The Best Reissues Of 2018
The vinyl resurgence took a giant step in 2018. Once regarded as a novelty niche market, it became a serious change agent in not just new releases, but the increasingly active realm of archival music.
Lured by the promise of improved sonics, prolific artists like Kate Bush overhauled their entire catalogs first for vinyl, then digital. The art-pop legend's lavish, visually stunning Remastered series gathers her studio albums, live and rare tracks and long-missing B-sides of singles into a powerful career-spanning statement, one that offers much more detail than individual album reissues ever could.
Labels like Impulse brought out newly discovered vault gems — like John Coltrane's Both Directions at Once, one of the year's most discussed jazz titles — with vinyl as a key component of the release strategy.
The year's reissues and catalog titles reflect the serious sleuthing that's going on in every corner of the music world. Below are 20 highlights, split into two groups to emphasize whether the work was essential because it made available something previously unheard by the public or because it underlined the importance of previously celebrated recordings. Some are long-buried treasures, finally unearthed; others are well-known gems, ready to sparkle given a new turn in the light. All are a reminder that music has a life well beyond the moment in which it's made.
UNKNOWNS
John Coltrane
Both Directions at Once
(Impulse, recorded in 1963)
The title of this wondrous previously-unreleased set of studio recordings from John Coltrane is a bit of a misnomer: On it, the titan of the tenor saxophone isn't just looking forward (to free-jazz vistas) and backward (in the direction of hard bop). He seeks uncharted points across the spectrum between those extremes, and finds commonalities that other jazz musicians missed in the pursuit of the new. The original tunes, particularly those he plays on soprano, exhibit the light, blithe, Richard Rodgers-esque lyricism that is a Coltrane compositional trademark. The improvisations on tenor, meanwhile, catch Coltrane experimenting with and refining the colorfully strident many-tones-at-once harmonics that would drive his later recordings. This session happened at a crucial pivot-point in Coltrane's career, and as a result opens up new perspectives on his artistic evolution. For, that offers an overview of his activity from that year and includes (recorded a day after the session) and .
