Just gave the CD its first spin and I'm not sure what to think.
Like many other people here, I'm a big Coltrane fan. A bit unusual as a fan perhaps, in that I'm not that interested anymore in his early Columbia/Riverside/Blue Note/Miles Davis period (with the exception of what he did in Blue Train). I rarely ever listen anymore to Giant Steps and My Favourite Things. I find his tone on alto in My Favourite Things unpleasant, and I prefer other tenor saxophone players in the hard bop canon. I'm also not particularly interested in what he started doing in Ascension and after, with the exception of Stellar Regions, which by the way has his talented wife as a pianist but no Pharoah Sanders.
But what he did for Impulse with Garrison/Elvin Jones and especially Tyner (whom I adore) has some of my favourite music of all times, regarding of genre. The following are all equally extraordinary for me: Live at Birdland, Live at the Village Vanguard, Africa/Brass, Crescent. The studio version of A Love Supreme tops them all, with the first part of the suite, Acknowledgement, having an almost trance-inducing effect on me (same effect I get with one of the renditions of 'Machine Gun', Fillmore East, Jimi Hendrix and the Band of Gypsys).
Anyhow the above just to tell you where I'm coming from. I like John Coltrane 'out there' but with his classic rhythm section still providing that pulse we all know of.
Now this record - it's a first listen but it all sounds too... Loose. I know, they are searching, experimenting, and it's a live recording. But Acknowledgement didn't go anywhere for me. I just listened to all of it two times. And that's where I stopped. No visceral reaction sadly.
Also, normally I wouldn't care about sound quality considerations for a live recording of this vintage, but I have to agree with other people here in that the mix is off. I'm listening with what I believe are fairly neutral studio headphones (Beyerdynamics DT250) and Coltrane's phrasing is completely buried in the left channel, overwhelmed by the (beautiful) work of Elvin Jones and by a bunch of random people hitting on cowbells, with one of the two bass players playing bowed stuff which I found distracting and frankly cheesy. McCoy Tyner is all the way to the right. The real problem is not the absolute sound quality, which is great/dynamic/etc, but the fact that Coltrane sounds like an old uncle murmuring something about the War by the fireplace while everyone else is having Christmas Dinner. Such a shame. Listen to Live at Birdland, how he comes in after Tyner's solo in Afro Blue. Goosebumps! Screw My Favourite Things, this is some of the most hypnotic alto sax playing of all times for me. There's a sense of urgency, a raw power that I've come to associate with his music that is completely missing in this live rendition of Acknowledgement.
So essentially I miss the focus, the spiritual agenda so to say - and the directed energy from the studio recording. Might keep trying, perhaps the recording has more to offer.
