Today marks 100 years since the birth of John Coltrane, the saxophone genius whose playing changed the face of jazz. Naturally, there are festivities afoot, including the release of some long-mythologized live recordings.
First of all, Jeff Parker, the Tortoise guitarist who has emerged as a leading light in the West Coast jazz scene via his ETA IVtet, has recorded a new cover of "Miles' Mode" from Coltrane's 1962 Impulse! album Coltrane. Joining Parker on the recording are the Bad Plus' Chris Speed on tenor saxophone, Kneebody's Kaveh Rastegar on electric bass, and Chrome Sparks' Aaron Steele on drums.
A word from Parker:
John Coltrane has been a steady muse for me ever since I started to study his music at a young age. It’s an honor to pay tribute to him on the occasion of his centennial with three of my favorite musicians from the Los Angeles music community.
Hear the "Miles' Mode" cover below.
The biggest news of the day is an official release announcement for The Tiberi Tapes. There's a fun backstory for this one. Believing that Coltrane's studio albums could not sufficiently capture his essence, saxophonist Frank Tiberi sought to study Trane's incomparable technique by surreptitiously recording his live performances. He did so by developing a delightfully lo-fi method of bootlegging.
Between the summer of 1960 and Coltrane's death in 1967, Tiberi brought a small condenser microphone and a portable reel-to-reel machine called a Concertone TR-100 Transicorder to dozens of Coltrane shows in New York and Philadelphia. He hid the reel-to-reel in a cloth bag on his lap and put the microphone under his coat, switching tapes by hand without looking in the bag when performances ran long. When all was said and done, Tiberi had more than 80 reels containing over 26 hours of Coltrane performances.
Tiberi kept his tapes to himself, intensely studying them and incorporating them into his own playing and teaching. But in the years after Coltrane's death, word got around about the guy with the massive archive of unheard Coltrane live tracks. The recordings have since taken on mythic status, and some of them are finally coming out this fall.
In November, The Tiberi Tapes will be available in 4-LP, 3-CD set, and digital formats through Impulse! Records. The box set includes 11 recordings, starting with two versions of "Giant Steps" at radically different tempos, 226 and 262 BPM. The slower of those two is out today as a teaser track; listen below, and marvel at not just the music but the wonderful 1960s audience chatter.
TRACKLIST:
01 “Giant Steps” (226 BPM)
02 “Giant Steps” (262 BPM)
03 “Thing in D Flat”
04 “Lover”
05 “West 42nd St.”
06 “Impressions”
07 “Untitled Original in F Minor”
08 “Satellite”
09 “Good Bait”
10 “Resolution”
11 “It’s Easy to Remember”
The Tiberi Tapes are out 11/6 via Impulse!
