A Quartet Finding Its Footing
Coltrane sounds at ease inside Garland's trio, pushing hard without losing the groove.
The session took place on August 23, 1957, at Rudy Van Gelder's studio, with Red Garland on piano, Paul Chambers on double bass, and Art Taylor on drums alongside John Coltrane on tenor saxophone. It was a working band in a working room, and the record sounds like one. Nobody is trying to make a statement about the future of jazz; they are playing standards and originals with the kind of focus that comes from having played together a lot.
Coltrane is the newcomer in the sense that matters for the listener. He was still early in his development, and you can hear him feeling out the harmonic ground that Garland's chord voicings and Chambers's walking lines provide. The trio's rhythm section is tight and swinging, and Coltrane leans into it, sometimes sounding restless and sometimes sounding like he is simply having a good time. The playing is energetic more than introspective.
As a place to start with Coltrane, this is a solid but unremarkable entry point. It is far less essential than Blue Train (1958) or his later Prestige and Blue Note work, but it is a pleasant document of a young saxophonist absorbing the mainstream hard bop language around him. Fans who want the full arc of his career will find it worth hearing; casual listeners can reasonably skip it. AllMusic reviewer gave it four stars, which is a fair measure of how well it holds up as a straight-ahead record.
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More by John Coltrane
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The musicians on this record
Their own records, close in time
