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.

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.

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]

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.

Improv conundrums but with an unwavering spiritual intent, these on-the-fly Coltrane experiments were part of a 1960s step-change in the evolution of jazz and much else in contemporary music, still making waves from those long-gone analogue days to the eclectic present.