Plenty of John Coltrane’s early tunes have become jazz standards – Blue Train, Giant Steps, Naima, Moment’s Notice and so on – but few of his later works have found themselves in the rehearsal books. British saxophonist Denys Baptiste here attempts to redress this imbalance by re-contextualising eight compositions from Coltrane’s final years. Where the originals see Trane speaking in tongues and taking modal jazz into outer space, Baptiste and his band locate the core of each theme and gently ruminate. The skittery Afro-jazz of Dusk Dawn is turned into a gentle bossa nova; the muscular free bop of Transition becomes a rumbling, ambient ballad; the frenzied out-jazz of Ascent and Vigil are transformed into space-age funk; while Peace on Earth sounds – gloriously – like Prince’s Condition of the Heart, with pianist Nikki Yeoh doing a fine Alice Coltrane. Two original compositions, Neptune and Astral Trane, see Baptiste and fellow saxophonist Steve Williamson take their own Coltrane-style transcendental voyage.
