Happy 65th Anniversary to John Coltrane’s Blue Train, originally released in January 1958.
At some point in my teenage years the sound of a guitar talking in a way I’d never heard before seeped through the wall from my elder sister’s bedroom and sparked a journey of discovery that continues to this day and will likely never stop. My sister’s copy of Strong Persuader (1986) by Robert Cray was swiftly copied and played to death as I lost myself in the glory of his guitar playing.
From there my thirst for musical exploration was born, like Lake Itasca marking the source of the mighty Mississippi river in Minnesota. It wasn’t long before my love for blues music led me to jazz—they are, after all, roots of the same tree—and I received a gift one Christmas that stoked the fires of my musical desire further. My mother, the canny operator that she is, handed me a slight book roughly the size of a postcard and in doing so gave me a treasure trove of images.
The book was a set of postcards of Francis Wolff’s Blue Note photography. Wolff and his friend Alfred Lion founded Blue Note Records in the late 1930s and ran the label that came to represent one of the peaks of bebop music. Lion’s job was to record the music and from 1939 to 1967, he recorded seminal works aplenty. Wolff, on the other hand, may have been less direct in his impact, but ultimately his work would come to represent the label almost as much as the music itself.
Wolff used a Leica or Rolleiflex camera to take pictures of every Blue Note artist, often finding them in relaxed moods between takes rather than actually in the act of recording. The images that I flicked through struck me immediately in the same way they did for countless people. There was humanity, fierce artistry and ineffable coolness in each and every shot. For all that “cool” can be a slippery nebulous term, the photos Wolff took most assuredly demonstrated the cool in each and every musician.
It wasn’t until the advent of the LP that these lovingly taken photographs took on new forms, other than the archival purpose Wolff had imagined. Three hundred of Wolff’s photographs eventually became the covers of albums by the musicians he documented so lovingly, complementing the music magnificently. These covers of Blue Note records even prompted other labels to try to compete (for example, Columbia used innovative graphic designers like S Neal Fujita), but Blue Note remained the pinnacle.
Flicking through the gift my mother gave me, one picture stood out amongst the rest—it was the photograph that would eventually become the cover for John Coltrane’s Blue Train. With his left hand behind his head and his right one gently touching his lips, he looked relaxed and thoughtful, but there was an unmistakably steely focus to his gaze. It held my attention for a long while and I knew immediately that I had to listen to the music that the picture represented.
Prior to the recording of Blue Train (ironically Coltrane’s only recording for Blue Note) though, Coltrane’s life was in a parlous state. Though he was sharing the stage with the great and good of the jazz world (particularly Miles Davis), his light was being dimmed by his addiction to heroin and booze. In his autobiography, Davis recalled the sorry state of Coltrane, reflecting that “…with Trane it was getting to be pathetic. He’d be playing in clothes that looked like he’d slept in them for days, all wrinkled up and dirty and shit.”
But despite the toll addiction took, his core characteristic remained intact as Davis again described: “He was just into playing, was all the way into music and if a woman was standing right in front of him naked, he wouldn’t even have seen her. That’s how much concentration he had … it was like he was possessed when he put that horn in his mouth. He was so passionate—fierce—and yet so quiet and gentle when he wasn’t playing. A sweet guy.”
Though Davis obviously understood addiction firsthand, he had no brook with it interfering with his band and he fired Coltrane in March 1957. That year proved to be the most important of Coltrane’s, as he emerged clean and spiritually energized, determined to be a musical vessel for God. He spent five days going cold turkey, locked away in isolation and exclaimed on resurfacing, “I thought the Lord had taken the gift of music away from me. I promised the Lord if he would give me back the gift, I would become a preacher on my horn.”
And so it proved. A brief stint in Thelonious Monk’s band contributed to a profound transformation where he “learned from him (Monk) in every way—through the senses, theoretically and technically.” AB Spellman (in discussing Blue Train for NPR) explained that over the course of a couple of months in the summer of ’57, Coltrane found his “voice”—a lyrical, developed style whereby he could take one or two ideas and evolve them. Spellman likened his style to that of composer JS Bach due to the ability of both to take a melodic line and open it up and up, seemingly exponentially.
