Full scream ahead - John Coltrane’s Both Directions at Once

The Guardian 0

This newly unearthed session from 1963 captures the intensity of Coltrane’s great quartet and hints at the boundary-stretching brilliance to come

Missing presumed lost, Both Directions at Once is a newly discovered session recorded on 6 March 1963 by John Coltrane with Elvin Jones (drums), McCoy Tyner (piano) and Jimmy Garrison on bass. The tape has survived in good condition but the way we hear it now has changed significantly in the 55 years spent in limbo (in care of the family of Coltrane’s first wife, Naima, apparently). Back then, what was to come, musically, was only a possibility, partly contained by what was already there. Now we also hear what was destined to be left behind. That which had not existed is now dated: literally in the sense that we know the date, but also because it has been made to sound older by virtue of what Coltrane went on to do.

There is a wonderful recording of Ben Webster rehearsing Denmark’s Radio Big Band in 1970, coaxing them in his inimitable way (“Scream it! Scream that shit!”) to swing harder. So successful is he that by the end it seems that, on the first takes of each song, they had not swung at all. Coltrane’s quartet, by contrast, come powering out of the blocks. So completely were they living within the process of music-making that they could pick things up at a moment’s notice. Straight after this session they headed off for the last night of a fortnight-long residency at New York’s Birdland. The following day they were back in the same studio to record an album with singer Johnny Hartman. The result is not likely to be high on any list of jazz essentials but it illustrates how the forward momentum of creative expression was harnessed, at this point, by a constant desire to maintain and extend the commercial success achieved a couple of years earlier by My Favorite Things.

In the liner notes ​Sonny Rollins​ likens the discovery of this session to '​finding a new room in the great pyramid'