Die Reviews sind inzwischen da … Giovanni Russonello (NYTimes) spricht von einer „detour“, was – ohne die Aufnahme schon zu kennen, ich warte auf die CD, bin ab Samstag einige Tage wer, wird also ev. noch etwas dauern – sicher einleuchtet:
Well, there’s something alluring about this odd little gift of a session, which for Coltrane must have landed somewhere between “just a gig” and “just a favor.” Supporting someone else’s low-budget film, obligingly revisiting items at Groulx’s request that he no longer even played live, the saxophonist sounds as if he was carrying a generous spirit and a relatively easy air into the studio that day.
That isn’t to say the group’s sound is not dark and deep, just as it was on “Crescent,” which the quartet had finished recording only weeks before. In the late 1950s Coltrane defined a swirling, “sheets of sound” approach, and when he did hold long notes he played them in a beaming, silvery tone. By 1964 that had all changed; he was using fewer notes, and each one took up more space, stating its case with subtlety but commanding greater attention.
Even on the relatively brief pieces here — particularly “Like Sonny” and the three versions of “Village Blues” — the quartet doesn’t hurry, and Coltrane plays beautifully carved lines over Jones’s sturdy, polyrhythmic strut. As on “Crescent,” Coltrane’s solos are defined by the weight and steady vision of his playing, as much as by the phrases themselves: a variety of long tones, pendulum-swinging repetitions and zigzagging runs.
Garrison’s bass is turned up rather high, giving the entire session a pulpy, magnetic aura. And the band is having fun. On the two versions of “Naima” — especially Take 1 — Mr. Tyner savors the piece’s strangely colorful harmonies, dancing and skipping in the buoyant style he often brought to ballads (and which he used in live renditions of this tune, the only one on “Blue World” that was still in the quartet’s stage repertoire). It is not as haunting a performance as the original, but it conveys how renewable this piece had become for Coltrane. Written for a soon-to-be ex-wife, it was no longer just a love song; “Naima” lived on as a prayer, and perhaps an issuance of gratitude for a partner who had done so much to help shape and support his creativity.
Like the rest of “Blue World,” these takes on “Naima” might first seem like a light-touch aberration from the work Coltrane was doing in that consequential year. But these performances are, in fact, deeply entrenched in Coltrane’s moment: He’s issuing a warm valediction to his old catalog, full of his characteristic seriousness and serenity, before charging even further ahead.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/25/arts/music/john-coltrane-blue-world-review.html
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Peter Margasak für (The Quietus):
Despite frequent critical frothing about such discoveries, Blue World is neither holy grail nor a missing link, but the performances are terrific and we can hear the exploratory push of the quartet digging deeper into the material than it had just a few years earlier. There’s no missing a heightened sense of melancholia on ‘Naima’, featured in two takes, and a more measured vibe on ‘Like Sonny’, while three takes of ‘Village Blues’ (a tune originally included on the 1962 album Coltrane Jazz) find the saxophonist leaning much harder into the mid-tempo theme, his tone more biting, his phrasing more urgent, and his focus greater.
The title track is technically a new tune, but it borrows the harmonic structure of the standard ‘Out of This World’, which appeared on his 1962 album Coltrane, where the saxophonist was already unleashing furious salvos of notes, spitting out lines unmoored from the tune’s chordal underpinning, but here he goes even further over a more springy rhythm, his probing, galvanic solo anchored by Tyner’s trademark cycling vamps and Garrison’s imperturbable yet investigative patterns, but lifted upward by the explosive Jones. There are clear signs of the heights he’d soon reach on A Love Supreme five months later. Observing such incremental shifts is both fascinating and valuable, and while the performances are all deeply satisfying it remains a tad disappointing that archival projects like this one tend to blot out contemporary work that proves that jazz continues to push forward in the present.
https://thequietus.com/articles/27176-john-coltrane-blue-world-review
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John Fordham für den Guardian:
… Blue World – even if its movie agenda required simpler, and more lyrically explicit delivery than anything else this enthralling band was doing on the road or on record in 1964 – is still Coltrane quartet music to its vibrant core. Commissioned by Canadian director and Coltrane fan Gilles Groulx for a Montreal love story called Le Chat Dans Le Sac, Blue World features two takes of the exquisite 1959 ballad Naima, three of the catchily hooky Village Blues, the Sonny Rollins dedication Like Sonny, a harmonically audacious exploration of the modally stripped-down title track, and a storming ensemble performance on the standout, the mostly-improvised Traneing In. For newcomers to a 20th-century musical giant who transcended genre frontiers, it makes a very attractive sampler. For fans who know that the dark, lamenting Crescent preceded it, and the legendary and hippy-hypnotising A Love Supreme followed, it’s a fascinating hybrid of Coltrane’s song-based earlier methods, and his incandescently devotional late period.
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/sep/27/john-coltrane-blue-world-review
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Nate Chinen (Pitchfork) schreibt über das Quartett 1964: „one of the most compelling bands in jazz history, at an unmistakable apex of cohesion“ – und das allein ist schon ein Grund, warum ich die Scheibe unbedingt hören will. Eine weitere Session der besten Jazzband aller Zeiten, entstanden zwischen den zwei besten Jazzalben aller Zeiten … klar kann man das schlechtreden, aber bei mir obsiegt die Neugierde, keine Frage! Und das hier macht doch mächtig Lust drauf, die Aufnahme auch zu hören:
But it would be foolish to shrug off Blue World as yet more product off the archival assembly line. For any admirer of Coltrane, a saxophonist-composer-bandleader who embodied so much in the 1960s—deep mystery, spiritual fervor, hurtling momentum, searching humility—it’s a windfall worth greeting with fresh astonishment, before considering a handful of questions.
So, in that spirit: Blue World offers a glimpse of the John Coltrane Quartet in a state of relaxed assurance, during the same span of time that would yield two landmarks, Crescent and A Love Supreme. Recorded at Van Gelder Studios on June 24, 1964, it’s a small assortment of songs from earlier in Coltrane’s career, refashioned by the evolving language of the band. And to a man—Coltrane on tenor saxophone, McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass, Elvin Jones on drums—these musicians seem almost to luxuriate in the dark modal hum and polyrhythmic pull that had already become their trademark. They sound unburdened, as if they have no agenda to advance, and nothing to prove.
Chinen bespricht im folgenden die Stücke einzeln und ausführlich, die ganze Rezension gibt es hier:
https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/john-coltrane-blue-world/
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"Don't play what the public want. You play what you want and let the public pick up on what you doin' -- even if it take them fifteen, twenty years." (Thelonious Monk) | Meine Sendungen auf Radio StoneFM: gypsy goes jazz, #151: Neuheiten aus dem Archiv – 09.04., 22:00 | Slow Drive to South Africa, #8: tba | No Problem Saloon, #30: tba