John Coltrane recorded at least three albums in 1964. Two of them were released and are now considered masterpieces, while one of them never saw the light of day.
The LPs that hit store shelves were the late jazz saxophonist’s “Crescent” and “A Love Supreme,” and the unreleased album called “Blue World” will now be available to consumers for the first time.
The album was recorded in June of 1964 in engineer Rudy Van Gelder’s New Jersey studio, in between the “Crescent” and “A Love Supreme” sessions.
The 37-minute offering was made to be a soundtrack for Canadian filmmaker Gilles Groulx’s film “d Le chat dans le sac” “(The Cat in the Bag).” But only 10 minutes of the session was used in the film toward the end, and it’s never been put on an album. The new release is said to be mastered directly from the original analog tape as well.
“Blue World” will be released by Coltrane’s label Impulse!/UME, and it’ll also feature the classic quartet, which consists of Coltrane, McCoy Tyner on piano, Elvin Jones on drums and Jimmy Garrison on bass.
The unreleased album will be released on September 27 on CD, vinyl and download.
Barbara Ulrich, who starred in “d Le chat dans lesac” and dated Groulx, explained how Coltrane was brought in for the soundtrack.
“Gilles had a list of the music he wanted and later he told me when he gave the list to Coltrane, Coltrane said, ‘OK, I can do this — I can’t do that, it’s not mine. OK, I get it, I know what you want,'” she explained. “Then they just started jamming and recorded for several hours.”
“Then Rudy gave Gilles the tape and that was it,” added Ulrich. “When he got back he was absolutely ecstatic. He knew exactly where he was going to use the music in the film.”
In 2018 Impulse! released Coltrane’s “Both Directions at Once: The Lost Album,” pulled from previously unreleased 1963 recordings, which was a huge success.
Coltrane died at age 40 of liver cancer in 1967.
