Many of the songs on this extraordinary album were recorded during the "Giant Steps" sessions, a landmark CD that often unfairly overshadows this record. It's innocuous title, "Coltrane Jazz," causes many to overlook it, but don't fall into the same trap. I've been listening constantly to this CD for the past three or four months and I cannot take it off my playlist. It is phenomenally beautiful music. It lasts and lasts and lasts!

At this stage in his career, John Coltrane seemed to have a direct link between the emotion he clearly felt and the music through which he was so well able to express it. A glorious combination of fabulous technique and fine compositions developed of course through improvisation of a high order. The tunes have a very strong character and a distinct sound, quite apart from serving as the most fertile of ground for the improvisation through which he was able to develop the particular emotional impetus of each one. The balance between the three elements of composition, sound and improvisation is a clear quality in this extraordinary music, yet Coltrane still swings, avoiding the overt practiced professorialism I detect in some of his work, for example with Thelonius Monk a couple of years before. Whilst perhaps not coming over as a musical monument like that feat of terpsichorean architecture Giant Steps, which seems to me to exemplify for the first time the full logical and inevitable product of the artist's use of his ideas and technique, opening up a channel for the torrent of expression he needed so desperately to release, this record has great subtlety, variety and wit. I like it very much, and you'd go a long way to find a better, before or since.

He's playing in a traditional quartet setting, with Miles' rhythm section behind him, and it sounds nice. It's a good record, if not the most adventurous (to be honest the best track is the one that looks forward, with Jones on drums and Tyner on piano - "Village Blues").