John Coltrane & Johnny Hartman

As the Blizzard of 2011 was touching down here in Chicago, I was at Dusty Groove America on Ashland Ave, spending a warm hour listening to music, digging through the jazz bins, and generally not getting pelted with sleet to the face. It was wonderful. I listened to two Common albums and found my all-time favorite jazz ballad album, John Coltrane & Johnny Hartman, waiting in near-perfect condition for me. The album's warm tone was a perfect night-cap as fences were being blown over outside my window and a light, icy mist was spraying into my bathroom through a ceiling vent. I really hope those folks at Dusty Groove got home okay. They were open til 8.

Now, musically speaking, I generally favor consistency in tone over eclecticism; this album is an exemplar for how a group of artists can compliment each other in a fluid, balanced way. Hartman's voice is so warm and rich and it floats over McCoy Tyner's piano comps so unassumingly, just as Coltrane's horn does. From song to song, the musicians never waver in their uncanny pitch and melodic phrasing. Listening to Coltrane's ballad playing, you don't necessarily hear the "wall of sound" he was becoming known for after 1959's Giant Steps. There are very few complex harmonic structures. There is no playing "out". He riffs on the melody in short, effortless phrases, repeating powerful motifs that are short kernels of song in themselves.

Speaking of consistency, Coltrane's best ballad albums all appeared around when this one did, in 1962. As I learned from A.B. Spellman in the original liner notes, the albums that preceded John Coltrane & Johnny Hartman were Ballads and Duke Ellington & John Coltrane. To my mind, these three are companion pieces. Coltrane's career, like any great artist's, can be seen in movements, and this period in his evolution--after Giant Steps but before 1964's spiritual and harmonic behemoth A Love Supreme-- was devoted to melodic exploration within songs that gave him a lot of open space.

Pianist Tommy Flanagan once said, "Ballads are harder... because you've got so much more time." Countless other musicians have quipped a variant of the same message. Listening to John Coltrane & Johnny Hartman, it is staggering to hear how easy these guys make ballads feel.