Jazz / Classic Jazz; Bop; West Coast Jazz; Third Stream; Standards; Soul-Jazz; Progressive Jazz; Progressive Big Band; New Orleans Jazz; Modern Free; Modern Creative; Modern Big Band; Modal Music; Early Creative; Experimental Big Band; Hard Bop; Jazz Blues; Latin Jazz; Cuban Jazz; Ballads; Avant-Garde Jazz; Afro-Cuban Jazz
Recorded: Feb 1961-Apr 2004
Orange and black. Fire and ebony. Fury and pride.
From 1961 through 1976, Impulse Records wore its signature colors proudly and raised its exclamation point high, producing albums with hinged, brightly hued covers that opened wide, attracting generations of listeners into an exciting and far-ranging world of improvised music. The sound in those grooves bristled with the spirit of the Sixties, swinging with the musical experimentation and political outrage of the day. To many who made it through the era, the label was an inherent part of the velocity, keeping pace with - and at times predicting - the sound and politics that lay ahead.
The label's commitment to music of (apparently) minimal commercial potential can be traced to the influence of one singular musician who could steer a major commercial enterprise like Impulse Records into its mission and musical identity. His music remains the best-selling part of the Impulse catalog and the label's most enduring point of recognition. His name is John Coltrane.
In 1967, the year the celebrated saxophonist died at forty - and at the apogee of Impulse's golden first fifteen years - the label had already been dubbed "The House That Trane Built" by a coterie of musicians and music lovers. By then, Coltrane had far transcended mere jazz popularity. His distinctively dark, searching tone and frenetic delivery were reaching a wider range of ears than any other jazz player, save for his former boss, Miles Davis. His Impulse albums had sold tens of thousands of copies - over a hundred thousand in the case of A Love Supreme - attracting a younger generation that also gloried in the sound of rock, folk, electric blues, and other breaking styles of the period.
---Ashley Kahn |
