NPR

A Lost Album From John Coltrane Is Found, With Thanks To A French-Canadian Director

Coltrane recorded the album in New Jersey, at the admiring behest of a Québécois filmmaker named Gilles Groulx, who used it to score his docufictional film Le chat dans le sac.
John Coltrane © Jim Marshall Photography LLC

"There is never any end," John Coltrane said sometime in the mid-1960s, at the height of his powers. "There are always new sounds to imagine; new feelings to get at." Coltrane, one of jazz's most revered saxophonists, was speaking to Nat Hentoff about an eternal quest — a compulsion to reach toward the next horizon, and the next.

More than half a century after his death, that restless pronouncement also carries implications for us, the beneficiaries of Coltrane's music. Not only because his body of work represents a fathomless realm of insight, as his many admirers can attest — but also because it has recently yielded surprise discoveries from his prime.

Just over a yeara made by the John Coltrane Quartet in 1963. That two-disc set posthumously gave Coltrane his first-ever debut on the Billboard 200, at No. 21; according to the label, global sales have exceeded 250,000 copies.

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