Acreage-Sized Baritone

Wow.  I haven’t heard this in ages.  This is some live Coltrane from 1961 that I always used to have on an LP called “Africa and India,” , the tune “Impressions” rendered here on a “Live at the Village Vanguard” collection.  (One of many, so titled.)  I’m reminded of how much I like this period in particular.  There is enough grounding architecture to hold the space travel together.  It reminds me of what it was like to “discover” John Coltrane, when everything he’d done somehow seemed fresh and beyond my ability to explain.

Slowly catching up on work today.  This has all been pending for quite some time.  Acutely pending like a sore foot that you work at trying to ignore.  I’m not caught up.  But the goal line is within sight where it had been utterly invisible just twenty-four hours ago. 

Oh dear.  Spotify has forwarded us along to Coltrane and Johnny Hartman’s acreage-sized baritone.  “They Say It’s Wonderful” sounds like the same elemental tidal wave that washed me up somewhere and left me the first time I heard it this as well, when I wasn’t in love, when his “so they say" musings were all I had to my name either.

I tried to stop my wife and make hear listen to the final chorus.  A contextual, it was water lapping, rather than anything tidal.  Some other time.   I wonder what Hartman’s voice sounded like live.  This sounds so floor-shakingly loud.  As if he might have even been able to occupy a stage beside Howling Wolf.   

Playing loudly in the kitchen now, while the vegetables are chopped and the dough is kneeded.  “Lush Life” just about made me cry.  This is the version.