In August 1965, at the height of his fame, saxophonist John Coltrane headlined the DownBeat jazz festival in Chicago. Taking to the stage with a new member of his band, young experimentalist Archie Shepp on tenor, Coltrane’s quartet blew through a series of jagged and free improvisations, straying from structured compositions and, instead, hurling down sheets of sound so loud and aggressive that they reportedly caused widespread walk-outs. DownBeat’s own reviewer later wrote: “They gave as tasteless a display of musicianship as I’ve ever heard … Shepp and Coltrane seemed to be more interested in trying to out-honk, out-squeal and out-bleat each other than in playing music.” That 1965 performance should have been a triumphant moment, after five years of Coltrane’s star ascending.
Since leaving Miles Davis’s “first great quintet”, with whom he had recorded what would become the bestselling jazz album of all time – 1959’s Kind of Blue – Coltrane founded an entirely new harmonic language in jazz with the 1960 release of his solo LP Giant Steps, had a radio hit with his 1961 version of The Sound of Music’s My Favourite Things and, in January 1965, formulated his own spiritual imagining of jazz music with the Grammy-nominated album A Love Supreme. He was already a giant of the genre, contributing dozens of compositions to the standard repertoire, but two years later, in 1967, aged just 40, he would be dead of liver cancer. He always wanted to keep moving forward and to keep listening to himself.
He was questing and working towards a kind of endless music.” To mark the centenary of Coltrane’s birth this month, that quest is being documented on a series of previously unreleased, holy grail recordings of his nightclub experiments. Regularly taking up four- to six-week residencies in spaces such as the Jazz Gallery in Manhattan, the Showboat in Washington DC or Pep’s Lounge in Philadelphia, Coltrane would play extended sets of new material that existed purely in the moment of their making: unplanned and unruly. Dubbed The Tiberi Tapes after Frank Tiberi, the saxophonist who made the recordings, the reel-to-reel tapes initially existed as Tiberi’s private means of study.
Taking a bulky Magnavox TR-100 to clubs, with its microphone hidden in the sleeve of his overcoat, Tiberi began recording concerts, managing to change the tapes in the dark every 30 minutes to capture as much of Coltrane’s virtuosity as possible. Following Coltrane’s quartet from 1960 to 1964, just before the recording of A Love Supreme, Tiberi amassed 80 reels of recordings and more than 60 hours of music that he began sharing with select peers and students: a map of Coltrane’s circuitous route to endless music. Sax legend Joe Lovano played with Tiberi as part of the Woody Herman Big Band in 1976 and remembers being astounded by the material.
That freedom of his later work was always present in the way he took his own melodic path and left space for others.” Lovano later played with McCoy Tyner, Coltrane’s pianist from 1960 to 1965, “and he told me they all knew Frank was recording but he had their blessing. The band knew it was for education and the music first.” Tiberi, who is now 97 and was unavailable for interview, offered up the tapes recently to Coltrane’s final record label, Impulse!, as a means of preserving their history. Whittling down those 26 hours of music to 11 newly mastered compositions, the Tiberi Tapes compilation doesn’t shy away from the often poor audio quality of the haphazard recordings or the raucous environment of their making.
Audience members can be heard chatting in the background or yelping in response to spirited passages, while Coltrane’s saxophone lines weave through the tape hiss to produce startlingly beautiful takes on a slower, more melodic version of Giant Steps, as well as a 33-minute extension of A Love Supreme’s Resolution. And then performing until 4am before driving home to his babies. He’s just a young man striving in his 30s and he shares that inspirational energy,” he says.
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