For this month's Lunch__Breaks show I've invited Amsterdam based multidisciplinary artist Ivana Dukic. Ivana about the first record: "The first track is Impressions (Take 1) from John Coltrane's "Both Directions at Once: The Lost Album," which was released in 2018. The original session, recorded in 1963, included four different takes of the song, and the deluxe edition of the album features three of them as bonus tracks. We will hear Impressions (Take 3) at the very end of the show.
Both Directions at Once was recorded in Van Gelder Studio in New Jersey on March 6, 1963, by saxophonist John Coltrane and his Quartet: double bassist Jimmy Garrison, drummer Elvin Jones and pianist McCoy Tyner. The session took place on the last day of a two-week stint at Birdland. The next day, the group would join singer Johnny Hartman for the recording of John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman.
To cut down on storage space, Impulse! Records destroyed the master tape, and the recording was lost for decades. The seven tracks on Both Directions survived as a copy Coltrane gave to his first wife, Juanita Naima. Van Gelder made a separate copy for Coltrane to listen to at home. In 2005, after the Guernsey's auction house announced plans to sell Coltrane-related artefacts, the record company intervened to acquire the tapes. Coltrane's son Ravi and studio executive Ken Druker assembled the final album with liner notes written by Ashley Kahn.
"Both Directions at Once" captures the John Coltrane Quartet at a crucial period, bridging his work with standards and new, exploratory directions. The album was recorded on a single day in March 1963, between the recording sessions for John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman , which we will also hear in the show, and the start of the sessions for A Love Supreme.
The album's title came from a recollection by Wayne Shorter, who stated that at one point, Coltrane told him that what he was attempting to achieve musically was "starting a sentence in the middle, and then going to the beginning and the end of it at the same time... both directions at once."
