Favorite John Coltrane era on record?

[Peter Friedman]

My favorite would be the Prestige period, including Blue Train on Blue Note. 

I also like a number of his Atlantic recordings, but most of the Impulse sessions are not to my taste.

[Pim]

On 9/7/2023 at 7:09 PM, JSngry said:

My favorite YEAR would be 1965, including all the live things that are out there. But that's not an era, that's just one year and the apex/culmination of a band. 

My favorite RECORD would be Interstellar Space. But that's not an era, that's one day that ended up being a nearly-overwhelming culmination/summary of an entire lifetime.

But the guys been dead 50+ years now, it's all been one story, and we know not just how it ends, but how it got there pretty much every step of the way. For me, that overrides the notion of having just one "favorite" in the sense of "desert island". Can't have a favorite chapter in a great novel, can you? 

That's how I see it anyway. 

 

Well said. His style is so different but the quality so consistently high it’s hard to talk about favorites.

1965 was a hell of a year: Ascenscion, Transition, Sun Ship, the Half Note stuff, Meditations etc etc 

[Gheorghe]

9 hours ago, Peter Friedman said:

My favorite would be the Prestige period, including Blue Train on Blue Note. 

I also like a number of his Atlantic recordings, but most of the Impulse sessions are not to my taste.

From that period of the late 50´s I enjoy mostly Blue Trane on BN, since it has Philly Joe Jones on drums. 

The Prestige albums .....I mostly miss a more powerful drummer. Most of them have Art Taylor, who is okay but does not reach the level of Philly J.J., Elvin Jones.
On Atlantic I like very much "The Avantgarde" with Don Cherry .......that´s a very very fine album, very interesting to have Trane with the Ornette Coleman-boys (Cherry, Haden , Blackwell).