Blue World is an album of 1964 John Coltrane recordings, created as a film soundtrack and released on September 27, 2019. The release has received positive reception from critics.
Recording and release
The album was recorded at Van Gelder Studio with the Classic Quartet in between the Crescent and A Love Supreme sessions for the film Le chat dans le sac. Director Gilles Groulx was friends with Jimmy Garrison and he used that relationship to request songs for Coltrane's quartet to record. Groulx traveled to the United States to attend the recording sessions for Coltrane's only soundtrack work and Coltrane recorded it without informing his record label. After three hours in the studio, Groulx took the master tapes with him to Canada. When the director ended up shelving most of the music, it went unreleased until 2019, when Coltrane's long-time label Impulse! Records decided to release it, with the original composition "Blue World" being released on August 16, 2019 along with the announcement of the album. Release was delayed by several years due to the NFB owning the rights to the tape itself but Impulse! having the rights to release it as an album. The recordings were stored away until the early 21st century, when an archivist from the National Film Board of Canada was tasked with assembling Groulx's work; the government agency negotiated with Impulse! to have the album released. This album comes a year after the successful release of , also from Impulse!, capturing a Classic Quartet session from 1963 and is part of a trend of unreleased albums from 1950s and 1960s jazz greats released in the 2010s.
Reception
's Phil Freeman gave the soundtrack a positive review, calling the piece a coherent recording that almost functions as a suite and writing that the performances are "fascinating and entertaining". For The Arts Fuse, Michael Ullman claims that Coltrane fans will "have to have" the album, particularly for the clarity of the recording during the Classic Quartet period. Victor L. Schermer, writing for All About Jazz, recommended the album with a rating of eight out of 10, summing up, "The one great thing about it is that it keeps the jazz world attuned to all that Coltrane has to offer." Giovanni Russonello of The New York Times gave a positive review to both the performance on the album as well as its production, pointing out how, "Garrison’s bass is turned up rather high, giving the entire session a pulpy, magnetic aura"; he additionally called the recordings an "outlier" in Coltrane's catalogue that is "more like a favor to a young filmmaker than an expression of where Coltrane was creatively in that moment". For The Times, Chris Pearson, gave the album three out of five stars, calling the music "beautifully recorded" but noting that this is a historical artifact for its purpose as a soundtrack. The Guardian named it Jazz Album of the Month, with John Fordham giving it four out of five stars for being "a fascinating hybrid of Coltrane’s song-based earlier methods, and his incandescently devotional late period". Pitchfork named this the best new reissue of September 2019, with Nate Chinen giving it 8.4 out of 10, writing, "There’s no serious argument to be made for its integrity as a proper album; there’s too much redundancy for that, and no way of knowing what Coltrane would have wanted. But the strongest moments on this offhanded, unintended artifact are remarkable even by the standards of this band at this juncture, and the historical record will reflect that."
