Impulse Records was Coltrane's last record label, when
his music was at its most hair-raisingly avant garde.
The label performed an invaluable service to posterity
by giving Trane total creative control of his recordings,
letting him pretty much record whatever he wanted with
whoever he wanted. It wasn't just an act of altruistic
artistic patronage; Impulse was able to continue to release
new beautifully-recorded Coltrane material for years after
the great one's tragically early death. Coltrane wasn't
naming his compositions during the later years, and on
the posthumous records, it fell to Alice Coltrane to pick
titles. She had an unfortunate thing for astrology, so
from just looking at the late Impulse Trane albums, you'd
think they were new age music to play during yoga class.
Nothing could be further from the truth, unless you go
to an extremely hip yoga studio. Those albums with the
astronomical names are magnificent works of art, but they
aren't for the faint-hearted. The most approachable one
is Interstellar Space, an album of duets between Coltrane
and drummer Rashied Ali. Because Trane is the only melodic
and harmonic voice, it's much easier to follow his improvisational
lines than when he's thrashing it out against a band.
Venus
Those gnarly late-period tunes like Venus sound random
and chaotic, but they aren't. Lewis
Porter's highly-recommended biography John Coltrane: His
Life And Music has a whole section that analyzes and
discusses Venus, revealing it to be an intricately (though
asymmetrically) structured piece of music. The track named
Stellar Regions on the album of the same name, by the
way, is Venus, played faster, brighter and with piano
and bass.
Stellar Regions
Why Alice Coltrane gave it a different name is anyone's
guess. Anyway, here's my hip-hop version. Enjoy.
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