Both Directions at Once: The Lost Album

As strong and revealing as the bare-bones collection is, it’s hard to imagine a Coltrane freak who won’t want to plunk for the deluxe version. It affords one of the deepest looks available at the way Trane addressed creative choices in the studio. No less than three more versions of “Impressions” are heard on the second disc, and they are the best advertisement for the two-disc package. ... Is its belated arrival a godsend? Absolutely.

The best-kept secret in the Coltrane archive seems to leap between every stage of his career, like a greatest-hits sampler being improvised in real time. [Sep 2018, p.45]

Whatever the plan was, Both Directions at Once isn’t just a treat for the hardcore, either in terms of Coltrane or jazz more broadly.

If it’s not Giant Steps, the album that type of casual Coltrane fan knows is A Love Supreme. Both Directions at Once isn’t definitely isn’t Supreme, but it enhances our understanding of how that group of musicians came to make it.

For the die-hards, the ones who have charted the Classic Quartet's every move, from the early glories of the Coltrane LP to the fiery outpourings heard on albums like Sun Ship from 1965, it's another small but crucial puzzle piece in the group's still-stunning evolution during its roughly three-year lifespan. For everyone else, it's an unvarnished, day-in-the-life portrait of an icon--and the three musical giants that helped him achieve that status--at work.

It can give you new respect for the rigor, compression, and balance of some of his other albums from the period. It is at times, as Coltrane’s son Ravi pointed out, surprisingly like a live session in a studio; parts of the music sound geared toward a captive audience. That may be the best thing about it.

The tunes recorded on 6 March bear no relation to that relaxed and delicate session [with Johnny Hartman]. Instead, they’re much closer to the kind of high-octane material the quartet were pursuing in live performance at the time, albeit with considerably less intensity than could be witnessed on the bandstand. [Aug 2018, p.74]

It's the fiery One Up, One Down and the four zigzagging interpretations of Impressions that truly add tot he indispensability of this set. [Aug 2018, p.119]

Both Directions at Once is truly a rare thing: an important discovery from the vault that's also a blast to hear.