JOHN COLTRANE — Transition (review)

JOHN COLTRANE — Transition album cover Album · 1970 · Avant-Garde Jazz Buy this album from MMA partners
4/5 ·
Sean Trane
Another one of these fantastic posthumous release (of 72, I believe), Transition is definitely a long-lost sister to the famed Love Supreme album as it was recorded in the spring of 65 (which not that close to ALS, I’ll agree), but still featuring the excellent first quartet with Tyner. Holding just three tracks, Transition consist mainly of the excellent title track and the sidelong 5-movements suite, entitled just that: Suite.

Just as your stylus hits the black wax, you’ll immediately get the “classic Trane” fever, where McCoy, Elvin and Jimmy lay down the red carpet for the soaring John, at the top of his form, soaring like an eagle over the grandiose landscape depicted by Tyner’s piano tight chords. This 15-mins+ extravaganza ends in an awesome fashion over some thrilling Tyner chords, ever so reminiscent of the mythic album it evokes transitioning from. Stuck between the two monster tracks mentioned above, the shorter (everything being relative) Dear Lord track is often overlooked, partly because it’s stylistically much older than its siblings, but it does kind of reflect Trane’s more spiritual quest, but whatever it lacks the energy, it makes up in sensitivity, but it is kind of out of context, and in contradiction with the album’s title.

On the flipside, the superlative Suite kinds of dwarfs the posthumous release, but be ready to find a much more advanced state of mind, even if the quartet starts off an ALS mood, it doesn’t last long before they challenge the boundaries of your sanity, as Trane definitely wanders quite far away from the dissonance frontier. Pushed ever so further down the line by Tyner’s piano, Trane just glides smoothly in the troposphere, toying away with Apollo and Soyuz objects of the times, playing with their balls, and then hoofing them in the nuts. Unfortunately, the overlong Garrison solo breaks the momentum (Elvin’s is much more concise), but once over with, Trane comes back to overwhelm your flayed-alive senses to cap off the album in an ALS–Meditations manner. Trane’s general crescendo and ascension to total intensity and suspense is simply unstoppable and implacable. Simply awesome. Chills down my spine as Tyner’s closing chords ring away in my mind for more than a few minutes after the diamond lifted away from the wax.

I simply can’t speak highly enough of such a flawed but fantastic posthumous release, but this is exactly the typical artefact and perfect trial-exhibit A to show just how great Trane was way above the pack, with only Mingus to accompany him to a certain altitude.

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