Our brave new digital world has laid waste to the market for physical music media, but a few niche categories are still viable. One is historical jazz packages. Consider, for example, four albums of previously unreleased John Coltrane material. Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall (Blue Note, 2005), One Down, One Up (Impulse!, 2005), Offering (Impulse!/Resonance, 2015), and Both Directions at Once (Impulse!, 2018) were all huge sellers. They owned the “Historical” categories of the major jazz polls in their respective years.
Now there is another, Blue World. The backstory: In 1964, Coltrane (surprisingly) agreed to provide music for a Canadian film by Gilles Groulx, Le chat dans le sac. On June 24 of that year, he went into Van Gelder Studios with McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, and Elvin Jones and recorded eight takes of five tunes. Groulx used only 10 minutes of Coltrane’s music in his film, which quickly faded into cinematic obscurity.
