In a con­trar­i­an take on the lega­cy of John Coltrane on the 50th anniver­sary of his death last year, Zack Gra­ham at GQ did not rec­om­mend Giant Steps nor A Love Supreme nor Blue Train nor My Favorite Things as the most impor­tant album in the artist’s career, but a record most casu­al jazz fans may nev­er encounter, and which even the hard­est-core Coltrane fans nev­er heard in his life­time. Record­ed in the year of his death, Inter­stel­lar Space—a fre­net­ic suite of free jazz duets with drum­mer Rashied Ali—didn’t appear until 1974. The album has since received wide­spread crit­i­cal acclaim, and stands, Gra­ham argues, as “Coltrane’s most influ­en­tial record, its echoes still heard today in every­thing from elec­tron­ic music to some of the world’s biggest hip hop acts.”

Gra­ham makes a com­pelling case. It’s hard­ly an acces­si­ble album, but dis­cern­ing lis­ten­ers will nonethe­less hear the sound of now in Ali’s stut­ter­ing, rapid fire beats and Coltrane’s modal bleats. Look­ing back, it can almost seem like he knew he was run­ning out of time, and rushed to leave behind a blue­print for the music of the future.

“In his last months,” writes Stephen Davis at Rolling Stone, “Coltrane had changed every­thing about his music,” and, per­haps, every­thing about music in gen­er­al, jazz and oth­er­wise. His evo­lu­tion as a musi­cian and explor­er of the mys­ti­cal poten­tial­i­ties of artis­tic expres­sion was so rad­i­cal that from a cer­tain point of view we are forced to work back­ward when approach­ing his cat­a­log, as we might do with biogra­phies of saints.

Should we pur­sue this line of think­ing, how­ev­er, we might have to grant that the posthu­mous Inter­stel­lar Space and its fol­low-up Stel­lar Regions—com­piled from tapes Alice Coltrane dis­cov­ered in 1994—are the result of Coltrane’s final musi­cal apoth­e­o­sis and thus can sound nigh-incom­pre­hen­si­ble to most mere mor­tals. Inter­stel­lar Space “is a musi­cians’ album, for sure,” Gra­ham admits, and an album for those ful­ly open to the unknown: “the dis­so­nance and enhar­mon­ic exper­i­men­ta­tion… is oth­er­world­ly.”

Work­ing back­ward, we see Coltrane’s trans­fig­u­ra­tion into an avant-garde pio­neer in 1966’s Ascen­sion, an album that “still man­ages to con­found as many lis­ten­ers as it con­vinces,” Derek Tay­lor writes at All About Jazz. A Love Supreme is Coltrane’s gospel, a spir­i­tu­al clas­sic that draws every­one in with its mes­sage of tran­scen­dence and one­ness. Ear­li­er mile­stones My Favorite Things, Giant Steps, and Blue Train are each mirac­u­lous feats of musi­cian­ship that drew huge crowds of admir­ers and imi­ta­tors, and then there are the years of appren­tice­ship, when the young Coltrane stud­ied under mas­ters like Miles Davis and Dizzy Gille­spie, and prac­ticed the dhar­ma of Char­lie Park­er.

A nar­ra­tive of Coltrane as a kind of musi­cal mes­si­ah explains the lit­er­al ven­er­a­tion of his work by the Church of Saint John Coltrane, but it is only one con­ve­nient means of Coltrane appre­ci­a­tion. In truth, his oeu­vre is too vast and var­ied in scope to neat­ly sum up in any ful­ly sat­is­fy­ing way. We might just as well start at the begin­ning, when Coltrane was a most­ly unknown, but very hip, side­man, play­ing with the greats through­out the fifties. “From his Bird-emu­lat­ing begin­nings to his flights into the unknown in his last years,” writes Fer­nan­do Ortiz, com­pil­er of the “Com­plete” John Coltrane playlist above, “the stan­dard of his music and his pas­sion are always at the top or very close to it.”