Then, in September 1957, he went to Rudy Van Gelder’s Hackensack, New Jersey recording studio and set about recording Blue Train and his transformation became obvious—not only was he the leader of the band for the first time, but he also wrote four of the five tracks. With him were Curtis Fuller on trombone and Kenny Drew on piano, alongside one of the greatest rhythm sections in jazz history—Paul Chambers on bass and ‘Philly’ Joe Jones on drums. And then there was a teenage trumpet player whose style and verve made a mockery of his youth—the inimitable Lee Morgan.
A key part of the recipe for success was the fact that Alfred Lion did not just encourage the band to rehearse, but that he was able to pay them to do so. A gap in the touring schedules of the musicians meant that the pay was more than welcome and the opportunity to hone the pieces helped result in the now-classic status of the record.
The hard-bop masterpiece is steeped in the blues (as the title unsurprisingly reveals), but it is also the home of the first recorded instance of ‘Coltrane Changes’ (harmonic progression variations using substitute chords over common jazz chord progressions) on “Lazy Bird,” and that combination is part of what makes the end product so important and thrilling. The title track is a minor blues that serves as the perfect starter to the repast on offer.
Meanwhile “Moment’s Notice” is, according to Scott Yanow for Mosaic Records, an example of Coltrane “mastering Benny Golson’s method of composing whereby he matches a singable melody with complex chord changes that challenge musicians”. A further reflection was offered by Stuart Nicholson in Jazzwise’s list of “100 Jazz Albums That Shook The World,” who offered that “Moment’s Notice” might be seen as a stepping stone to Giant Steps (1960), as here Coltrane uses different chords to harmonize the same repeated note, an indication of his sophisticated harmonic understanding.
“Locomotion” is 44 bars or so of blues that offers at least two great reasons to love it. First up is the way that Trane leaves the melody behind and disappears off into the ether, building momentum as he goes. And the second is what AB Spellman (again from the NPR piece about the album) argues is one of the finest jazz trumpet solos from the teenage Lee Morgan. I don’t know what you were doing when you were 19, but I’m going to guess it wasn’t laying down an all-time musical solo performance in a band of great jazz renown.
For four of the five songs, one of Miles Davis’ observations about Coltrane stands true. He wrote in his autobiography that “Trane was the loudest and fastest saxophonist I’ve ever heard,” and in thinking about Coltrane’s legacy, the speed of attack and constant spiraling toward freedom and nirvana are the characteristics most often associated with his playing. What sometimes goes unheralded is his ability to strike tender moments. One of my favorites is his rendition of “You Don’t Know What Love Is” (by Raye and de Paul), but here his tender side is shown just as divinely on the one track he did not write, “I’m Old-Fashioned.”
In 1970 Nat Hentoff, the jazz critic, was asked to contribute liner notes for a collection of Coltrane finest pieces issued three years after Trane’s death and he described the power of John Coltrane thus: “He drew you into his vortex, deeper and deeper and deeper until you begin to realize that it was your own self you were excavating.” He also went on to eulogize his powers and why they continued to resonate after his passing: “Rarely I think, in any form of music, has one man so thoroughly revealed himself in the act of music and that’s why he compels each listener to confront himself.”
A year later, Coltrane would record and release the aptly titled Giant Steps that fully showcased the blossoming expansion of jazz as filtered through John Coltrane and a handful of years later his definitive masterpiece A Love Supreme (1965) would change music for those with willing ears. Both are lauded (quite rightly) to high heaven, but there is something about Blue Train that makes me return to it more often than those two epochal albums. Maybe it’s the sentimental place in my heart it has at the beginning of my jazz journey or maybe it is the way it bridges the gap between the stages of Coltrane’s career. Either way, Blue Train is an album of impeccable quality that I revisit often and with deep joy.
LISTEN: