, 1964 — a few weeks after the quartet put a finishing
touch on the album _Crescent_ — as the soundtrack to a Canadian art film. Because
the date had gone unnoted in session recording logs, this music has occupied a blind
spot for Trane-ologists, archivists and historians.

[[

But it’s featured prominently throughout the film, _Le chat dans le sac _(_The Cat
in the Bag_) — a coolly stylized, politically charged docufiction by Gilles Groulx,
considered a landmark of Québec cinema. Within the first two minutes of screen time—
during direct-to-the-camera intros by Barbara and Claude, the young idealists whose
uncoupling provides the film with its narrative tension — you can hear Coltrane’s
quartet start into his exquisite ballad “Naima.” (The curious can [watch the film here](https://www.nfb.ca/directors/gilles-groulx/),
courtesy of the National Film Board of Canada.)

Coltrane had first recorded “Naima” five years earlier, for the Atlantic album _Giant
Steps_. His quartet had played it often in live settings, but this is a studio version,
and a truly excellent one. It plays in its entirety, all four-and-a-half minutes,
as Claude and Barbara make their opening statements. A following scene, revealing
the lovers in a sensuous idyll, is also scored with new-to-us music by the Coltrane
quartet, playing the saxophonist’s smoldering “Village Blues.”

In his liner notes for _Blue World, _Ashley Kahn outlines the circumstances that
led Coltrane to contribute to the film. Barbara Ulrich, who played Barbara and was
later romantically involved with Groulx, remembers the situation matter-of-factly.“
When we moved in together,” she says of Groulx, “it turned out we had many of the
same albums — jazz was holiness to Gilles and he had every Coltrane album that ever
came out. Coltrane to him was an absolute master.”

Through a mutual acquaintance, Groulx was friendly with Jimmy Garrison, which seems
likely to have been the opening he needed to approach Coltrane. At the time, Groulx
was working for the state-sponsored National Film Board, honing his skills as a 
documentary filmmaker. He had also fallen under the spell of the French New Wave—
in particular, the work of Jean-Luc Godard, whose visual cool, jump-cut edits and
verité dialogue are all clear influences on _Le chat dans le sac._

There was a glowing precedent of modern-jazz scores in Francophone films, notably
Miles Davis’ celebrated work on Louis Malle’s _Ascenseur pour l’echafaud_(“Elevator
to the Gallows”) and Thelonious Monk’s less-famous effort for Roger Vadim’s _Les
liaisons dangereuses_ (“Dangerous Liaisons”), which has recently begun to receive
its due. When Groulx approached Coltrane with a list of possible songs, he surely
had this ideal somewhere in mind.

His film also directly addresses the disenfranchisement of Québec’s Francophone 
population, drawing a parallel with anticolonial movements of that era. (Claude,
though drawn as an insufferable mope, espouses a radical politics of the sort that
Groulx seems to find agreeable.) For Coltrane, who had recorded originals meaningfully
titled “Liberia” and “Africa,” this subtext of independence and freedom may have
been especially appealing.

But Coltrane hadn’t seen a cut of the film when he recorded the soundtrack, which—
probably due in equal part to Groulx’s taste and the onus of licensing — consists
of new versions of prior material. (The album includes three takes of “Village Blues,”
two takes of “Naima,” and one apiece of “Like Sonny” and “Traneing In.”) This was
an unusual move for Coltrane, especially in the studio.

“For this reason alone,” observes Kahn, “_Blue World _offers a special opportunity,
which is the chance to compare these versions with previous perspectives, revealing
both Coltrane’s personal progress and the interactive consistency and sonic details
the Classic Quartet had firmly established as their collective signature by 1964.”

A case in point is the title track of _Blue World_, which Impulse! has released 
today. This powerful performance, excerpts of which appear in the final stretch 
of _Le chat_, unfurls in undulating waltz time, with Tyner tolling dark-hued block
chords against Jones’ polyrhythmic hum of cymbals and toms. Garrison is a pivot 
point, holding down the song’s center without sealing off any avenue for digression.

Which brings us to Coltrane, whose tenor is a revelatory voice throughout the song.
He composed “Blue World” using an existing harmonic framework, from the Harold Arlen-
Johnny Mercer standard “Out of This World.” (He had, in fact, [recorded that song in 1962](https://youtu.be/6aKHMd_jESI),
for the album titled _Coltrane_, in the same key and with a similar rhythmic arrangement,
at a brighter tempo).

The harmonic language Coltrane employs in his improvisation, and the solid heft 
of his phrasing, feel distinct from that earlier version of the song. There are 
moments in his tenor solo on “Blue World” that point clearly in the direction of
[ _A Love Supreme_](https://www.npr.org/2000/10/23/148148986/a-love-supreme)_, _which
the quartet would record months later, in December. Coltrane’s methodical yet unscripted
push into different tonal centers, expressed as a form of incantatory fervor, should
be familiar to anyone who has ever been entranced by “Acknowledgment,” the first
movement in the _Love Supreme _suite.

That we’re just now latching on to this music, which was never exactly hidden but
also never accounted for, recalls the expression of vastness that Coltrane once 
described. It also resonates well with a moment early in _Le chat dans le sac, _as
Barbara stands before an oversize map of Montréal, where most of the film takes 
place.

“Right here,” she says amiably, pointing at a spot on the map. “Such a little city
in that huge space, this huge country…” she trails off, scanning the territorial
expanse, as if momentarily awed by the breadth of all that she has yet to know.

![John Coltrane, photographed in his backyard in Queens, New York in 1963.](https://
i0.wp.com/mediad.publicbroadcasting.net/p/shared/npr/styles/placed_wide/nprshared/
201908/751518593.jpg?w=640&ssl=1)

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