Both Directions at Once: The Lost Album

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Both Directions at Once: The Lost Album
Studio album by John Coltrane
Released June 29, 2018
Recorded March 6, 1963
Studio Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, US
Genre Jazz
Language Instrumental
Label Impulse!
Compiler

• Ravi Coltrane
• Ken Druker

John Coltrane chronology
The Atlantic Years in Mono
(2016) Both Directions at Once: The Lost Album
(2018) Blue World
(2019)

Both Directions at Once: The Lost Album is a studio album recorded by saxophonist John Coltrane for Impulse! Records that was first released in 2018.[1] The recordings were made in 1963 during Coltrane's Classic Quartet period and lost for decades.

History

Both Directions at Once was recorded in Van Gelder Studio in New Jersey on March 6, 1963, by saxophonist John Coltrane and his Quartet: double bassist Jimmy Garrison, drummer Elvin Jones and pianist McCoy Tyner. The session took place on the last day of a two-week stint at Birdland.[2]The next day, the group would join singer Johnny Hartman for the recording of John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman.[3]

To cut down on storage space, Impulse! Records destroyed the master tape, and the recording was lost for decades. The seven tracks on Both Directions survived as a copy Coltrane gave to his first wife, Juanita Naima.[4][5] Van Gelder made a separate copy for Coltrane to listen to at home. In 2005, after the Guernsey's auction house announced plans to sell Coltrane-related artefacts, the record company intervened to acquire the tapes.[6]Coltrane's son Ravi and studio executive Ken Druker assembled the final album with liner notes written by Ashley Kahn.[1] Ravi recalled that he and the others involved in the preparation of the album were "over the moon," and commented: "We spend our lives following these players, recording, studying them, transcribing them — you go at the new material like it's sustenance."[7]

The album's title came from a recollection by Wayne Shorter, who stated that at one point, Coltrane told him that what he was attempting to achieve musically was "starting a sentence in the middle, and then going to the beginning and the end of it at the same time... both directions at once."[8]

The standard edition of the album includes one recording of each track and expanded deluxe editions include multiple takes, including several of the title track from Impressions. All tracks were previously unreleased except for "Vilia" (Take 5), which was included in the 1965 sampler The Definitive Jazz Scene, Vol. 3 and the CD reissue of Live at Birdland.[8][9]

Impulse! followed this release with 2019's Blue World, from a lost 1964 session.[10]

Reception