Customer Reviews

Last Trane

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This album contains 2 of the 5 tunes recorded on January 10,1958 with a quintet featuring Coltrane,Donald Byrd,Paul Chambers,Red Garland and Louis Hayes. This session for me is the greatest Trane recorded @ Prestige; if it was released as one album back in 1958 I'm positive it would have garnered more attention. Check out "Lover" and "Come Rain or Come Shine", then check out "Lush Life","The Believer" and "Nakatini Serenade" on the aforementioned albums ( tunes also available in sequential order on the 16 cd Prestige box set ). Passionate music and mind-boggling playing from Coltrane in the heart of his "Prestige Era".

All of Coltrane's Prestige catalog, while not so much influenced by the Eastern sounds that would later envelop his music, is wonderful. You get to hear Trane in a more traditional setting somewhere between his work with Miles (in fact he was still with Miles when this stuff was recorded) and his first steps (ha pun not intended) away from more traditional tunes on the Atlantic label. Now, there are 11 CDs that make up this catalog (Trane as a leader on Prestige). You do the math. If you buy 'em separately you are going to pay around $125.00. You can get the Fearless Leader box set right here on Amazon for half that price PLUS you get a great guide to all the music Trane recorded as a leader for Prestige, a complete "session-ography", nice picks of all the CD covers including some of those that went through some changes over the year, 45 rpm single covers and so on. It's a very nice package. Buy this if you must but I recommend you save your pennies for a few weeks until you can afford to buy Fearless Leader.

This is a sadly overlooked Coltrane album. The only other reviewer associates it with Lush Life, and rightly: 3 of its 4 numbers share the same personnel used on the same dates - attesting to some outstanding magic in those sessions. It's tempting, yes, to wonder if instead of being companions, they'd been released as one package, launching Coltrane's career to the stratosphere earlier; still, that conjecture jumps way ahead. Miles Davis and others commented about being glad, in the early `50s, about the shift from 78s to LPs, which took the music past the 3-minute mark and made room for some real soloing, and even by `58 multi-LP releases were still unthinkable. I think Dylan's 'Blonde on Blonde' was the first double LP, and that's well into the mid-60s.

The four numbers on `The Last Trane,' two standards and two Coltrane originals, were recorded during one 1957 date and two early '58 sessions. The earliest led to a trio for sax, bass and drums, without piano - like the first three songs on `Lush Life.' Two tracks are quintets with Donald Byrd on trumpet (like the title track on 'Lush Life'), and a standard sax quartet number emerged from the final session. This instrumental variety may suggest an uneven album but, on the contrary, greater uniformity would be likely to be more challenging. `The Last Trane' is never jarring, and close listening is handsomely rewarded. (A closing note about recording associations: on 26 March `58, the final session for this LP, Coltrane, Garland, Paul Chambers and Art Taylor also recorded *all* of Settin' the Pace at the Van Gelder Studio in Hackensack, NJ)

Coltrane's billowing sax improvisations in the opening number, an arrangement of Rogers and Hart's `Lover,' take it soaring far from its over-familiar core. The near-hectic pace used in this standard, together with Coltrane's overpowering `sheets of sound,' may account for Donald Byrd's false start, but his trumpet more than catches up. This track begins with stormy drumming from Louis Hayes that returns every so often, and it closes with rounds of glorious soloing by all the players. Mr. PC appears on every track except the trio, `Slowtrane,' where Art Taylor sets a subtle pace so Earl May's walking bass line can act as perfect foil for Coltrane's creamy-smooth, bluesy blowing. The 12-minute `By the Numbers' is a Coltrane composition and the longest track. Despite his smoking 4-minute solo, this blues is so driven by an unusually inspired Red Garland as to render the pianist its owner, in my books. In the last track, Mercer-Arlen's ballad `Come Rain or Come Shine,' some soulful blowing again shows Coltrane staking his ground firmly in the jazz vanguard of the day. The album ends on a luscious foray by Byrd, who again does wonderful work keeping up to Trane.

This may not be considered `classic' Coltrane as no special hits stand out and no stylistic thresholds are crossed. Even so, it's not `second-tier' Coltrane - unlike, say, sessions he didn't lead, such as Coltrane Time, or opportunistic re-releases from before he found his own voice.

This is engaging, atmospheric early Coltrane, and strongly recommended.

****½