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The Ultimate Blue Train Sale Price: $9.49 Average Rating:

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Everyone knows this is a classic album. I would just like to warn against the "enhanced features" - at least on a mac. You have to install folders and it restarts your mac in "classic mode." The interviews sound like they're playing back at half-speed. You have to click on a heading every few sentences to continue and each segment cuts off in the middle of a sentence. There are no navigation controls. At the end of the interview there's no way to get back to the main menu. Your computer also freezes up so that you can't quit the program or eject the cd. If you click command-option-escape you can force quit the program and the classic mode but your computer is still set to a very grainy 8-bit display.

Out of John Coltrane's four most popular albums (the others being Giant Steps, My Favorite Things and A Love Supreme), Blue Train is easily the most straightforward and traditional. Giant Steps pushes the language of bebop about as far as it can go, My Favorite Things lays down the foundation for Coltrane's modal explorations, and A Love Supreme is an early step into his final free jazz phase. Blue Trane, on the other hand, is comfortably within the hard bop mainstream - and on the premiere hard bop label of the 1950s, Blue Note. Blue Trane was recorded about 2 years after Trane caught his big break and joined Miles Davis's quintet. A lot of those early 1955 and 1956 recordings show Coltrane struggling - whether with his substance abuse problems or with articulating his challenging ideas, I'm not sure. But after kicking heroin in May of 1957, his playing and composition began to evolve by leaps and bounds. He joined Thelonious Monk for a legendary gig at the Five Spot, and began recording a series of fine albums under his own name for the Prestige label. (The first one, titled Coltrane, was recorded about 4 months before this one.) His playing was growing so rapidly, and he was recording so frequently, that you can hear the change even across recordings just a few weeks apart. Prestige and Blue Note had very different recording styles, and you can hear it here. Prestige was about loose recording sessions with minimum preparation; Blue Note was about practice, rehearsal and creating a polished product. While both approaches have their strengths, in this case Blue Train is well above its Prestige counterparts. Not only does it perfectly showcase Coltrane's playing (both its power and its delicacy), but it's the first album to really focus on his compositional skills. Aside from a beautiful ballad performance of "I'm Old Fashioned", all of the tunes are Coltrane originals. The title track, a minor blues, might be the most striking, but they are all strong. The sidemen play very well. Lee Morgan was at an early peak here; while his playing doesn't have the depth it would acquire in the mid-to-late 60s, he plays with plenty of explosive fire here. The rhythm duo of Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones show why they were in such high demand during this period. I don't know whether this is the best Trane intro; as a fan of classic and progressive rock, the more exploratory A Love Supreme and Live at Birdland clicked instantly while Blue Train seemed somewhat ordinary at first. But those whose tastes lean primarily toward mainstream 50s jazz like Kind of Blue, Getz/Gilberto and Time Out should probably start here. Also, fans of this album should check out Sonny Clark's album Sonny's Crib which has a very similar lineup.

The cover of the 1997-edition enhanced CD says it needs Windows 3.1 or mac7.1. In some quick tests on a couple of Macs, full install of the the enhanced content required OS9 (OSX10.4), but the video and audio files played fine with current QuickTime (QT7.6/OSX10.5). I don't know what happens on PCs, but I'd guess it's a similar situation (files play but full content won't).

Though a lot older jazz has lost resonance for me, Blue Train is reminder of the purity of standard structure in the hands of such a brilliant soloist and budding leader, taking what is apathetically mundane nowadays and stamping it with brass immortality.

Unquestionably one of the all-time best ever jazz recordings, and probably my favorite Coltrane album. Plenty has already been written here about the music ... this is jazz at it's best! If you just want some great tunes, and don't really care so much about some differences in recording quality, then don't hesitate to get this album today - you won't be disappointed! The rest of this review is for those folks like me, who do notice subtle differences, and want the best possible sound quality: Sadly, I have to proclaim my disappointment with this "remastered" release. I also own the 1997 CD release, which sounds significantly better. This new release is over-compressed, and has had a low-quality digital EQ boost in the treble, replacing the nuance and texture of Jones' excellent drumming with a homogenous sizzle - the cymbals have lost all semblance of realism. Blue Note should be ashamed for their mishandling of this historic recording, and especially for caving in to the over-compression fad which plagues the industry. I expect this sort of mindless mastering in bad pop recordings, not the greatest jazz of all time! To some, this may come off as nitpicking, but I hope you'll excuse my negativity - to me it is disheartening to hear this sort of careless treatment of such treasured music, at the hands of professionals who surely know better. Coltrane's beautiful music deserves a lot more care than this. If you would like to own a better copy of this album, do yourself a favor and skip this edition - get the 1997 (20-bit "Super Bit-Map") CD instead. Your ears will thank you.