1. Blue Train
2. Moment's Notice
3. Locomotion
4. I'm Old Fashioned - John Coltrane, Kern, Jerome
5. Lazy Bird
6. Blue Train
7. Lazy Bird
Amazon.com essential recording
Blue Train is one of those ineffable sound recordings that actually seems to capture a moment of perfect artistry. Coltrane was in the midst of a Prestige recording contract but was able to honor a previous commitment to Blue Note and release this one album. With four Coltrane originals, including the haunting theme of the title track, and one standard, this recording showed Coltrane was becoming the complete package: player, composer, and bandleader. What distinguishes this session from the Prestige dates of the same time is the easy, relaxed, and obviously well-rehearsed playing of the group, and the usual masterful recording by Rudy van Gelder. This enhanced CD-ROM also features two alternate takes. The well-designed multimedia elements, including musician interviews and pictures from the famous van Gelder studio, round this stellar session into an experience that informs and delights over and over. --Michael Monhart
Amazon.com
The tenor sax giant had signed with another label when he embarked on this one-off date for Blue Note, an excursion that paid off with an enduring modern jazz masterpiece. Boasting volley after volley of smart soloing and intuitively swinging rhythm work, Blue Train is a joy, from the coolly precise ensemble entry on the opening title piece through the set's balance of elegant hard bop conversations and smooth downshifts into ballads. John Coltrane wrote four originals for the date, all of them now regarded as standards, and assembled a rhythm section including pianist Kenny Drew, Miles Davis's rhythm section of bassist Paul Chambers and drummer Philly Joe Jones, and trumpeter Lee Morgan and trombonist Curtis Fuller, both recent Blue Note recruits. Coltrane's signature sound, now fully developed but still hewing more to familiar blues and chromatic harmonies than his later modalities, is confident and expansive, and his partners respond vividly throughout. --Sam Sutherland
Album Description
John Coltrane's most important and best selling album after "A Love Supreme", Blue Train gets with Rudy Van Gelder for a 24-bit mastering treatment. This edition features the complete session with alternate takes included. JOHN COLTRANE: Tenor Saxophone
LEE MORGAN: Trumpet
CURTIS FULLER: Trombone
KENNY DREW: Piano
PAUL CHAMBERS: Bass
PHILLY JOE JONES: Drums
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Blue Train
- Audio CD: 0 pages (1997-04-01)
- Publisher: Blue Note Records
- Label: Blue Note Records
- Format: Enhanced, Original recording reissued, Original recording remastered
- Studio: Blue Note Records
- Average Customer Review:
 based on 78 reviews
- Sales Rank in Music: #4388
Avg. Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
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Summary: All Aboard The Blue Train! 2008-11-30
Comment: This is a classic jazz recording without a doubt in my mind. If anyone gave this a bad review they're clearly not listening hard enough, because this is the only album that I really dug. Perhaps it was his choice of sidemen: Lee Morgan on trumpet, Curtis Fuller on trombone, Kenny Drew on piano, Paul Chambers on bass, and Philly Joe Jones on drums, I'm not sure, but all I know is this album is the most swinging in Coltrane's discography, although "Giant Steps" was pretty good as well, but I always enjoyed hearing Coltrane with other horn players. His tone on this record was by far the best it ever sounded.
Anyone interested in hearing Coltrane, then pick this album up first! You won't be sorry.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
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Summary: Blue Trane is a lesson in Understanding not just the Art of the Blues, but art period 2008-11-23
Comment: Art is challenging because there are purposely only a few "rules of the road" and often no trail of clues left for the uninitiated to find his way around or especially to find his way into the artist's head, which is often where he needs to be in order to understand anything -- not to mention, in order to understand what was intended. Lucky for the uninitiated, there is almost always an ascending ladder of understanding with multiple open doors at each rung of the ladder for appreciation and enjoyment -- even when understanding is elusive (or even completely closed off). As well, there are invariably multiple routes to meanings, feelings and even to the transcendental itself. That is to say it is entirely possible to make the artistic journey and many of the necessary connections without any artistic understanding whatsoever. The mind is a powerful instrument, that often can cut through intellectual complexity and just levitate to other worlds of meaning without any independent effort, and without "passing Go." However, to do so without full understanding makes life much less interesting, certainly less rich, and always much less fulfilling. The quest for understanding is life itself.
