General Information The John Coltrane Reference Biography Discography News Coltrane FirstHand Frequently Asked Questions Live at the Village Vanguard

 Overview

  This section of The WildPlace contains a great deal of information about the great saxophonist John Coltrane (1926-1967). The table above lists the major subsections, which are described briefly below:

• The John Coltrane Reference.
  Details about the just-released Coltrane chronology/discography.
• Biography.
  A far too brief sketch of the details of Coltrane's life.
• Discography.
  An abbreviated version of the last half of The Recordings of John Coltrane: A Discography, with all the updates. The balance of the discography (and indices) will make it online someday, I hope...
• News.
  News items from far and wide, of some relevance to the legacy of John Coltrane.
• Coltrane FirstHand.
  A neat section which grew out of contributions to the John Coltrane List, which preserves individual recollections of Coltrane in performance.
• Frequently Asked Questions.
  A group of responses to some questions which seems to reoccur regularly.
• Live at the Village Vanguard.
  When the box set first came out in 1997 I put together this page with details on the set. I've kept it online for the information it contains about those exceptional performances.

Etcetera...
Although you won't find my reminiscences in the Coltrane FirstHand section (right time, wrong place), I’ve nonetheless been fortunate enough to have had a number of opportunities to work with his music. I compiled and published what became the standard John Coltrane discography in the late seventies (the starting point for the comprehensive 1995 work compiled by Yasuhiro Fujioka) and have written liner notes for a number of Coltrane releases over the past two decades. I also contributed to Carl Woideck's John Coltrane Companion in 1998, among other publications.

 I was most fortunate in 1997 to have the chance to write notes for the four-CD box set of the complete recordings of John Coltrane at the Village Vanguard (1961). For of you with questions about the set, click here for details preserved from the initial release.  The Impulse label has since become a part of the Verve Music Group, and they are still sorting things out. You can check out the current state of their Coltrane information at Impulserecords.com. I might also direct you (somewhat immodestly) to two of their pages which display the liner notes I wrote for the last couple of Coltrane releases:

• Living Space, released 3/10/98, and
• Live at the Village Vanguard - The Master Takes, released 2/24/98

You won't find anything about Coltrane at the Atlantic WEB page, but it doesn't really matter; everything Coltrane recorded for Atlantic is in the box set from Rhino, and there are full details at The Heavyweight Champion page, including Lewis Porter's thorough notes.