4. John ColtraneBlue Train
I bought this at university, mainly because of the cover art, I admit. I had a very small record collection then. You did in those days, and because you didn’t have a lot, you’d play every record again and again. My dad, Tom, was a bandleader, so there was a lot of jazz in the house. He liked people like Count Basie and Woody Herman, but he stopped at Coltrane. He found the modernism of it difficult, but I loved it. It felt like a big thing for me, when I was a precocious teenager. The first jazz I had found for myself! This is a real fork-in-the-road album for jazz, too, from 1958, a proper boundary between hard bop and the future. The three-part horn arrangements are something I tried to emulate on the first track of [Everything But The Girl’s 1984 album] Each And Every One, too – in my own way of course. The album was only his second, and him early on as a session leader. There’s so much life in it, and so many ideas.