Some artists like Theolonius Monk, send out complex signals through their music and could care less whether the message is received or not. Others like Lionel Hampton is concerned about nothing else. Omar Khayyam's poems for instance all seem to have a simple motif about how fleeting life is and about how enjoyment for the moment is the only reality, so drink up. But then he springs on us the idea that "God plays tricks:" for the ultimate truth is that the only reality is death itself: In a hundred ways he tells us (with tricks of verse) that real men face death straight up. Period. Painters are notorious for feeling cramped by modes of expressions such as by a canvas, by different paints, by the dimensionality of space, time and distance, by colors, texture, and form and, by structure even more generally. Most times the artist is unwittingly playing games with himself as Bach does with his Fugues: the message is often in the pattern, in the riff, in the mood, even in the smell in the air.
Why they do this is not always clear? But a good guess is that they are often trying to stretch their art form, trying (sometimes desperately as is the case with Coltrane here) to remove conventional strictures, trying to get outside of themselves and outside of their instruments, struggling to make new connecting across previously forbidden barriers and into new modalities: that is, trying to move across and beyond conventional dimensions, grasping to reach the transcendental state, trying to transform old modalities into new ones, and for any of a thousand other reasons. The ultimate goal however is that all roads lead to that elusive inner self, the soul.
In music this quest to reach the transcendental state through cross-modality can reach insane proportions, as is the case with Theolonious Monk, whose exquisite rhythms and angular chords border on the edge of both insanity and cacophony. Monk didn't care about either. He always "knows" where he is headed, even if no one else does! Period. Some musicians like Miles Davis, in an indirect route to the soul, want to use their horns to paint pictures with notes. Some Painters like Wassily Kandinsky, do the reverse in seeking to make the canvas speak to the ear through form. Well, of course there are limits to what can be done cross-modally, but equally, there is also a place where the search is endless, and it is in the quest for trying to touch the soul: reaching for the transcendental is the same as reaching for the infinite.
John Coltrane in this incredible album (under a pseudo name and for another recording company) is a study in how to use "sound" to reach for the soul, the transcendental, the infinite. This album, Blue Trane, is lesson #1 enroute to linking the Blues form to the transcendental, that is to say to the soul. It presages what was to come in Coltrane's "A Love Supreme." It is a clear, unadorned lesson in higher musical understanding. There is earthiness, incandescent fire, saxophone wailing and honking, intricate beauty, violent torment, soulful vamps and riffs, a virtual musical potpourri of expressive forms. As always, Trane leaves everything on the table. No one who is trying to understand him will be left unsatisfied no matter what rung of the ladder you may be. But even for those who do not even try to understand him, there is meaning here. Its like the Sisters in the Baptist Church who "get Happy" and resolve all their fights with their demons in a transcendental paroxysm of "jumping and shouting," and then they faint, and there is peace between them and their God.We all bask in their glow. We know instinctively that something important has just happened. The same is true here. Understanding is helpful but not necessary.
Here Trane too attempts to get inside the "bone marrow" of the blues and then he tries to turn it inside out and wring every ounce of meaning out of it. He jumps up and down as if he is beating a rug. When he finishes there is peace, incandescent light, a quiet flow that connects the Blues to the larger universe. The challenge has been met; it is over, it has been overcome. There is peace all over the musical world and the Blues will never be the same again. This is the best album in all of Jazz. Period. 1000 stars.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
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Summary: A review addressed to the newcomer 2008-09-28
Comment: If you know Coltrane, you know this record.
If you don't know Coltrane, either this or his Atlantic record "Giant Steps" is, I think, an ideal place to begin.
"Giant Steps" is the more historically important of the two records - for its contribution to the jazz songbook almost as much as the fresh peak it represented in Coltrane's development. And the fact that each song has a memorable tune that you can whistle to yourself makes it very easy to become familiar with.
But there are extra-musical attractions to jazz as well - which need not be condescended to. This is a more archetypally "jazzy" record than "Giant Steps". [You may already know that it being a product of the Blue Note label has a lot to do with that.] You would more readily pick it as the soundtrack to a scene set in a swinging jazz club. It would look more immediately cool on your record shelf - if people had record shelves any more.
