Crescent
by: John Coltrane
(Impulse!)
"The main thing a musician would like to do is to give a picture to the listener of the many wonderful things he knows of and senses in the universe."
--John Coltrane
Crescent contains five original John Coltrane compositions. A meditative album, Crescent served as the prelude to Coltrane's masterpiece A Love Supreme. Recorded in 1964, Coltrane spent several months preparing for these sessions. His quartet including McCoy Tyner (piano), Jimmy Garrison (bass) and Elvin Jones (drums)recorded 40 minutes of restrained jazz of the highest order on this classic album. These songs, unlike Coltrane's free-form era, retain a structure that evokes a wide scope of lyrical range.
Crescent's reflective mood begins with the title track. The quiet "Wise One" captures Coltrane's somber brilliance in these timeless eight minutes. In the album's original liner notes, Nat Hentoff wrote: "Another index of the variegated moods of Coltrane is the brightly swinging 'Bessie's Blues' in which McCoy Tyner again demonstrates his skills as a crisp, enlivening, economical soloist."
"Lonnie's Lament" emits a lanquid charm as if one were wading in some mystical stream. The final cut, "The Drum Thing" drifts into old African rhythms as drummer Elvin Jones provides a cosmic pulse to Coltrane's mellow music. Crescent contains some of Coltrane's most soulful mojo...
James Calemine
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John Coltrane: Stellar Regions
Coltrane: The Story of a Sound
The Definitive Thelonious Monk
Thelonious Mont: Straight, No Chaser
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