Listening to Coltrane Through Kuhn's Hands
A pianist's quiet conversation with a saxophonist he knew for one transformative season.
You hear space first. Steve Kuhn's trio moves through these Coltrane pieces like they're thinking out loud, letting silence matter as much as sound. The tempos breathe—nothing rushes. When Kuhn sits at the piano, he doesn't announce himself; he enters sideways, leaving room for the bass and drums to establish the shape of the room before committing to melody. The mood is introspective without being heavy, respectful without genuflecting. This is mature-era Kuhn, a pianist who spent decades absorbing the music before making this record.
Kuhn worked with John Coltrane briefly in 1960, a short but indelible collaboration that clearly never left his hands. Rather than try to transcribe Coltrane's saxophone voice onto the keyboard, Kuhn inhabits the spiritual content of those compositions—the searching quality, the harmonic restlessness, the way melody can bend without breaking. This isn't a note-for-note recitation. It's one musician's sustained meditation on another's vocabulary.
AllMusic reviewer Ken Dryden awarded the album four stars, calling it one of the best among the countless Coltrane tributes and one of Kuhn's essential recordings. That assessment holds weight because Kuhn's discography is substantial; for a record to stand out within it takes real clarity and purpose. Mostly Coltrane (2009) matters because it proves that a single season of collaboration, decades earlier, could seed a lifetime of understanding.
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