John Coltrane Quartet - "Afro Blue"

Sean having set the stage by posting a six hour song on Friday, I now follow suit with this, the shortest cut off my favourite release of 2005, "Afro Blue" from John Coltrane's One Down, One Up: Live at the Half Note. Recorded in the Spring of '65, just after Coltrane's year of unsurpassed brilliance, this live set showcases the classic Coltrane Quartet in top form, pushed stylistically beyond what they had done on Crescent and A Love Supreme, right up to their limit, as it would turn out. These are longer, freer, more exhaustive investigations than the band or almost anyone else had done previously. Coltrane does not cease to surprise - just as you feel he has explored all a theme has to offer, he will approach it from a new, more oblique angle, showing you something about the song that was there the whole time, that you'd never heard but that you'd felt. Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones provide an erratic, tense heartbeat, while McCoy Tyner furiously bangs out storms on the piano. When the radio announcer's voice interrupts the end of the song, we are presented with a very strange juxtaposition indeed: the immanent, earth-bound voice of a radio dee-jay and the transcendent, inter-stellar sounds of the best band of all time.

The band would take on a new form before the end of '65. Where Coltrane was going next he would need a drummer who would abandon traditional rhythms altogether, and horn players whose fluid and continuous shredding and skronking would provide a bed and a foil for his experiments. For me though, this moment, this night at the Half Note, is the high point of an arc, the lowest points of which themselves exist on a higher plane. [Buy]

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Arthel "Doc" Watson - "Hicks' Farewell"

Arthel "Doc" Watson is known primarily as a master of flat-picked, rather milquetoast country music. But here, accompanied by a lone scratching fiddle, he unflinchingly examines his own mortality. Soon he will die, and though he will miss his wife, children, and friends for the short time he is separated from them, those he loves will come to join him soon enough, and for all eternity. He is absolutely sure of this. His voice is rich with bitter herbs, wet grass, moss, dirt, ash. [Buy]