Live in Seattle is an album by jazz musicianJohn Coltrane on Impulse! Records, recorded in 1965 and released posthumously in 1971. The original Double LP issue was expanded to 2 CDs for the reissue. The Allmusic review by Scott Yanow comments: "Coltrane experts know that 1965 was the year that his music became quite atonal and, with the addition of Sanders, often very violent. This music, therefore, is not for fans of Coltrane's earlier sheets of sound period or for those who prefer jazz as melodic background music... This is innovative and difficult music that makes today's young lions sound very old-fashioned in comparison".
Background
During September 14 - 26, 1965, the John Coltrane Quartet played an engagement at the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco. Saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, whose music Coltrane admired, and who had previously recorded with Coltrane on Ascension, went to hear the group and was invited to sit in. According to Sanders, "he told me then that he was thinking of changing the group and changing the music, to get different sounds. He asked me to play with him." At the same time, multi-instrumentalist Donald Garrett, who had played with Coltrane's group in 1961 as a second bassist, was also asked to sit in. At the end of the two week gig, both Sanders and Garrett were asked to join the band, and accompanied it to the next engagement, September 27 - October 2 at The Penthouse in Seattle. During the stay in Seattle, Coltrane elected to document the newly-expanded group at his own expense, hiring recording engineer Jan Kurtis for the September 30 gig. Roughly 3 1/2 hours of music were recorded that evening, and, roughly four years after Coltrane's death, four pieces, Cosmos, Out Of This World, Evolution, and Tapestry In Sound, were selected to appear on the original double LP, with Out Of This World and Evolution split over two sides. Two additional pieces, Body And Soul and an incomplete version of Afro Blue, were added for the CD release, and the previously-split Out Of This World and Evolution were restored to create continous versions. Most of the remaining music recorded that evening was released on CD by RLR in 2011 on The Unissued Seattle Broadcast, which was created from a fan's recording of a radio broadcast, "Jazz from the Penthouse" on KING-FM, hosted by Jim Wilke. It contains four tracks: Untitled Original, which ends with a bass duet that apparently precedes Cosmos from the original disc in terms of the actual running order; an incomplete continuation of the version of Afro Blue that appeared on the original CD; Lush Life; and an incomplete version of My Favorite Things. The following day, October 1, Coltrane's group, along with Joe Brazil, went to Jan Kurtis's studio, Camelot Sound Studios in Lynnwood, WA, to record Om.
