Issued on 180gm vinyl by the New Jazz label, this is the well-known Rudy Van Gelder Prestige recording of March 1958. The sound is good and the music compelling in its particular take on the hard-bop template of the period. The rhythm section of Flanagan, Chambers and Cobb is exemplary, with Flanagan taking several elegant, poised and flowing solos, while Burrell and Coltrane are in fine fettle throughout.
One of my favourite guitarists, Burrell offers passage upon passage of peerless playing. His blues-hued post Christian sound and phrasing, his harmonic and melodic literacy, achieve the seemingly impossible feat of sounding at once intense and mellow, crisp and liquid, contained and expansive. What a musician!
Coltrane offers some crying and burning pre-modal testifying in the medium-up clip of the workout that is Tommy Flanagan’s Freight Trane – where Paul Chambers has an arresting, deeply cast arco solo. Relish also Coltrane’s contributions to Burrell’s Lyresto, where there are also some good bass and drum trades, and enjoy the relaxed overall bounce of I Never Knew. And move to the blues-sprung grooves which propel Big Paul, Flanagan’s lengthy and irresistible group tribute to Chambers.
The shortish duet between Burrell and Coltrane that is the Kern/Hammerstein ballad Why Was I Born? supplies the contrasting standout piece here, where the tempered phrasing and lyricism of Coltrane’s sound prefigure the soulfulness of a piece like After The Rain or the mood of an album like Ballads, both from the early 1960s.
In his original Downbeat review Harvey Pekar gave the music five stars and deemed it one of the best examples of jazz in the late 50s. But Coltrane’s Giant Steps, Davis’s Kind Of Blue, Mingus’s Mingus Ah Um and Coleman’s The Shape Of Jazz To Come would all appear in 1959. And a couple of years earlier, Sonny Rollins had cut A Night At The Village Vanguard.
Maybe, then, the present disc has to slip back some in the “best of jazz in the late 1950s” category. Nevertheless, this one-off meeting between two masters of their craft remains essential – and most enjoyable – listening.
Discography
Freight Trane; I Never Knew; Lyresto (19.15) Why Was I Born; Big Paul (18.02)
Burrell (elg); Coltrane (ts); Tommy Flanagan (p); Paul Chambers (b); Jimmy Cobb (d). New Jersey, 7 March 1958.
New Jazz CR00720
