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Previously unheard recordings of John Coltrane, captured by Frank Tiberi

108 points · 42 comments · gregsadetsky

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diego_moita · 1790533985 · focus · HN ↗
John Coltrane has a special meaning in jazz for me.
I don't see any other musician creating harmonies as rich as him. Yes, not even Miles Davis, Bill Evans or Tom Jobim (other jazz musicians that I like a lot).
It is surprising how fresh and accessible his music remains today. He never became a top hit, but also never stopped being relevant.
1. breezybottom · 1790536535 · focus · HN ↗
  When you say accessible I guess you're excluding his free jazz period. And "rich" harmonies doesn't really mean anything. If you're saying that he stacks more extensions than Bill Evans, that seems hard to quantify.
  1. viccis · 1790544852 · focus · HN ↗
    >And "rich" harmonies doesn't really mean anything.
    I can't even begin to comprehend how you can't understand that someone can write harmonically rich music.
    breezybottom · 1790564006 · focus · HN ↗
    That's still not a definition, that's just you saying how you feel about it.
    viccis · 1790620428 · focus · HN ↗
    Rich can easily be given with an example rather than purely aesthetics. Coltrane introduced more advanced harmonic movement via "Coltrane changes" as one example. It had been done in one-off cases in classical music (like just about anything), and occasionally in show tunes (Have You Met Miss Jones) but Coltrane was the first to isolate the specific pattern and make it into a reusable substitution technique to reharmonize other tunes.
    Aside from that, Coltrane's contribution to modal jazz is significant. Though not singularly from him (or anyone else), he contributed quite a few standards and recordings to a style that was a pretty radical and rich departure from functional harmony. And if you don't consider the harmonic system this resides in (Russell's LCC is a common one used to analyze it) as "rich" then I think you might be too harsh a critic.
    breezybottom · 1790639262 · focus · HN ↗
    Modal harmony is the definition of rich? That seems like literally the opposite. It's often vamping on single chords.
    viccis · 1790660812 · focus · HN ↗
    Absolutely. The definition of "harmony" doesn't begin and end with functional harmony.
    breezybottom · 1790780357 · focus · HN ↗
    It doesn't, but almost any word other than rich would be better. Sparse, for example.
    viccis · 1791008751 · focus · HN ↗
    Chord scale theory is born out of modal harmony. No idea what you're talking about lmao
ViktorRay · 1790534360 · focus · HN ↗
<a href="https://youtu.be/YjRbmtrDJI4" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/YjRbmtrDJI4
For those of you who don’t know…John Coltrane is a legend in jazz music. Posted a YouTube link to an excellent work of his above.
1. aworks · 1790534571 · focus · HN ↗
  And the recordist, Frank Tiberi, is a jazz saxophonist and has played with the Woody Herman big band (with whom I saw in the 70s). Also teaches at Berklee College of Music in Boston.
dbalatero · 1790534975 · focus · HN ↗
I picked a hell of a day to stop impulse shopping.
2b3a51 · 1790540398 · focus · HN ↗
The tape recorder's manual is available with circuit diagrams [1] and more pictures [2]. I'm not seeing an hf bias oscillator in the circuit unless the manufacturers are being clever. It was half track mono with two speeds, 3.5 ips and 1.875 ips.
Someone did a lot of work to restore these recordings!
[1] <a href="https://manualmachine.com/concertone/tr100/8544644-schematic/" rel="nofollow">https://manualmachine.com/concertone/tr100/8544644-schematic...
[2] <a href="https://www.radiomuseum.org/r/transicord_tr_100.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.radiomuseum.org/r/transicord_tr_100.html
1. gregsadetsky · 1790549467 · focus · HN ↗
  Could you explain more? I could ask an LLM but I find it friendlier to ask you, ha! If you don't mind of course.
  What does a bias oscillator do that would help, and is the ips speed slow ie it's a low "resolution" (so to speak) analog recording?
  1. JKCalhoun · 1790561471 · focus · HN ↗
    Inches per second… the larger number is of course better, as higher frequencies require a higher tape speed to faithfully capture. Higher-end reel to reel recorders could do 7.5 i.p.s. and 15… to give you an idea what high end would look like.
