This is what I was talking about yesterday. Probably the main reason I got this was because of the extra CD-ROM content on it (I think that's why it's called the ultimate Blue Train). Oh, I was so convinced this was the future back then. I even wrote a proposal that got several thousand ECUs from the European Commission to explore and demonstrate this (blimey, it's still online). Wrong, wrong, wrong! The CD-ROM bit does still run on my Mac, and it has some nice photos of the band, audio interviews with trombone-player Curtis Fuller (the only surviving member of the band in 1995) and Rudy Van Gelder among others, plus a video clip of Trane playing So What with Miles and an essay by Bob Blumenthal. But clearly it falls between the stools of a coffee-table-style hard copy documentation on the one hand and the flexibility, links and cross-platform availability of online reference material on the other.
The music was a surprise to me. I tend to listen almost exclusively to Coltrane's work after 1960 (apart from when he was in Miles's band), and I'd forgotten that he previously did solo work like this. It was recorded in 1957, which, if I remember correctly, was the year he kicked his smack habit and found the new lease of life that carried him through the next ten years until, well, his death. I like it, but not as much as the later stuff.
![]() |
Comments