Com­pris­ing over 700 tracks, “or four straight days of lis­ten­ing,” this playlist list is still “far from per­fect,” Ortiz admits, “since it is sub­ject to avail­abil­i­ty and to the non-sys­tem­at­ic approach to data on Spo­ti­fy, but it’s not that far this time.”

…no stu­dio record­ing he made between 1955 and 1965 is miss­ing (his pre­vi­ous years are well rep­re­sent­ed, start­ing with his 1946 record­ings while in the Navy), which includes all his stu­dio work as a leader dur­ing those years, as well as all his record­ings as a side­man with Miles and Monk.

The weight­ing toward live record­ings, “both from offi­cial and boot­leg sources,” pro­vides a very mul­ti­fac­eted view of the artist’s onstage devel­op­ment, and the inclu­sion of box sets like Heavy­weight Cham­pi­on: The Com­plete Atlantic Record­ings offer panoram­ic sur­veys of his stu­dio work. While we don’t get every­thing here, and some of the omis­sions are key, you will, if you spend qual­i­ty time delv­ing into this trea­sure house, under­stand why the name Coltrane con­jures such inten­si­ty of awe, praise, and devo­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Orga­nized Reli­gion Got You Down? Dis­cov­er The Church Of Saint John Coltrane

John Coltrane Draws a Mys­te­ri­ous Dia­gram Illus­trat­ing the Math­e­mat­i­cal & Mys­ti­cal Qual­i­ties of Music

John Coltrane’s Hand­writ­ten Out­line for His Mas­ter­piece A Love Supreme (1964)

The His­to­ry of Spir­i­tu­al Jazz: Hear a Tran­scen­dent 12-Hour Mix Fea­tur­ing John Coltrane, Sun Ra, Her­bie Han­cock & More

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

If you’re a 19-year-old wun­derkind like Ewan Cun­ning­ham, who can play any num­ber of instru­ments, it’s a great time to be alive. Record­ing is cheap, video is just as cheap, and YouTube pro­vides a venue to share a slew of his home­made cov­ers of rock clas­sics.

Above is one of his most ambi­tious ven­tures: a full note-for-note cov­er of Pink Floyd’s “Echoes,” all 20 min­utes, that uses video trick­ery to have four Ewans side-by-side play­ing at Dob­bie Hall. (From what we can tell, Dob­bie Hall is locat­ed in Lar­bert, Scot­land, a town about equidis­tant between Glas­gow and Edin­burgh.)

Div­ing down into all six years of Ewan’s videos and we find, at first, not a 13-year-old Ewan, but his dad, play­ing and singing an acoustic cov­er of Coldplay’s “Par­adise”. So we know where Ewan got the music bug.

In fact, he tells us “I start­ed play­ing drums at the age of 4 and con­tin­ued to only play drums until I start­ed branch­ing out into oth­er instru­ments such as gui­tar, bass, key­boards and vocals. I’ve been teach­ing myself to mix, record and film music since I was 10 years old and this is my pas­sion.”

Ewan start­ed upload­ing drum cov­ers at 14, play­ing along to every­one from Evanes­cence to Foo Fight­ers. At 16 he uploaded his first Floyd drum cov­er (“Brain Damage/Eclipse”) and, like many a teen before him, fell hard for the band.

Then the cov­ers begin in earnest, with him shar­ing duties with his dad (“Wot’s…Uh the Deal” and “Brain Dam­age”) and then on to “Grantch­ester Mead­ows” (from Pink Floyd’s Ummagum­ma) and final­ly on Jan­u­ary 1, 2017, when Ewan pre­miered his three song set from Dob­bie Hall, fea­tur­ing “A Saucer­ful of Secrets,” “Care­ful with that Axe, Eugene,” and the afore­men­tioned “Echoes.”

After a suc­cess­ful Indiegogo cam­paign, he returned lat­er in 2017 to Dob­bie Hall for three cov­ers from “The Wall,” which cheek­i­ly includ­ed a papi­er-mache air­plane crash­ing into the stage at the end of “In the Flesh?”.

