Coltrane in the 1950s: Late Bloomer

In May 1956, when Sonny Rollins and guest John Coltrane locked horns on the friendly throwdown “Tenor Madness,” Coltrane was 29, and Rollins four years his junior. But at this point in their careers, Sonny had the jackrabbit head start. He’d been recording under his own name since 1951, and was much admired; Coltrane hadn’t yet made a record of his own.

It’s easy to forget, sometimes, Coltrane wasn’t always lionized; some reviewers of his early work with Miles Davis‘s quintet had no ears for his eccentricities. In the end, playing in that band would make Coltrane’s reputation. But Miles had hired him only because Rollins had turned the gig down.

Traits that made Coltrane sound funny or awkward to skeptics – the hard, sanded and shellacked tone, a compulsion to squeeze in an awful lot of notes over every passing chord – are among the very things we celebrate as quintessentially Coltrane now. After five decades of his endlessly repackaged recordings, and saxophonists whose sounds and concepts are heavily derived from his, it can be hard to relate to a time when he wasn’t beloved.

To be sure, he’d get his due soon enough. You can’t miss why, listening to Side Steps – Concord’s second and final roundup of sides he cut as a sideman at Prestige, between May 1956 and January ’58, with leaders including pianists Elmo Hope, Mal Waldron and Red Garland and tuba wiz Ray Draper He’s got that sound: busy but eerily precise. His lightning-bolt runs are infused with abundant, glad-to-be-alive feeling: what jazz musician conveys uplift more than Coltrane? (All those upward-reaching, aspirational lines help). And, even early on, he had a knack for balancing intricate, rapid, virtuosic passages with triumphant long tones that give listeners a moment to catch their breath.

That distinctive sound makes him easy to pick out even on the compilation’s opening Elmo Hope album (aptly named Informal Jazz), with fellow tenor Hank Mobley. Coltrane’s even a cinch to spot on the Gene Ammons sessions that close the set, playing a borrowed alto sax, quite deliberate in his typical tenor style – as on “Ammon Joy” at 6:43, or batting cleanup in slow ballad mode on “It Might As Well Be Spring.” (The interested can riddle out all the session and personnel details here.

Coltrane had in fact started out on alto, had been playing it when founding bebopper Dizzy Gillespie hired him for his big band in 1949. (He switched to tenor two years later, for a Dizzy small group.) Then Trane joined Duke Ellington altoist Johnny Hodges, who had a peerless sound and sizzling presence as a soloist. “The first time I really paid attention to Coltrane was in that band,” sainted New York superfan Irving Stone once said, “because he knew how to make an entrance like Johnny Hodges.”

That gets to the nub of it: the immediate, commanding presence of his sound. Like Hodges, Coltrane has certain mannerisms that let you identify him immediately. But where Hodges ‘slithery tics could sound piquantly archaic, Coltrane was all soaring modernism, sleek as a glass skyscraper. And his firing off a full quiver of scalar runs over any chord helped lay the foundation for scale-oriented modal jazz. (Kind of Blue, epic year 1959, yadda yadda yadda.)

Self-starter Coltrane was particularly valuable on the quickie dates that make up much of this set. He’s consistently on. During the period in question narcotics were a scourge in the musicians ‘community – Coltrane himself would kick heroin in 1957 – and Prestige specialized in unrehearsed, low-overhead sessions populated by musicians constantly in need of cash. The label has been justly attacked for that exploitative policy, but Mal Waldron, de facto music director on many of those dates, including three sessions here, would laugh about it all 40 years later: “Those were not painful days. You just thought about music, got high, and played. It was a complete dream, and a big school.”

Some dates sound better prepped. The Red Garland quintet on discs three and four benefits from stable personnel: Donald Byrd on trumpet, Jamil Nasser on bass and Art Taylor on drums.

The most indelible session here is a one-shot, and the one date where Coltrane is the lone horn: 1956′s Mating Call by composer/pianist Tadd Dameron, who was allied with the boppers but never all the way in their tent. (Philly Joe Jones shimmers at the traps; John Simmons walks the bass.) Tadd’s medium ballad “Soultrane” shows what the tenor saxophonist learned from Hodges about making an instrumental line sing. And with his strong sound in all registers, Coltrane animates the plummeting broken chord that kicks off “On a Misty Night.” Makes you wonder if Thelonious Monk had heard Mating Call before he hired Coltrane for his own quartet the following year: the saxophonist sure could make a not-quite-bop pianist’s melodies come alive.