John Coltrane – Ballads (1962/2008)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 32:08 minutes | 687 MB | Genre: Jazz
Official Digital Download – Source: HDTracks.com | Digital Booklet | @ Impulse Records
A breathtaking album by the single most influential saxophone player (and perhaps jazz artist) in history. Featuring his stellar quartet of McCoy Tyner, Elvin Jones, and Jimmy Garrison, BALLADS finds Coltrane at his most pensive and lyrical. The result is one of the great jazz albums of the 20th Century. Absolutely essential.
Throughout John Coltrane’s discography there are a handful of decisive and controversial albums that split his listening camp into factions. Generally, these occur in his later-period works such as Om and Ascension, which push into some pretty heady blowing. As a contrast, Ballads is often criticized as too easy and as too much of a compromise between Coltrane and Impulse! (the two had just entered into the first year of label representation). Seen as an answer to critics who found his work complicated with too many notes and too thin a concept, Ballads has even been accused of being a record that Coltrane didn’t want to make. These conspiracy theories (and there are more) really just get in the way of enjoying a perfectly fine album of Coltrane doing what he always did — exploring new avenues and modes in an inexhaustible search for personal and artistic enlightenment. With Ballads he looks into the warmer side of things, a path he would take with both Johnny Hartman (on John Coltrane & Johnny Hartman) and with Duke Ellington (on Duke Ellington and John Coltrane). Here he lays out for McCoy Tyner mostly, and the results positively shimmer at times. He’s not aggressive, and he’s not outwardly. Instead he’s introspective and at times even predictable, but that is precisely Ballads’ draw.
Tracklist:
01 – Say It (Over And Over Again)
02 – You Don’t Know What Love Is
03 – Too Young To Go Steady
04 – All Or Nothing At All
05 – I Wish I Knew
06 – What’s New
07 – It’s Easy To Remember
08 – Nancy (With The Laughing Face)
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