The ques­tion this rais­es is obvi­ous: does Ewan record any­thing orig­i­nal? Indeed, a few months ago he start­ed a new YouTube chan­nel of his own songs. It’s up to you, dear read­er, to check them out.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Scenes from the “Pink Floyd Bal­let:” When the Exper­i­men­tal Rock Band Col­lab­o­rat­ed with Bal­let Chore­o­g­ra­ph­er Roland Petit (1972)

Hear Lost Record­ing of Pink Floyd Play­ing with Jazz Vio­lin­ist Stéphane Grap­pel­li on “Wish You Were Here”

Pink Floyd Plays in Venice on a Mas­sive Float­ing Stage in 1989; Forces the May­or & City Coun­cil to Resign

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

Seri­ous fans of live record­ings well know that such pro­duc­tions are usu­al­ly doc­tored before they reach the mass­es, with effects added to sweet­en the mix, record­ing errors cor­rect­ed, instru­ments and crowd noise over­dubbed, tracks rearranged, and per­for­mances from dif­fer­ent nights com­bined. It’s a com­mon prac­tice and shouldn’t alarm any­one expect­ing absolute doc­u­men­tary fideli­ty. If you couldn’t make the show to expe­ri­ence the band first­hand, they’d at least like you to hear them at their best. (Who could resist the oppor­tu­ni­ty to revise, say, a pub­lic speak­ing gig after the fact?)

When record com­pa­nies are involved, every effort can go into mak­ing a saleable prod­uct, but heavy edit­ing usu­al­ly doesn’t hap­pen to taped bootlegs. One notable excep­tion hap­pens to come from an excep­tion­al gig, when the Sex Pis­tols fol­lowed John­ny Cash’s exam­ple and played the Chelms­ford Top Secu­ri­ty Prison dur­ing their first major tour of Eng­land in 1976 for an audi­ence of 500 pris­on­ers. Part­ly due to a seri­ous record­ing issue—the near total fail­ure to cap­ture orig­i­nal bassist Glen Matlock—and part­ly to a “con­fused idea of what would make for a wor­thy release,” writes Ned Raggett at All­mu­sic, the band’s sound­man Dave Good­man decid­ed to make sev­er­al alter­ations to the record­ing.

These changes, in turn, gave rise to a mythol­o­gy sur­round­ing the show, rais­ing its rep­u­ta­tion to the lev­els of chaos for which the Pis­tols are renowned. That rep­u­ta­tion itself large­ly revolves around Sid Vicious’ lat­er onstage antics, and is at times inflat­ed. The Pis­tols could be a great live band—Steve Jones, Paul Cook, and Mat­lock were all more than capa­ble musi­cians, and John­ny Rot­ten was a per­fect punk spec­ta­cle all his own. But the ele­ments didn’t always come togeth­er amidst the band’s unre­hearsed dis­or­der.

The audi­ence at Chelms­ford were, please excuse the pun, a cap­tive one, and there­fore, unable to dis­play the same unbri­dled enthu­si­asm as the band’s usu­al crowds of rub­ber­neck­ers and scen­esters. To play up the gig, then, Good­man dubbed in the sounds of “ran­dom crowd and vio­lence noise” and sirens. He didn’t only see fit to over­dub Matlock’s miss­ing bass, but also added in “an incred­i­bly poor Rot­ten imi­ta­tor goad­ing the ‘pris­on­ers’ on between songs,” Ragett notes, “as well as often singing on top of the real Rot­ten him­self!” That first 1990 release of Live at Chelms­ford does not so much gild the band’s musi­cal strengths as it “plays on the revolutionary/anarchy side of the punk image to no avail.”

Luck­i­ly, the orig­i­nal record­ings remained, and were released lat­er on the Sex Pis­tols Alive com­pi­la­tion, in their orig­i­nal order, and, rearranged, on a sec­ond Live at Chelms­ford Prison CD. It is the orig­i­nals, with min­i­mal treat­ment, that you can hear here. At the top is “Anar­chy in the UK,” below it “Sub­mis­sion,” and a sneer­ing cov­er of The Who’s “Sub­sti­tute” fur­ther down.  The giant hole in the mid­dle of the mix where Matlock’s bass should be is hard to ignore, but over­all, these are some occa­sion­al­ly great per­for­mances, par­tic­u­lar­ly from Cook and Jones, whose pound­ing drums and blis­ter­ing gui­tar come through loud and clear, often bury­ing Rotten’s voice, which is mud­died through­out.

