Naima Siimone

John Coltrane’s Giant Steps – the influential jazz saxophonist’s first album with Atlantic Records – continues to astound and inspire listeners 60 years after its release. Consistently lauded in music histories, Giant Steps was inducted into the Grammy® Hall of Fame in 2001 and went gold in 2018. To celebrate this seminal album’s six-decade anniversary, Rhino has remastered Giant Steps and its surviving sessions outtakes for two new collections.

John Coltrane - The Heavyweight Champion: The Complete Atlantic Recordings {7CD Box Set Reissue 2013}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 2.86 Gb | MP3 @320 -> 1.09 Gb
Full Artwork @ 600 dpi (png) -> 1.66 Gb | 5% repair rar
© 2013 Atlantic / Rhino / Warner | 8122796427
Jazz / Hard Bop / Post Bop / Modal Music / Avant-Garde Jazz / Saxophone

The Heavyweight Champion is a box set that lives up to its title. Collecting all of John Coltrane's Atlantic recordings, including a fair number of unreleased takes as well as an entire disc of alternate tracks and studio chatter, the seven-disc box set documents a pivotal moment in Coltrane's career, as he was moving from hard bop and sweet standards to a more daring, experimental style of playing influenced by the avant-garde. Much of the music is hard bop (Giant Steps) or lushly melodic (My Favorite Things), but the latter discs show the saxophonist coming to terms with the more experimental movements in jazz. The scope of this music is, quite simply, breathtaking – not only was Coltrane developing at a rapid speed, but the resulting music encompasses nearly every element that made him a brilliant musician, and it is beautiful.

John Coltrane - Live Trane - The European Tours (2001) {7CD Pablo-Victor Japan VICJ-60831~7 20bit K2 Mastering rec 1961-1963}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 1.47 Gb | MP3 @320 -> 0.98 Gb
Full Artwork @ 600 dpi (png) -> 1.47 Gb | 5% repair rar
© 1961-63, 2001 Pablo Records / Fantasy / Victor Japan | VICJ-60831~7 | 20bit K2 Mastering
Jazz / Hard Bop / Modal Music / Saxophone

The seven-CD set Live Trane expands upon Pablo's earlier CDs of John Coltrane recorded during his European tours between 1961 and 1963, including all of The Paris Concert, Bye Bye Blackbird, The European Tour, and Afro Blue Impressions, and supplementing them with extra songs from most of these concerts. Of the 37 tracks, 19 have not previously appeared commercially (except on a number of European bootleg labels with sound ranging from barely acceptable to horrendous), and a 1961 Hamburg concert with Eric Dolphy makes its debut here. A number of titles are repeated throughout the set – six takes of "My Favorite Things" and five versions of both "Impressions" and "Mr. P.C.," along with four takes of "Naima" – but true Coltrane fans will marvel at the differences between them from one concert to the next.

John Coltrane - Live At The Village Vanguard Again! (1966) {Impulse!-Verve Originals B0015827-2 rel 2011}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 293 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 98 Mb
Full Artwork @ 600 dpi (png) -> 228 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 1966, 2011 Impulse! / Verve / UMG | Verve Originals Series | B0015827-2 | LP AS-9124
Jazz / Avant-Garde Jazz / Free Jazz / Post Bop / Saxophone

John Coltrane returns to the Village Vanguard – but his sound here is a lot more far-reaching than a few years before! The album's a great counterpart to the first Vanguard session – as it takes all of the bold, soaring energy of that date, and balances it with the newly introspective sound of the later Coltrane years – plus some of the freedoms learned from the Love Supreme era. The group here showcases the new territory explored by Coltrane – with Trane himself on tenor, soprano, and a bit of bass clarinet (echoing earlier Dolphy), plus Pharoah Sanders on additional tenor, Alice Coltrane on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass, and Rasheid Ali on drums. The album only features 2 long tracks – an incredibly soulful version of "Naima", and a very firey version of "My Favorite Things", but one that begins with a haunting bass solo by Garrison!

John Coltrane - Blue World (2019) {Impulse! ‎B0030157-02 rec 1964}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 156 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 119 Mb | Artwork | 5% repair rar
© 1964, 2019 Impulse! ‎/ Verve / Universal | B0030157-02
Jazz / Post Bop / Modal Jazz / Tenor Saxophone

A year after the unprecedented release of the John Coltrane Quartet's Both Directions at Once: The Lost Album, fans get another gift from the vault. The backstory (detailed in the booklet) combined with the unique place it claims in his catalog (chronologically and aesthetically), make it a fascinating, historically significant addition to his discography. In 1964, between the recently completed Crescent, and six months before the start of the sessions for A Love Supreme, the John Coltrane Quartet cut the music on Blue World.