Revinylization

John Coltrane spent his final years with Impulse! Records, from 1961 until his death, in 1967, at the age of 40. Those years were his most adventurous, as he sorted through every sound he could create in his spiritual quest, as he put it, to "get the one essential." His range of recordings in those years spanned from "Greensleeves" to A Love Supreme, from ballads with pop singer Johnny Hartman to multiphonic fireworks with alto saxophonist Eric Dolphy.

Do we need yet another unearthed recording of the Bill Evans trio? I count 22 albums or boxed sets—a total of 49 polycarbonate or vinyl discs—of posthumously released sessions, many of them in just the last few years. But this latest discovery, recorded in Buenos Aires in September 1979, is a stunner. So, to answer the question above: Yes, we do need this recording.

In the January 2020 Stereophile, I described my transformation from John Fahey skeptic to John Fahey fan; suffice it to say, the late guitarist was far from the only musical artist whose work I came to enjoy only after a number of failed attempts. Another was the English band Yes, which I saw in concert in 1977, at New York's Madison Square Garden: I was so bored by the many lengthy instrumental solos, each one remarkable only for the sheer number of notes being squirted at me, that I literally nodded off. (In my defense, it was also very warm in there.)

Certain albums stand as monuments because of the influence they had on contemporary and future musicians despite having little commercial success. The Velvet Underground & Nico comes to mind. So do the early Ramones albums. And then there are albums that had just as much influence but were megahits—a much rarer thing.

Those of you old enough to have heard it when it was new will recall when you first experienced the music of Jimi Hendrix. I was 13, in 1967, when I came home after school with a friend bearing an LP of the just-released US Reprise Records pressing of Are You Experienced. My dad had a floorstanding, monophonic record player.

As an aspiring teenage illustrator, I was fascinated by the work of outlaw cartoonist Robert Crumb. His beautifully drawn images offered escape from the redneck southern city where I grew up. I was especially enchanted by Crumb's caricatures of blues and jazz musicians, which were assembled in his "Heroes of the Blues" and "Early Jazz Greats" trading-card collections.

With its indelible Francis Wolff cover image of a pensive John Coltrane bathed in blue, freshly fired by Miles Davis but four months free of heroin, and its confident, accessible music that hints at the genius to come, Coltrane's Blue Train is a timeless jazz masterpiece. The saxophonist's only album as a leader for Blue Note, recorded before his triumphs at Atlantic Records—My Favorite Things and Coltrane Jazz—the boppy Blue Train, which, including the original mono and stereo pressings, had been issued 272 times, remains important for many reasons.