And I bet your feet will be tapping. Give it a try!
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
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Summary: Blue Train 2008-07-16
Comment: John Coltrane-Blue Train *****
When I first heard the album Blue Train I played the title cut eight times before I played the rest of the album; Then I proceeded to play the album over and over and over again. The title piece from this land mark album is like nothing I had ever heard before and nothing I have heard since. While not half as adventurous as he would soon become and not as technically efficient as some of Coltrane's other work, 'Blue Train' is a piece unto itself. Maybe because it is none of those things is why it is so stunning to me. The piece rolls along like a train as the title suggest. The blues number is among Coltrane's most inspired pieces in my book.
'Moments Notice' 'Locomotion' and the restrained power of 'Lazy Bird' serve as some of Coltrane's greatest original compositions. Finding him treading the waters of his future here, especially on 'Locomotion.' 'I'm Old Fashioned' is the only non Coltrane original but as with all his readings of classics the man managed to make this uniquely his own.
The Trumpet work from Lee Morgan here is some of my favorite trumpet playing outside of Miles. Fuller's trombone is less prominent through out the album, only where really needed which adds for great texture and feel. But maybe most amazing is the key work from Kenny Drew. I had never heard of him before this record but was sure to check out anything he played on after; Let me tell you this man is one of the truly underrated players in jazz history.
Blue Train is stunning, and beautiful. For anyone interested in Coltrane I would recommend this as a great place to start. For those already with a collection, it shouldn't be with out Blue Train.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
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Summary: He needs no cushion - he has his launchpad 2008-05-12
Comment: Review of CD by John Coltrane - Blue Train
Kevin Celebi
If there were a list of the ten jazz albums that non-jazz listeners own, "Blue Train" would be number three behind Kind of Blue and Time Out. And there's a reason for that - catchy title tune, no if's or but's about it. The opening melody is memorable, singable, and is the kind of song that never leaves your mind since you heard it at age four. After the melody statement and Coltrane's torrid flights to the seventh circle of the universe, the rest, to non-jazz listeners, is the same, but to jazz aficionados, it leads us into the land of Gods.
"Blue Train" is an album of four songs that become instant jazz standards along with a shockingly caressing treatment of a standard into a ballad, filled with great musical statements; it is such a pity that Alfred Lion and John Coltrane signed a deal for only one record, knowing how much quality and quantity Blue Note Records provoked from its artists. The improvisations are remarkably fair and, yes, the sole criticism that you've heard is true: Coltrane blows his bandmates away and deals no apologies for doing so.
The Blue Train Sextet (did they tour as the BTS?) was equipped with powerful horn soloists and a rhythm section very well acquainted with the art of swing. Lee Morgan, playing on his beloved bent-up Dizzy-style horn, played some of the most incredible solos, from the standpoint of virtuosity and musical taste, of his career (matched only by his brilliance on Moanin' and The Sidewinder). Coltrane, playing like an unchained animal released from the haven of his drug recovery bedroom, simply doesn't play a note that isn't remarkably fair. Curtis Fuller, the young upstart trombonist from Detroit, plays fair musical statements as well, pleasing with full vibrato and wise rhythmic decisions. The lamentably underrated Kenny Drew, aside from generously volunteering to try to either keep up with Coltrane or hold the fort during his improvisations, also offers elegant solos characterized by a merry touch. Don't ever forget Paul Chambers, probably jazz's best timekeeper. Philly Joe Jones, the restless master of the drum kit, was still at the peak of his powers in Miles Davis' quintet and his playing on this record shows why. The sextet is robust and relentless, and they could have remained in the studio and recorded fifty songs if they had wanted to, rather than just five.
