John Coltrane’s Blue World Reviewed

Source: The Quietus.

Blue World, another previously unissued – and unknown – Coltrane session from 1964, has already become one of the big jazz stories on 2019, and it’s certain to replicate the success of Both Directions. The music was cut as the soundtrack for a new wave-inspired film by the French-Canadian auteur Gilles Groulx called Le chat dans le sac (The Cat in the Bag). Plenty of new wave filmmakers had already turned to jazz greats like Monk, Miles Davis, Art Blakey, and Martial Solal to craft music for their work. Groulx approached Coltrane through a friendship he had with bassist Jimmy Garrison, and Coltrane’s band (Garrison, pianist McCoy Tyner, and drummer Elvin Jones) recorded the music in a single day at Rudy Val Gelder’s studio inn Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey on July 24, 1964, with Groulx in attendance.