Jazz
Impulse! · 6 November 2026
For years, saxophonist Frank Tiberi went to John Coltrane’s club gigs in New York and Philadelphia with a portable reel-to-reel recorder, a Concertone TR-100, hidden in a satchel and a small microphone under his coat. According to the label, by the time Coltrane died in 1967 Tiberi had more than eighty reels holding over twenty-six hours of music, which he’d studied closely but never made public. “My main purpose of recording him was to get information and harmonic values, so that I could be able to really play myself,” Tiberi recalls.
Impulse! released a selection on 6 November, as part of the celebrations for Coltrane’s centenary, on four LPs, three CDs and digital. There are eleven tracks and nearly three hours of music. It opens with two versions of “Giant Steps” at 226 and 262 beats per minute, and goes on with “Thing in D Flat”, “Lover”, “West 42nd St.”, “Impressions”, an untitled original in F minor, “Satellite”, “Good Bait”, “Resolution”, the longest track at nearly thirty-three minutes, and “It’s Easy to Remember”.
The first of the two versions of “Giant Steps” came out as a taster on 23 September, the day Coltrane would’ve turned a hundred, which is also when the label announced the box.
Text by Aina Torrents