    Anyway, rather than call it "low resolution", loss of high-frequencies (low pass) is closer to the mark.
    2b3a51 · 1790613342 · focus · HN ↗
    Was at work today so late in. To add to JKCalhoun's post, magnetic recording is pretty non-linear with a marked threshold. So a 'bias' signal strong enough to overcome the threshold was added to the current from the amplifier and passed through the recording head. That extra signal could be just a dc current as JKCalhoun mentioned, or a high frequency (mid tens of KHz, well above human hearing) current. See [1] for the details. I think that the 'dc rumble' from the magnetic grain is audible on the trailer recording in the OA.
    The microphone in the OA pictures looks pretty basic as well, and perhaps intended for voice recording mainly. So we have limited high frequencies from comparatively slow tape speed, rumble from the dc bias, and a microphone that perhaps isn't catching low frequencies.
2. bsteinbach · 1790561849 · focus · HN ↗
  Indeed, no hf oscillator, instead it looks like it uses DC bias via R12. It's also neat to see all the circuitry re-used identically for amplifying the tape in playback, or amplifying the microphone input to record to tape. Was that a standard and obvious plan for the engineers of the time?
  I'm also curious if R22, the thermistor, would have been just for thermal protection, or if it was actually used to set the operating point for the output transistors in normal operation? Would it have switched on loud and angry before the transistors warmed up and the bias point cooled down, the opposite of a tube amp?
  1. dn3500 · 1790596543 · focus · HN ↗
    I am not familiar with this machine but I owned several other Japanese miniature tape recorders in the 1960s. These germanium transistors are very temperature sensitive, and the thermistor was almost certainly there to compensate for this and keep the bias point steady in normal operation as the temperature varied. And yes a single amplifier was used in all these machines.
Slow_Hand · 1790543847 · focus · HN ↗
Career musician here. My dirty secret is that Coltrane doesn’t resonate with me at all. Not one iota; despite me being a huge jazz fan.
For my taste, his harmonic language tips over the threshold where it goes from being viscerally enjoyable to a more heady, academic exercise. It all feels like a blur to me. Maximal in it’s vocabulary, and yet flat in it’s overall effect. It’s often so dense that it ends up feeling “same-y” and grey to me. Like Schoenberg’s serial music.
Maybe my impression here comes from the fact that by the time I began listening to him in the mid 2000’s an entire school of derivative jazz players had long since developed upon and retroactively made his innovations feel far more common (to no fault of his own). It’s that flavor of jazz where you get the impression that the players are enjoying this way more than the audience. It’s not for me.
1. jamiek88 · 1790544177 · focus · HN ↗
  Seinfeld effect but for jazz! Seems very possible to me.
2. pvab3 · 1790546514 · focus · HN ↗
  <a href="https://youtu.be/Zu2fm8vmHIk" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/Zu2fm8vmHIk
3. na1026 · 1790547038 · focus · HN ↗
  [dead]
4. dharma1 · 1790547441 · focus · HN ↗
  Which era Trane are you talking about? The man went through at least 4 major shifts. I’m guessing you are talking about Giant Steps and the later avant garde years?
  He did a lot of stuff too which is not dense at all and very approachable - Naima, A Love Supreme, My Favorite Things, Kind of Blue with Miles, a lot more, enjoyable, classic albums.
  Dig deeper
  1. breezybottom · 1790564308 · focus · HN ↗
    It's all subjective. The idea that none of these are dense is pretty bonkers to me. Some people don't find hard-bop to be approachable. Kind of Blue is really more the exception to his typical output.
  2. rayval · 1790580983 · focus · HN ↗
    the songs you mention are ones that I've played time and again for 40+ years. Never get tired of them.
    Giant Steps is more abstract but still worth dipping into once in a while.
    Here is a musical analysis of Giant Steps (basically the Circle of Fifths):
    <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62tIvfP9A2w" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62tIvfP9A2w
5. madaxe_again · 1790547667 · focus · HN ↗
  Not a career musician - just a musician, pianist.
  I love Coltrane - I find the complexity lyrical, like Art Tatum or Django Reinhardt in their respective disciplines - or if you throw back, Liszt, Chopin, the other bloody show-offs who could sing with an instrument. I dunno. It talks to me, but I guess at the end of the day it’s all just taste.
