John Coltrane’s most iconic studio album and most celebrated live recording are both being reissued in special vinyl editions this fall. The saxophonist’s longtime label, Impulse! Records, will drop A Love Supreme: Mono Edition on Sept. 26 (preorder here). On Oct. 24, Impulse! will release The Complete 1961 Village Vanguard Recordings, a 7-LP boxed set (preorder here).
The Vanguard material comes from one of the earliest engagements by Coltrane’s quartet with McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass and Elvin Jones on drums. Producer Bob Thiele made the arrangements for a live recording at the club, with engineer Rudy Van Gelder setting up his equipment on a table near the stage. A resulting LP, Coltrane “Live” At the Village Vanguard, featured bassist Reggie Workman and multi-reedist Eric Dolphy on one side. But the entirety of the Vanguard sessions only saw release in the United States in 1997, on a 4-CD boxed set.
That box, also titled The Complete 1961 Village Vanguard Recordings, has long been out of print. The forthcoming set will mark its first time on vinyl, with all the material — four and a half hours of music — presented in order of performance. It will be released as a limited-edition 7-LP package, with a 20-page booklet containing essays, archival photos and original illustrations.
As a body of work, the Village Vanguard recordings deliver a statement of arrival. “Coltrane had just finalized his quartet,” Ben Ratliff observes in Coltrane: The Story of a Sound, “and the music radiates self-assurance.” By the time Coltrane took the quartet into Van Gelder Studios a few years later to record A Love Supreme, its language had fully cohered, and self-assurance was just a means to an end. The album was Coltrane’s most intentional artistic statement to date, organized around a four-part structure and a spiritual message, burning with devotion. It’s a cultural touchstone and, not coincidentally, one of the best-selling jazz albums in history: it was certified platinum by the RIAA, for sales of 1 million copies in the U.S., in 2021.
A Love Supreme: Mono Edition represents the first new mono mix of Coltrane’s legendary album in more than 50 years. It was mastered by Ryan K. Smith from a flat tape copy of the original made by Van Gelder in April 1965 for use in the UK. This tape was discovered at Abbey Road Studios in London, and has previously been used for Analogue Productions projects like an Ultra Tape Reel to Reel and a 2020 reissue on Impulse!’s Acoustic Sounds.
So why mono? There are reasons why Coltrane’s landmark would be improved by the format. In his 2002 book A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane’s Signature Album, Ashley Kahn illuminates some technical aspects of the session, which Van Gelder recorded live to two-track:
In 1964, Van Gelder recorded in stereo; a reel-to-reel machine moving at 15 ips (inches per second) recorded the master copies for later editing and then mastering (the creation of the acetate platter that rates stamps for manufacturing vinyl albums). In the interest of maintaining some degree of isolation between the instruments on the master recording, the engineer opted to separate saxophone and drums as much as possible. A close listen to the surviving copies of the master tapes reveals Coltrane at “hard left” — positioned all the way on the left channel — Jones “hard right,” Tyner’s piano centered between the two, and Garrison’s bass at right-center.
“The mono experience is superior because it most faithfully represents what Coltrane and that band likely heard in the studio,” says WRTI’s Josh Jackson, who owns both stereo and mono editions of the album.
“The stereo edition has always been problematic, for me, because of the hard pan between John on the left and Elvin on the right, and the fact that McCoy and Jimmy got lost in the sauce,” adds Jackson, who conducted an A/B listening session this week, with hi-res files from the new release. “The fold-down from stereo to mono reduces that effect in a way that makes this far more listenable — and far more powerful.”
A Love Supreme: Mono Edition will be released on Sept. 26 (preorder here).
The Complete 1961 Village Vanguard Recordings will be released on Oct. 24. (preorder here).