"Blue Train" opens the album in the "listen to me, I'm Blue Train" fashion, ominous diminished whole tone chords mysteriously opening the way, before the straight four groove of the classic blues serve as the launching pad for Trane's jump into the stratosphere. Trane most likely filled his glass (and his horn?) with wine before the tune, because the brilliance of his solo could have only been provided by a drunken Trane (note that he didn't actually get drunk at this session - it's simply a suggestion for the reason of why he is able to play so well). Nearly his entire solo is double-timed, with not a single note left out, such rhythmic perfection. Harmonically speaking, he climbs all over the Eb dominant scale, but when the turnaround approaches, he gobbles the tri-tone substitution right up and climbs all over that, too (mainly, an A7 substitution leading to an Ab7). I hate to say it, as the other sidemen have been criticized in "Blue Note Records: A Biography" for "simply, just playing the blues" on their solos, but that is essentially what they do. But just to say that they only play the blues is not doing their work justice - Morgan explodes into a frenzy of a chorus of straight-up sixteenth notes, for instance, and Fuller milks the blues scale for all it has in the timbre of a trombone. The entire song is a romp through the blues with harmonic edge and ensemble power.
"Moment's Notice," obviously, is emblematic of Trane's love for the alchemy of chord changes and looks forward to his landmark Trane changes. However, it is also rhythmically appealing and its pedal point builds up tension, joy, and, yet again, another base for Trane to explode to the rim for another shattering dunk (sorry, I'm running out of metaphors for his boiling solos). In his improvisation, Trane both sounds youthful and young, plowing right through the changes with ferventness, and old, displaying such harmonic wizardry that he could be the man who devised jazz himself. Fuller struggles through his solo (but, hey, at least his struggles gave the song its title), and Morgan does all he can with the song's ridiculously difficult structure with his Clifford Brown tricks. Another added bonus is some arco work by Mr. PC.
"Locomotion" is another foray into, how about this, the blues. The twist is the chromatically descending bridge to make things interesting. Trane must have been drunk again (or just possessed) for his solo on this one, as his technical fluency propels him right through his chord changes, and his combination of bebop lines and tri-tone substitutions with flights through the avant-garde gives the song its sheen - the best part is that every note that he hangs onto has a bit of vibrato for extra measure. Lee Morgan's eight-bar break entrance to his solo was heralded by Mark Levine as "possibly the best break in jazz improvisation to be recorded." Like I said, the 19-year old Morgan brought his fiery young heart to the studio and left nothing behind, and he is recorded particularly well, with some of his higher notes being mixed with some reverb to add emphasis.
"I'm Old Fashioned" isn't played as much as it should be, but on Blue Train, it's full of beautiful song. Trane was very much "sober" for his rendition of the melody, embellishing it with beautiful grace notes and Kenny Drew's Bud Powell-like accompaniment filling the song's cup with honey. This is Fuller's chance to shine, as the trombone sounds perfect in the intimate, slowed-down settings of the jazz ballad, and Fuller's full-bodied tone sounds wonderful and he even has some fun quoting "My Funny Valentine." However, the show is stolen by none other than Lee Morgan, who plays a solo that is so melodic that I thought it was perhaps another melody statement, or written down. He plays the last eight bars of the melody with his sassy embellishments, and delicately ends the song on its major chord, joined by the entire ensemble (including more arco Paul Chambers).
As if Lee Morgan was going to relinquish the spotlight that he just stole, he keeps it by stating the melody to "Lazy Bird" and then guns into the first solo. "Lazy Bird" is a ii-V7-I based melody that is the closest to bebop you'll get in this album, and Morgan has fun blazing his bop lines all over its chordal structure. As for Trane, he was drunk again, but this time drunk with golden wine, playing his best solo of the entire record. Listen to his bop lines (sounding like Charlie Parker slowed down and an octave below), his intervallic leaps, his splashes into the high register, and his gorgeous vibrato. If there was a way to end this album properly and on a relaxing (but not anticlimactic) plateau, Lazy Bird was the answer.
Of course, we live in the 21st century, so the original album is never enough. "The Ultimate Blue Train" (I thought it was ultimate enough already) provides alternate takes of the first and last tunes, as well as being loadable into computers for an interview with a rather golden-aged Fuller. Since this is John Coltrane in question, and one that was arguably intoxicated in the studio, you'll want to hear these alternate takes for his improvisations.
And where did he get his wine? From the ancient casks of the previously mentioned Gods? We'll never know, but we'll always be able to rise and drink the beauty of Blue Train ourselves. Maybe the non-jazz listeners will enjoy it for its faring forth to their ears as an irresistible collection of melody and "cool music," but to me as a jazz musician, I'll never forget its kindling of my love for chordal brilliance, its improvisations bringing rise to the magic sun.
kc
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