When More Becomes Less

John Coltrane's Blue Train (Tone Poet Edition) and the Unresolvable Problem of Alternate Takes

We want it all. Anything wrong with that?

A chunk of the population (at least those who pay for streaming) no doubt believes that where music is concerned, we’re entitled.

We expect access to every scrap of audio that happened at every session associated with a consequential album. From the demo version where the song is just taking shape to the first pass with other musicians to the complete takes that were not quite as magical as the one the artist picked as the keeper.

Key idea to file away there: The artist did the picking.

As 2022 wound to a close with the usual parade of boxed sets and anthologies, I found myself torn by this completist urge. I’m a Neil Young fan; of course I want every scrap from the Harvest harvest. Having devoured so much music by John Coltrane, I felt compelled to preorder the deluxe Tone Poet vinyl edition of Blue Train, which is subtitled The Complete Masters and includes alternate takes and false starts and a trove of wonderful photographs.

As an object d’ art, the Tone Poet edition is tremendous, a reverent accounting of the events of September 15, 1957 at Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in Hackensack.

As art, it’s a nice historical document -- a footnote trail capturing the steps Coltrane and his band took as, take by take, they grappled with the complexities of the compositions.

Yet the set changes little about what musicians and Coltrane obsessives know about Blue Train. Among its revelations, one interesting insight comes under the heading Tactics for Soloing: Coltrane, trumpeter Lee Morgan and (to lesser extent) trombonist Curtis Fuller can all be heard riffling through phrases that are strikingly close to – and occur in the same place in the songform as -- those from solos on the classic master takes. Given the rapid-fire chord sequences of Coltrane originals like “Moment’s Notice” and “Lazy Bird,” it’s inevitable that the soloists would return to material they knew could connect one key center to another; when Coltrane does it, he changes some of the notes and the points of emphasis, creating something different from familiar building blocks.

Certainly part of the lure is hearing how intentional Coltrane was from one line to the next, and one take to the next. A stickler for rhythmic exactitude, he defines the tempo in unambiguous terms, then maintains the pulse while lunging like a ninja assassin or gliding like a shore bird or patiently carving like a surgeon. His torrents of ideas are romantic and mechanically precise in the same instant. They’re fluid and free and also cerebral – and they resonate because they’re rendered with no wasted motion or gestural excess, just a type of superhuman clarity that is his alone.

It’s a wonderful thing to hear more Coltrane, full stop. Especially given that the year is 1957 and this is a crucial moment in his evolution – he’s making what might be considered his first “statement” record, dominated by challenging original post bop material, working out ideas that bloomed later, on records like Giant Steps.

The new alternate versions don’t tarnish Coltrane’s legacy. But they don’t bolster it significantly, either – they don’t radically expand the listener’s appreciation for the Blue Train Coltrane intended for release. That’s largely because Coltrane made the right calls as he was selecting the final tracks and the running sequence. He skipped over performances where his solo, as technically impressive as it might be, veered into the realm of the perfunctory. He avoided versions where his solo might have been genius but the other soloists are heard scrambling just a bit.

These decisions are central to artistic work. Should they be final, and heeded in perpetuity? Neil Young is very much with us; if he wants to put out every surviving scrap of music from the time when he was making Harvest, that’s his right. But when the artist is gone, to what degree are living stakeholders obligated to honor the artist’s original intention?

There is no universal answer to this question. You could argue, as the record producer Aaron Luis Levinson and others have, that the decision about the alternate takes was already made at the time – by the artist, the only one who could possibly do it. As stewards of creative work, do the estates and the record labels have a responsibility to honor those intentions? Or is the responsibility more to history: By not making the additional material available, are the stewards depriving future generations of insights that are elusive on the original release and only obtainable through a more complete take-by-take approach?

It’s one of the conundrums of the reissue boom that’s likely to remain unresolved as long as there’s money to be made – or, more ominously, until fate takes the decision out of human hands, as happened in the vault fire at Universal Music in 2008, in which many priceless master tapes were destroyed.

Until then, maybe it’s progress enough that there’s some conversation circulating around this issue. Because more Deluxe Editions festooned with alternate takes of questionable quality are on the runway, and many more are planned. There may be no resolution – and, inevitably, more overthink -- on the horizon. So, absent better wisdom, let’s give Trane the last word. In the excellent liner notes of the Tone Poet release, journalist Ashley Khan shares a Coltrane quote from a Swedish radio interview from the early 1960s, which was included on the bootleg Miles Davis and John Coltrane. Coltrane was asked to name a record of his that he felt strongly about. He picked the five track original release of Blue Train, then the only available release, saying just this: “It’s a good band on there, you know. It was a good recording.”

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