![]() The album’s unconventional sax/drums format wasn’t entirely new for Coltrane. ![]() Reviewing the album for Rolling Stone, Stephen Davis called it “plainly astonishing” and likened the musicians’ interplay to “a two-man vulcanism.” The tapes sat unreleased until the fall of 1974 when four of the pieces – “Mars,” “Venus,” “Jupiter” and “Saturn” – came out under the title of Interstellar Space. The session, held on February 22nd, 1967, was among Coltrane’s last before his death from liver cancer that July. What resulted was a series of nakedly spiritual, often harshly ecstatic free-form duets between Coltrane’s tenor saxophone and Ali’s drums, each based only on a brief theme and most bookended by Coltrane’s ritualistic ringing of sleigh bells. “I was like, ‘Where’s everybody else?’ and said, ‘It’s just going to be you and me.'” ![]() “I went in there, and I was setting up, and I didn’t see Jimmy, I didn’t see Alice I didn’t see nobody else,” Ali recalled in 2003. Fifty years ago, when drummer Rashied Ali entered the Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, for his latest session with John Coltrane, he was surprised to find the rest of the saxophonist’s band absent.
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