The Best of John Coltrane

I would be guilty of gross hyperbole if I asserted that John Coltrane has been largely forgotten by all except jazz fans, but there's little doubt that his place in history has been considerably obscured due to the shadow cast by his contemporary and one-time bandmate, Miles Davis.

Go into your local megastore, upstairs into the jazz section, check out the size and volume of the shelf space devoted to Davis, and then compare it with that allocated to Coltrane, and you'll see what I mean. Like Miles, he is credited with having recorded one unparalleled, hear-it-and-die Classic Album (A Love Supreme); unlike Miles, not that much else of his back catalogue is deemed worthy of serious investigation. It's true that Coltrane was not quite the restless innovator that Davis was, and nor was he as interesting a figure in terms of his private life, but as the greatest saxophonist of all time, he surely deserves better.

Generalising wildly, his work can be divided into three main categories: straightforward quartet/quintet uptempo bebop, reflective ballads, and savagely experimental avant garde material. This compilation starts off perfectly with 'Blue Train', a superbly languid stroll-along which Trane apparently wrote in order to evoke the smooth glide of train travel. The main motif, a five-note riff with horns, sax and bass all chiming together in tandem, is unforgettable after even one listen. Three cuts from Giant Steps follow it, including the busy, quick-stepping title track and the similarly upbeat 'Mr PC'.

Yet, for someone who received much criticism during his career for adopting a supposedly abrasive tone when playing, Trane possessed an awesome lightness of touch on his instrument. It's to the fore on both his rendition of the Rodgers and Hammerstein standard 'My Favorite Things' and his version of Cole Porter's 'Every Time We Say Goodbye', where each note seems to almost sing out with sweet melancholia.

The second disc of this two-CD set opens with a couple of Coltrane's more, shall we say, challenging pieces. 'Chasin' The Trane' and the wretchedly self-indulgent 'India' are both perfect examples of what could ensue when he was given too much leeway in a studio (and you should hear the free-form tripe he recorded with his wife Alice in the mid-'60s).

Mostly, though, disc two is night music: slow, lovelorn ballads which get where they want to go at their own pace. The pick of the bunch is arguably Trane's duet with Johnny Hartman, a singer whose voice is redolent of a thousand lazy smoky evenings spent killing time for no particular reason. Worthy of mention, too, is his famous take on Duke Ellington's 'In A Sentimental Mood', a track which has surely soundtracked countless seductions in the homes of thousands of middle-class African-Americans.

Yet the final track is worth the price tag on its own. 'Acknowledgement', the opening movement from Trane's 1964 classic A Love Supreme, famously opens with a curlicued saxophone riff accompanied by cymbals gently shimmering in the background. Martin Carr of The Boo Radleys (a huge Trane fan who named his band's third album Giant Steps as a tribute) once described it as the musical equivalent of a breeze of wind coming in through a sunlit window and billowing the curtains.

The only problem with including it on this compilation is that, when it ends, you're left crying out for its three companion pieces to follow it in sequence. No matter. As a tribute to one of the most gifted musicians of the century, this compendium fits the bill almost perfectly.