In 1965 John Coltrane was experimenting in a number of directions, regularly augmenting his long-standing quartet with McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, and Elvin Jones. He began a West Coast tour in the fall with tenor saxophonist Pharoah Sanders as a regular member of the band, and in Seattle he added Donald Garrett, playing both bass clarinet and bass, and drummer Frank Butler to the group before heading to Los Angeles to perform and record. The title track was composed by Juno Lewis, a singer and percussionist who brought a strongly African element into the expanding band. The chanted vocal and layered rhythms create one of Coltrane's most evocative performances, at once tranquil and potent, a gorgeous tapestry of percussion and reed sonorities that suggests a ritual. "Selflessness," recorded with the same group minus Lewis, is one of Coltrane's most luminous themes, a brief and exalted melody that's repeated and gradually expanded into a kind of serene chaos. The developing relationship between Coltrane and Sanders is particularly arresting, the two saxophonists both mirroring and expanding one another's ideas in stunning joint improvisations. These tracks are balanced by some classic quartet pieces recorded a few months earlier. --Stuart Broomer