  1. na1026 · 1790547811 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm not a saxophonist but I believe that a lot of Coltrane's rapid scale traversal approach comes from transcribing or appropriating Art Tatum pieces for the saxophone.
    madaxe_again · 1790701325 · focus · HN ↗
    Oh totally - but if you listen closely to Tatum you find Rachmaninov hiding in there, occasionally a little Chopin riff - it’s turtles all the way down.
6. viccis · 1790552295 · focus · HN ↗
  Also a jazz musician and I find that it depends on what time frame you're talking about. I like him a lot up to the very early 60s, and then he loses me around this point. I prefer the direction other hard bop players took at this time. Coltrane benefited greatly imo from Tyner's rock solid comping and Jones' aggressive drum work. His sax soloing got a bit too interested in dense excess, often fairly inscrutable even before he drifted into free jazz. Opinions absolutely vary on this point though. I think it still sounds good even if it's not what I reach for.
  >an entire school of derivative jazz players had long since developed upon and retroactively made his innovations feel far more common
  The worst of this to me is at straightahead jazz jams when sax players run out of ideas or lose the form and then just start honking lol
7. CPLX · 1790557929 · focus · HN ↗
  I'm also a jazz musician.
  There's no accounting for taste. There's lots of stuff that I would say the same thing about that everybody loves that I don't like.
  With that said, I don't see how you can listen to My Favorite Things or Love Supreme and not just find yourself in utter awe.
8. shermantanktop · 1790564653 · focus · HN ↗
  [delayed]
9. belZaah · 1790568103 · focus · HN ↗
  Same. It’s a tiring exercise keeping up with what is going on. I marvel at the intricacies I can’t mostly even begin to understand but it doesn’t speak to me musically the way eg Watercolors or Kind of Blue or Take Five does.
10. qmr · 1790580051 · focus · HN ↗
  Moments notice!? Nothing?
11. globnomulous · 1790581276 · focus · HN ↗
  If the does nothing for you or feels like an inaccessible academic exercise, your ear must be very, very different from mine: <a href="https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=saN1BwlxJxA" rel="nofollow">https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=saN1BwlxJxA
12. seabre · 1790605371 · focus · HN ↗
  His Ballads album is probably one of the best albums ever made by anybody. It got dunked on by critics originally because they thought he was ditching his sheets of sound stuff from Giant Steps for more commercial appeal.
  If you don't own it you should. Preferably the deluxe edition with his Greensleeves takes.
  As far as his sheets of sound stuff, I think Sun Ship is ridiculously underrated and is a bridge between his classic quartet and Pharoah Sanders/free jazz era stuff. Really really good if you've never listened to it.
13. m463 · 1790623633 · focus · HN ↗
  It's ok, I resonate more with roscoe p myself.
hagbard_c · 1790545622 · focus · HN ↗
Sometimes these "security" solutions make you wonder whether someone took the joke about a machine without a network connection being the most secure seriously. First visit ever to this domain and:
```
   Sorry, you have been blocked
   You are unable to access jazzwise.com

   Why have I been blocked?

   This website is using a security service to protect itself from online 
   attacks. The action you just performed triggered the security solution. There 
   are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a
   certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data.
```
1. hackernud3s · 1790546819 · focus · HN ↗
  Some blacklists last forever even though most ip leases only last a day or two.
  1. hagbard_c · 1790685386 · focus · HN ↗
    I suspect it is IPv6-related and would work if I disabled it. They probably blocked an overly large IPv6 block which my /56 happens to fall inside. Oh well, no site, no sale...
2. _delirium · 1790554934 · focus · HN ↗
  Same here!
Drupon · 1790552716 · focus · HN ↗
Yeah man
1. rdiddly · 1790564536 · focus · HN ↗
  [dead]
rdiddly · 1790564625 · focus · HN ↗
I like the little interjections from what I assume is Tiberi, just enjoying the hell out of it.
mistercheph · 1790576789 · focus · HN ↗
If I ran a deep learning lab I would love to add this to my audio training mix and shred the copy
Lio · 1790577629 · focus · HN ↗
Home taping saves music! :P

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