Nonpareil Ensconced in Magnetic Tape

Music collectors are a doomed lot. It’s a reverse kind of kismet I’ve known for a long while, but have become increasingly adept at keeping suppressed & out of mind. When I lived in Tucson, there was a guy I’d spot all the time along the circuit of record shops I’d visit every Tuesday & Friday after work. Stoop-shouldered, balding along the pate with a long, split-end infested, graying pony-tail in the back; bad floral print shirts with sweat stains blooming from the pits joining a below-the-waist ensemble of frayed cargo shorts, knee-high athletic socks and flip-flops. I surmised the cracked and taped sunglasses hiding his downcast gaze as the finishing touch to make it impossible to read which aisle he intended to shuffle down next or what used cd-spine he’d pinpointed amidst the masses.

Soon I started recognizing him right off the bat and I’m pretty sure the cognizance was shared. But no word was ever spoken between us, him bee-lining for one end of a store’s jazz section while I switched gears to try my luck at the other. Eventually I started to look at him as the visage of a possible future, the temporal denouement of a life spent fingering cardboard sleeves and plastic cases in an eternal search for fresh musical loot. Smugly, I decided that would never be me; that I would heed the harbinger of the hunchback and eventually give up collecting for some healthier, more sociable pastime. Well, it’s a decade on and I’m still in the game. No frizzled pony-tail to speak of and I still have all of my hair, but some recent news made me think back to the hunchback with a restored awareness of the futility of it all.

Here’s as good a juncture as any to thank Phil Freeman for hipping me to a momentous discovery, the true cynosure of this post, via his Running the Voodoo Down Blog. I did a quick spin by several jazz chat boards and found no mention of it within their pages, though something this big has surely been fomenting a fair share of buzz for awhile. In a stroke of luck that comes once in a lifetime, Jazz scholar Barry Kernfeld (a name unfamiliar to me) found himself privy to a mother lode of previously unissued Coltrane reel-to-reels, 35 of them to be exact, documenting music recorded under the aegis of Impulse! Records, 1962-64 by Rudy Van Gelder. He gained access to the trove through his position as historical consultant for last year’s Guernsey’s Jazz Auction and was commissioned to catalog it. The tapes were originally scheduled for auction on behalf of Coltrane’s first wife Naima and their two children, but upon learning of their existence Impulse! claimed ownership and issued an injunction to halt sale at the last minute. So they now sit in sequestered as the record company suits decide what to do with them.

Kernfeld’s abstract (originally written for the Gurnsey’s auction pamphlet & later pulled in the wake of the Impulse! interception) goes into juicy discographical detail about the find. His prose is far more lucid than mine with annotations that fill several scrollable pages. But of a few of the highlights titles include pristine stereo copies of master tapes to all 6 versions of the sextet rendering of A Love Supreme (all previously assumed lost to the world) and several reels that contain solo rehearsal segments of Coltrane working out ideas on tenor, soprano & piano, that’s right, solo Coltrane(!). Add to that a bevy of alternates and unissued titles including 9 new versions of “Impressions,” six of “All the Things You Are,” one of “Body and Soul” and the entire Coltrane/Johnny Hartman session on five reels preserved in what Kernfeld describes as resplendent fidelity.

Pretty astonishing stuff to say the least. But then why does the bonanza seem so bittersweet? I do a swift survey my storage shelves and between box sets and singles I tabulate nearly a hundred Coltrane cds in my collection. Assuming these epochal reels eventually receive the rightful reissue treatment they deserve that’s another dozen discs to acquire at a minimum. And two more Coltrane finds are hitting the music shop shelves this month and next: the Thelonious Monk Quartet Carnegie Hall concert on 9/27 and the Half Note set due to drop 10/11. With them trails the doggedly everlasting question how much ‘Trane is enough Trane? I can see the my old adversary the hunchback in my mind’s eye making the requisite visits to the brick & mortar shops on each respective street date, plucking sealed copies of each set from the racks and shuffling dutifully to the cash register. That hunchback is Me.