Mostly Coltrane is a tribute from a pianist who held the piano chair in John Coltrane's quartet at the start of 1960, just before McCoy Tyner. "In January, February and March of 1960, I was privileged to work with John Coltrane at the Jazz Gallery in New York City," Steve Kuhn writes in his note to the album. Almost half a century later he went back to that music with his trio and the tenor saxophonist Joe Lovano. They follow Coltrane from the standards of 1960 to pieces issued only after his death.
The trio is Kuhn's long-standing group with David Finck on double bass and Joey Baron on drums, already heard on ECM in Remembering Tomorrow. Lovano plays tenor saxophone and also the tárogató. He grew up inside Coltrane's sound, and his father, a saxophonist, had jammed with Coltrane in Cleveland in the early 1950s. The quartet recorded in December 2008 at Avatar Studios in New York, with James Farber as engineer and Manfred Eicher producing. ECM's notes stress that this is an integrated quartet and never a soloist with rhythm section.
The programme opens with three Coltrane pieces from 1964 and 1965. Welcome, from Kulu Sé Mama, begins with a quiet piano introduction, and Crescent becomes a slow, restrained ballad, far from the intensity of the 1964 original. Kuhn also returns to tunes he played at the Jazz Gallery: I Want To Talk About You is for trio alone, and Central Park West is a duet for piano and tenor. Configuration and Jimmy's Mode come from material that surfaced only in 1994, on the posthumous album Stellar Regions, and push the band toward freer playing. Kuhn adds two solo piano pieces of his own.
In JazzTimes, Thomas Conrad wrote that "the fascination of this album is to hear them, in their maturity, venture in and out of Coltrane's spiritual domain". Mike Hobart of the Financial Times noted that "Kuhn's light touch and suspended harmonies differ from the fire-and-brimstone spirituality of the final model, but still capture the intensity". In PopMatters, Will Layman began his review tired of Coltrane tributes and ended by crediting Kuhn's choice of material with a sustained mood of gravity. The French magazines Jazzman and Classica both made it their Choc du mois.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2099, first released on 19 June 2009. The booklet carries Kuhn's liner note and a photograph of Coltrane by Herb Snitzer.