But a good record­ing of half the band hard­ly sells the leg­end of the Sex Pis­tols, espe­cial­ly the Sex Pis­tols in prison. “By all accounts,” writes Raggett, “it was a bit of a har­row­ing expe­ri­ence.” But you’d have to have been there to know it, and you prob­a­bly wouldn’t want to be. So it’s no won­der Good­man saw the need to spruce things up with what Discogs’ notes describe as “a canned audio track of a riot (com­plete with shout­ing, scuf­fles, break­ing glass, etc.)” A lot of peo­ple hat­ed it, but if you’re real­ly curi­ous, you can grab a copy of the over­dubbed ver­sion and hear for your­self. Or lis­ten to the full, undoc­tored, record­ing on YouTube.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Sex Pis­tols Make a Scan­dalous Appear­ance on the Bill Grundy Show & Intro­duce Punk Rock to the Star­tled Mass­es (1976)

Watch the Sex Pis­tols’ Christ­mas Par­ty for Children–Which Hap­pened to Be Their Final Gig in the UK (1977)

Watch the Sex Pis­tols’ Very Last Con­cert (San Fran­cis­co, 1978)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Since Dark Side of the Moon, the mem­bers of Pink Floyd dealt in var­i­ous ways with the fate of their orig­i­nal singer Syd Bar­rett. As Roger Waters said about the band in 1975, “It could­n’t have hap­pened with­out him, but on the oth­er hand, it could­n’t have gone on with him.” On Dark Side of the Moon, Bar­rett is not direct­ly addressed, but the themes of mad­ness swirl through the var­i­ous big state­ment songs and in the var­i­ous quotes from friends and road­ies pep­pered through­out the mix. Lat­er on, The Wall would bring lis­ten­ers a main char­ac­ter who goes mad and shuts him­self up in iso­la­tion exter­nal­ly and inter­nal­ly. Echoes of Syd are every­where.

And right in the mid­dle of that stretch is Wish You Were Here, both a direct trib­ute to Syd Bar­rett and a caus­tic mus­ing on the music busi­ness. The lat­ter both neg­a­tive­ly affect­ed the band at the time and, in some way, accel­er­at­ed Syd’s decline into (most prob­a­bly) schiz­o­phre­nia.

YouTube chan­nel Poly­phon­ic’s eight-minute overview of the album will intro­duce casu­al lis­ten­ers to the sto­ry behind the mak­ing of the album, and the lyrics that specif­i­cal­ly applied to Syd. “You were caught in the cross­fire of child­hood and star­dom” is one of many eulo­gies to their friend, the “crazy dia­mond” of the suite of songs that book­end the album.

The video, which includes clips from the BBC doc­u­men­tary on the mak­ing of the album cur­rent­ly stream­ing in var­i­ous venues (don’t blame us for the par­tic­u­lar poor qual­i­ty of this clip, espe­cial­ly the sub­ti­tles), also men­tions a vis­it that Bar­rett made to the Abbey Road Stu­dio. Bald, eye­brows shaved, and over­weight, the man was unrec­og­niz­able com­pared to the svelte, dark­ly hand­some lead singer they had known only a few years’ ear­li­er. It’s an emo­tion­al moment that only adds to the impact of this ghost­ly and melan­cholic album.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

When Pink Floyd Tried to Make an Album with House­hold Objects: Hear Two Sur­viv­ing Tracks Made with Wine Glass­es & Rub­ber Bands

Neil deGrasse Tyson: “Because of Pink Floyd, I’ve Spent Decades Undo­ing the Idea That There’s a Dark Side of the Moon”
Hear Lost Record­ing of Pink Floyd Play­ing with Jazz Vio­lin­ist Stéphane Grap­pel­li on “Wish You Were Here”

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.