On March 6, 1963, the John Coltrane Quartet played a session at the famed Van Gelder Studios in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. They recorded for approximately five hours—they had a show at Birdland in midtown Manhattan to get to later that evening. The tape was never released and was thought to be lost after Coltrane’s record label, Impulse!, was bought by ABC Records, and the archives were purged. But a mono copy tape that Coltrane took home from the session recently resurfaced, and the results are being touted as a lost Coltrane album.
It’s unknowable if Coltrane, who died in 1967, ever really intended for the session captured on Both Directions at Once—which comes out Friday, June 29 on Universal under the resurrected Impulse! imprint—to become an actual, finished album. My gut thinks not, otherwise he and his producer, Bob Thiele, would have gotten Impulse! to release it. The session is roughly contemporaneous with a pair of essential efforts, 1963’s Impressions and 1964’s Live at Birdland, and was recorded at the time Coltrane was shedding his rapid-fire be-bop “sheets of sound” in favor of the free-jazz-informed mysticism that defined his final years. As his son Ravi Coltrane says in the liner notes, “To my ears, it was a kicking-the-tires kind of session.” In just a few short months, the ever-forward-looking Coltrane was on to the seismic artistic developments that would lead to his 1965 masterpiece A Love Supreme, and this session was already ancient history.