There are so many musicians, legendary and not, that I deeply admire and who are gone. I don’t remember the birthdate of most of them, if I ever knew it. I know Kurt Cobain was born on February 20, but for whatever reason the date comes and goes and just passes me by.

For some reason, this doesn’t happen with John Coltrane. September 23, his birthday, is a date I always seem to remember. Every year, on that day, I usually do something about it, like spinning a record, reading an article or parts of a book, and so on. I already wrote about it once. I don’t even remember how it started. I think one particular year I found myself listening to Coltrane on his birthday (like many other days of the year, to be fair), and it just became a sort of ritual.

I wonder why him and not, for example, Miles, Freddie Hubbard, Mingus, or Hank Mobley, just to mention a few more players in the same niche I’m really fond of. Not to mention Charles Gayle, a ferocious tenor saxophonist who, as odd as it seems, was actually my gateway to jazz and is one of the musicians who mean the most to me. Perhaps it’s because Coltrane’s music, among other things, bridged the two jazz subgenres I’m fond of the most, hard bop and free, or it’s just that his tunes particularly resonate with me.

I only have a small selection of my records here where I live. Everything else is in a different country at the moment, and I had no Coltrane records to spin on what would have been his 100th birthday, so my plan for the anniversary was to go to my favourite local record store (just around the corner) and look for some Coltrane on vinyl to pick up.

I was quite surprised to find out that they only had four records. In comparison, there were probably 20 Miles Davis albums, so I wondered if, with the centennial coming, anyone else perhaps had the same idea and they’d been selling more Coltrane than usual lately. But no: with used records, it’s always a bit of a crapshoot.

The choice was fairly simple. The first record I came across was an Italian release with the widely bootlegged performance of ‘A Love Supreme’ at Antibes. That was easy to rule out, as it’s something I already have on at least a couple of CD releases, and I can easily do without it.

I was tempted by ‘Afro Blue Impressions’, a posthumous release on Pablo Live that mostly captures a 1963 Berlin concert, as the classic quartet with Tyner, Garrison, and Jones is my favourite line-up Coltrane played with. It might be my next purchase, as I decided to leave it there in favour of my two final contenders. They were two stone-cold classics that I never owned on vinyl, while their CD reissues are sitting miles away with the rest of my collection (and my personal criteria for choosing which albums I’m happy to own in two different media formats might be the subject of a whole post at some point).

One was an old pressing (but not an OG) of ‘Live At The Village Vanguard’; the other was ‘Live At Birdland’. Again, the choice was easy, because while inspecting ‘…Vanguard’ I noticed a couple of nasty scratches affecting one particular song. They might not have caused any skips, but certainly would have caused a lot of pops, and that explained why the record seemed a bit underpriced.

‘…Birdland’, on the other hand, wasn’t a particularly fancy edition — a circa-1982 UK reissue on Jasmine Records, officially licensed from MCA/Impulse — but it was in great condition and certainly does the job. As you probably know, the album is a masterpiece. Countless words have been written about it over the years, so it’s hard to write about it without being redundant. Let’s just say it’s one of the best snapshots of Coltrane’s classic quartet in their modal phase and, borrowing from a contemporary review in Record Mirror, the sound of “four musicians who become one”. Something that’s hard to argue with.