Track Listing

1. Mars
2. Venus
3. Jupiter
4. Saturn
5. Leo
6. Jupiter Variation

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #37017 in Music
• Released on: 2000-06-19
• Number of discs: 1
• Format: Original recording remastered
• Dimensions: .20 pounds
• Running time: 54 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
At times this album is hard, intense and demands total attention. But if you give it just that you will find Interstellar Space is totally absorbing and beautiful. Recorded just months before his death it shows 'Trane continuing to press the boundaries of music, discovering both moments of quietness and harshness as he does. With only drummer Rashied Ali to accompany him 'Trane creates his own universe, which very few musicians have managed to do quite so completely. With the original four tracks and two extras ("Leo" and "Jupiter Variations") included this is an album of such brilliance that even after a hundred plays the listener still finds new things to discover. It is a masterpiece of moods but one, which will most definitely not be found at garden centres.--Phil Brett

CD Description
These provocative duets were recorded right in between the two quartet sessions which yielded Coltrane's swan song, EXPRESSION. INTERSTELLAR SPACE is suffused with the searching fervour which distinguished Coltrane's conclusive works. Coltrane and Ali come on like a roller-coaster ride to Valhalla,playing as if their lives depended on it. The level of technical brinkmanship and emotional intensity is amazing--all the more so when you consider that Trane would be dead of liver cancer just four months later.
Faced with one's own mortality, even the most faithful of servants--from Job to Jesus--must finally ask...why? With so much left to accomplish,it's unlikely Trane meant to leave his legacy on such a suspended note. But with time running out, INTERSTELLAR SPACE finds Coltrane contemplating the cosmos in all its raging complexity and infinite wonder. Lashed to the foretop of his crystal ship, Trane stares defiantly into the teeth of the storm, as Rashied Ali's rolling, windswept rhythmic pulse provides him with an elemental spark. And the tenor saxophonist responds with dramatic urgency, as if he were literally trying to break on through...to exist as pure spirit.
Such is the biblical magnitude of these performances. While the heraldic rapture of "Venus" suggests the spiritual grace and acceptance of the psalms, "Mars", "Leo" and "Jupiter" admonish man in the babbling tongues of Revelations and the final days. Listen particularly to Coltrane's tone, as he evokes the eternal characteristics of the horn: its beckoning, portending, invocational quality.
"Saturn" is the final frontier.Technically, Trane does impossible things on his horn. He creates cubist shapes and man-sized flourishes that are more akin to violin triple-stops, piano arpeggios and drum rolls than the tenor saxophone, manipulating multiphonics and overtones to speak in three registers simultaneously--every notetouched with a human cry. And yes, that is a hint of swing you hear coming through the outer rings, and an echo of "Chasin' The Trane" peeking through the meteor shower. It's an appropriate metaphor, because John Coltrane never stopped pursuing rainbows, which is why listeners will be discovering his music a thousand years from now.

Customer Reviews

Excellent
Ferocious and luminously beautiful free improvised duets from 1967 with Rashied Ali, swinging like crazy and actually rather acessable. Unforced and wide open, the absence of any third parties to clog the gears gives the music total freedom to breathe and swell, saxophonist Coltrane an effortless stream of soul resonanting shapes and transitions and Ali a blizzard of crashing drums. An amazing recording, with the instrument tones seamlessly stinging and billowy and the recording studio reverberating like a church.

inner journey
Coltranes last album, to my knowledge. One thing for sure there is a progression in Coltranes music and it comes from his spiritual journey that he willingly shares. When "I" listen and feel this album I am connected to spirituality and feel the love of God, which I guess was Coltranes experience when recording. Not an album that I listen to everyday, it's a good "top up" and brings me back to a kind of inner peace. Musically it's amazing, truth is there is one sax player and a drummer making layers and layers of inspired sound a totally intimate experience where everything is revealed warts and all.

Visceral
By the time of the recordings of these pieces in 1967 John Coltrane was travelling farther and father out into the musical hinterland of free jazz. This set of recordings with drummer Rashid Ali is about as far as you can get. The music here is wild and powerful and at times violent as Ali and Coltrane at times seem to battle for the space in the music.

This is improvisation of the first order. Coltrane's playing squawks, honks, runs, and stutters its way around the clattering cachophony of Ali's frenetic drumming. Easy listening it isn't. It does seem to be a statement and it is fascinating to wonder where Coltrane would have gone next with his music beacuase listening to this you sometimes conclude that this was something of a final statement. If John Coltrane really was on some kind of musical journey it does seem, listening to this, that perhaps he had arrived.