Blue Train

JOHN COLTRANE: Tenor Saxophone
LEE MORGAN: Trumpet
CURTIS FULLER: Trombone
KENNY DREW: Piano
PAUL CHAMBERS: Bass
PHILLY JOE JONES: Drums

Amazon.com essential recording
Blue Train is one of those ineffable sound recordings that actually seems to capture a moment of perfect artistry. Coltrane was in the midst of a Prestige recording contract but was able to honor a previous commitment to Blue Note and release this one album. With four Coltrane originals, including the haunting theme of the title track, and one standard, this recording showed Coltrane was becoming the complete package: player, composer, and bandleader. What distinguishes this session from the Prestige dates of the same time is the easy, relaxed, and obviously well-rehearsed playing of the group, and the usual masterful recording by Rudy van Gelder. This enhanced CD-ROM also features two alternate takes. The well-designed multimedia elements, including musician interviews and pictures from the famous van Gelder studio, round this stellar session into an experience that informs and delights over and over. --Michael Monhart

Amazon.com
The tenor sax giant had signed with another label when he embarked on this one-off date for Blue Note, an excursion that paid off with an enduring modern jazz masterpiece. Boasting volley after volley of smart soloing and intuitively swinging rhythm work, Blue Train is a joy, from the coolly precise ensemble entry on the opening title piece through the set's balance of elegant hard bop conversations and smooth downshifts into ballads. John Coltrane wrote four originals for the date, all of them now regarded as standards, and assembled a rhythm section including pianist Kenny Drew, Miles Davis's rhythm section of bassist Paul Chambers and drummer Philly Joe Jones, and trumpeter Lee Morgan and trombonist Curtis Fuller, both recent Blue Note recruits. Coltrane's signature sound, now fully developed but still hewing more to familiar blues and chromatic harmonies than his later modalities, is confident and expansive, and his partners respond vividly throughout. --Sam Sutherland