What Coltrane recordings have been listening to Erik? A lot of his material after A Love Supreme is difficult to digest and takes some time, analogous to your thoughts on understanding and appreciating Picasso after his Blue and Rose Period paintings. So those recordings would be the wrong place to start.
The only worthwhile thing I got out of many years of college was listening to Coltrane’s A Love Supreme as part of a Jazz Music class I was taking as a lark. I’d never listened to anything but Rock n’ Roll before and loved everything from Bill Haley to what was then going on like the Stone’s Let It Bleed. I had no jazz listening experience at all, and was amazed by that recording. It was kind of a sink or swim experience, getting thrown in the water for the first time. I’ve forty or so of his albums now, not including his contributions to many of the large number of Miles Davis recordings in my collection.
I’m not sure if that would work for you, but reading your posts here makes me think you’d catch on quickly and fall in love with Coltrane too. Are there other jazz artists you like, or is jazz relatively new to you as a listening experience? What do you typically listen to?
Any of his later Prestige or subsequent Atlantic recordings are easier listening maybe. Look at the AllMusic Coltrane discography to get the sequence. The older the recording, the more traditional his playing is, generally speaking dating back to a Coleman Hawkin’s influence stylistically. I’m most enamored of his post Atlantic Impulse recordings up to A Love Supreme, as many others are, and am just now beginning to appreciate his free-form work which is reactive in an historical context just as you described Picasso’s abstract work. It’s well worth the effort to develop an appreciation Erik, as you’ll discover, so give him a good shot, and you won’t be disappointed..
You might try his Giant Steps album. That was a kind of watershed album for his sheets of sound approach which he further developed as a solo artist, and is a precursor to much of his later Atlantic and early Impulse recordings. The original My Favorite Things album to me is always enjoyable and a staple of his repertoire post Giant Steps. Familiarity with the tune from the Sound of Music might give you a bridge even though you found it unremarkable thus far. Listen to the original version as some of the many subsequent recordings of this song veer into the free-form realm.
Once you catch on, the heart felt loveliness of some of his music will be a gift to you, and you’ll wonder how you ever didn’t experience it that way before. The rest of his stuff is mostly good jazz that enabled him to play alongside the best. Good luck from a person who’s at age 67 is just starting to catch on to mainstream Classical music. But I learned to love jazz from Armstrong thru Weather Report after that initial Coltrane exposure.
Mike
