108 points by gregsadetsky6 days ago | 43 comments
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The tape recorder's manual is available with circuit diagrams [1] and more pictures [2]. I'm not seeing an hf bias oscillator in the circuit unless the manufacturers are being clever. It was half track mono with two speeds, 3.5 ips and 1.875 ips.
Someone did a lot of work to restore these recordings!
Career musician here. My dirty secret is that Coltrane doesn’t resonate with me at all. Not one iota; despite me being a huge jazz fan.
For my taste, his harmonic language tips over the threshold where it goes from being viscerally enjoyable to a more heady, academic exercise. It all feels like a blur to me. Maximal in it’s vocabulary, and yet flat in it’s overall effect. It’s often so dense that it ends up feeling “same-y” and grey to me. Like Schoenberg’s serial music.
Maybe my impression here comes from the fact that by the time I began listening to him in the mid 2000’s an entire school of derivative jazz players had long since developed upon and retroactively made his innovations feel far more common (to no fault of his own). It’s that flavor of jazz where you get the impression that the players are enjoying this way more than the audience. It’s not for me.
Which era Trane are you talking about? The man went through at least 4 major shifts. I’m guessing you are talking about Giant Steps and the later avant garde years?
He did a lot of stuff too which is not dense at all and very approachable - Naima, A Love Supreme, My Favorite Things, Kind of Blue with Miles, a lot more, enjoyable, classic albums.
The harmonic-density complaint maps onto one era more than the rest. Giant Steps is the dense one. The modal work right after it went the other way on purpose, with far fewer chord changes and more room to stretch out. If density is the issue, Ballads or the early modal quartet stuff might land differently.
I disagree. Seinfeld works because everyone copied the jokes. Hardly anyone copied late Coltrane. Players absorbed the Giant Steps changes and the pattern licks, but Ascension still sounds like nothing else. If it had been absorbed, it wouldn't feel academic to Slow_Hand, it'd just sound normal.
> For my taste, his harmonic language tips over the threshold where it goes from being viscerally enjoyable to a more heady, academic exercise. It all feels like a blur to me. Maximal in it’s vocabulary, and yet flat in it’s overall effect. It’s often so dense that it ends up feeling “same-y” and grey to me. Like Schoenberg’s serial music.
I felt exactly like this about Coltrane for years, which I think now was a consequence of primarily being exposed to Coltrane via his work with the first great Miles Davis quintet. Coltrane's albums as band leader come a bit later in his career and he drops a lot of the Art-Tatum-translated-to-sax "sheets of sound" approach in favor of a more lyrical yet still unorthodox style. Any of the late-50s or early-60s albums with Coltrane as band leader and McCoy Tyner on piano are really very good. From my perspective Coltrane had the fire and competitiveness as well as the pop sensibility of a player like Sonny Rollins and the thoroughly studied devotion to "the new thing" of players like Eric Dolphy.
Anyway all that is to say that I heard screeds like this from Coltrane devotees for years and there is really something amazing there. The albums with Coltrane as leader are quite good and worth giving another chance if you're in the mood to listen to some good jazz recordings.
Small nit: Schoenberg's serial music is atonal, but Giant Steps is still tonal, just chords moving in major thirds. If it sounds like a grey blur, IIRC that's more the late stuff like Interstellar Space, which isn't harmonic density at all. Fair enough on taste though.
John Coltrane has a special meaning in jazz for me.
I don't see any other musician creating harmonies as rich as him. Yes, not even Miles Davis, Bill Evans or Tom Jobim (other jazz musicians that I like a lot).
It is surprising how fresh and accessible his music remains today. He never became a top hit, but also never stopped being relevant.
When you say accessible I guess you're excluding his free jazz period. And "rich" harmonies doesn't really mean anything. If you're saying that he stacks more extensions than Bill Evans, that seems hard to quantify.
And the recordist, Frank Tiberi, is a jazz saxophonist and has played with the Woody Herman big band (with whom I saw in the 70s). Also teaches at Berklee College of Music in Boston.
Sometimes these "security" solutions make you wonder whether someone took the joke about a machine without a network connection being the most secure seriously. First visit ever to this domain and:
Sorry, you have been blocked
You are unable to access jazzwise.com
Why have I been blocked?
This website is using a security service to protect itself from online
attacks. The action you just performed triggered the security solution. There
are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a
certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data.
We hit this at our last company. Turned on a WAF's default ruleset, and the support tickets from blocked users showed up about a week later. Nobody on the team ever looked at the block logs. Most small sites set it once and forget it, so the false positives just pile up quietly.
How do they know the playback speed is right on a home deck like that? Consumer machines drifted a lot. Has anyone checked the pitch against the piano or some other reference? A few percent off and you'd never notice, but it'd be a slightly different Coltrane.
Someone did a lot of work to restore these recordings!
[1] https://manualmachine.com/concertone/tr100/8544644-schematic...
[2] https://www.radiomuseum.org/r/transicord_tr_100.html