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An uncommon, visually striking - if oddly off-key - memento of a profound evolutionary shift in the career of the one of the great originators of jazz. Late in September 1965, Coltrane was booked for a week-long residency at the Seattle club The Penthouse with his classic quartet, which featured the pianist McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison on bass, and the drummer Elvin Jones. On an evidently thought-through afterthought, he added two friends whom he had met up with in San Francisco: Sun Ra protégé Pharaoh Sanders on tenor, and the multi-reeds and bass experimentalist Donald Rafael Garrett. This decision marked a controversial transition in his work: a move into the realm of free-blowing and spiritual striving that defined his later career. The session was recorded, only being released some six years later as an Impulse! double set, which allows an informed, and divisive, debate on the music produced to continue. In their authoritative Penguin Guide, Cook and Morton drily speculate as to whether Seattle's 1980s grunge movement represented the "genetic fall-out" from Coltrane's visit to Washington State ten years earlier, while awarding the album ***(*). Allmusic's Scott Yanow reaches for "atonal. and often very violent", before concluding, "this is innovative and difficult music", while the Coltrane biographer Bill Cole asserts that "this music is unquestionably at the ritual level in terms of its function". As to Coltrane's long-time collaborators, Garrison adapted to the new ethos - "drones in the background" (Yanow) - later recording with Alice Coltrane, Ornette Coleman and Archie Shepp, while Tyner - "plays manfully. but this is no longer his music" (Cook and Morton). Elvin Jones - "once so ubiquitously evident, has dropped into the shadows" (ibid.) - left Coltrane in January 1966. On leaving, Jones remarked that "I couldn't hear what I was doing. all I could hear was a bunch of noise". We have been unable to trace another example of this poster, which in hindsight, with its Fiestaware pallet and kookie sixties lettering, seems almost impossibly at odds with the musical transformation it unwittingly announced. Nonetheless, and almost despite itself, it strongly evokes the moment. Richard Cook & Brian Morton, The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings, eighth edition, 2006. Poster (572 x 380 mm), colour printed in purple and pale orange on medium cardstock. A little toned verso, but overall very good.
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