John Coltrane

Interstellar Space consists of an extended duet suite in four parts with the drummer Rashied Ali, and was recorded at the Van Gelder Studios on February 22, 1967, the week after the session that produced Stellar Regions. As a result, the melodies often overlap; "Venus" has the same melody as the title track of the previous LP, "Mars" quotes the melody of what became known as "Iris", and many note choices and runs are similar. The album is an important example of highly improvised free jazz, which was Coltrane's principal interest in the latter part of his career. Coltrane's improvisations are thus extremely free here, stating tacit modes and harmonies briefly and modulating constantly, fitting extremely dense, twisting expressions into breath-length phrases.

In addition to their positions of importance in the Miles Davis quintet of the mid-fifties, John Coltrane and Red Garland a series of studio dates for Prestige in 1957 and '58. Here, as in several of the others, Paul Chambers is the bassist and Arthur Taylor is the drummer, with Donald Byrd on trumpet making it a quintet. There are only three numbers, the title song "Black Pearls", an extremely swift version of "Lover Come Back To Me", and the fast "Sweet Sapphire Blues" which begins with Garland soloing from the gitgo in a long, upbeat exploration before Trane unfurls his "sheets of sound". Byrd gets into that rapid fire mode, in and among his evenly-cadenced lines and Chambers (plucked) and Taylor (brushes into sticks)…