John Coltrane: Complete 1961 Village Vanguard Recordings

I wish there was a way I could make some intelligent comment about, oh, I don't know, some modal chord sequence involving a diminished seventh and how this differs between the versions of Spiritual on discs 2, 3 and 4. But I don't have the proper musical ear or knowledge, and anyway I haven't absorbed these recordings sufficiently even to determine the most superficial comparisons between the different versions.

I just put these CDs on and swim in the sound they make.

Somewhere — I can't remember where or when — I heard a story that Coltrane used to run off the stage at the start of the interval to get maximum time practising before the second set. The story may be apocryphal, but I love the sense it gives of Coltrane's (literal) devotion to his craft, where the public performance is just a punctuation point in the more important business of practice and continuous improvement.

MusicBrainz entry for disc 1 Disk 2 Disk 3 Disk 4