| Sun Ship | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
 | ||||
| Studio album by | ||||
| Released | April 16, 1971 | |||
| Recorded | August 26, 1965 | |||
| Studio | RCA Victor, New York City | |||
| Genre | Avant-garde jazz | |||
| Length | 42:28 | |||
| Label | Impulse! | |||
| Producer | Bob Thiele, John Coltrane | |||
| John Coltrane chronology | ||||
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Sun Ship is a posthumously released jazz album by tenor saxophonist John Coltrane recorded on August 26, 1965. Along with First Meditations, recorded a week later, it was one of the last recording dates for Coltrane's "Classic Quartet" with McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, and Elvin Jones. (Tyner left Coltrane's group at the end of 1965 to form his own trio and to work with Tony Scott, and Jones departed in January 1966, joining Duke Ellington's band.[1]) The recording occurred shortly after a notable performance by the quartet, with Archie Shepp added as a second tenor player, at the DownBeat Jazz Festival at Soldier Field in Chicago, which was described by Ben Ratliff as "a famous breaking point — a Dylan-at-Newport, or a Rite of Spring,"[2] with music that he described as "jagged and vociferous... It aggravated a great part of the crowd, prompting, according to some witnesses, a large exodus."[2]
Sun Ship was one of the few albums John Coltrane's quartet recorded without sound engineer Rudy Van Gelder.[3] According to David A. Wild's liner notes for the 1995 reissue of the album, "the reason is lost in time, but most probably Van Gelder was booked and Coltrane refused to wait."[3]
Sun Ship: The Complete Session, a two-CD collection, was released in 2013.[4] On this release, "Amen" is the only song identical to its master take; the four other songs appear in unedited form, plus alternative takes of all five tracks, false starts, breakdowns, incomplete takes, and inserts.[4]
- ^ Porter, Lewis (1999). John Coltrane: His Life and Music. The University of Michigan Press. pp. 266–267.
- ^ a b Ratliff, Ben (2007). Coltrane: The Story of a Sound. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. p. 96.
- ^ a b Wild, David A. (1995). Sun Ship (liner notes). John Coltrane. Impulse!. IMPD-167.
- ^ a b Hale, James (February 2014) "Chasing an Illusive New Form". Down Beat. p. 84