One Down, One Up: Live at the Half Note album cover
One Down, One Up: Live at the Half Note

John Coltrane

1965
Impulse!

This double disc captures John Coltrane’s “classic quartet” with pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Jimmy Garrison, and drummer Elvin Jones in full flight at two performances from March and May 1965. This was a period when Coltrane was beginning to move away from the modal jazz and questing, spiritual but still technically magnificent solos of his most commercially successful era and into the ecstatic free playing that would mark the last two years of his life. The Half Note was a small Greenwich Village club that broadcast live on WABC radio on Friday nights; these two Coltrane performances were part of that, and announcer Alan Grant can be heard introducing the band at the beginning of each disc. The band plays two of their most recognizable pieces, “Afro-Blue” and “My Favorite Things,” but it’s the title piece that makes this release notable — on “One Down, One Up,” which runs more than 27 minutes, Coltrane takes his longest solo on record, which at a certain point becomes a sax-drums duo, with Tyner and Garrison dropping out so the leader and Jones can go at it.

Phil Freeman

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