At the age of 11 or 12 I was really obsessed with Hendrix. I had all these biographies, and I had just started to play the drums, so was really into Mitch Mitchell, Hendrix’s drummer. I was reading about his influences, and one of them was Elvin Jones. And then I read that Hendrix was listening to John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman amongst other things, and I remember going into a record store after school, and it wasn’t a very good record store, but they had a Japanese input of the Coltrane album Live At The Village Vanguard on Impulse. And that was the first Coltrane record I bought. I remember buying it and seeing on the back that Elvin Jones was John Coltrane’s drummer, and it was like this huge eureka moment.
I came home and just absolutely obsessed over this record. And probably within six months, I had a huge Rolling Stones collection – bootlegs and loads and loads of LPs. My friends and I carried all these records to this used record store in Sydney, and I traded them for anything that had the Impulse logo on it – mostly Coltrane. When I traded, I pretty much only got his 60s stuff, from the beginning of the classic quartet to the last period of his life, but I didn’t know the difference between any of these things at the time.
But I really do remember lying on my bed with my eyes closed with headphones on listening to Live In Seattle. And there’s a track called ‚Out Of This World‘, which was also on that first Coltrane album I bought, but it was a really far out version with Pharaoh Sanders and Don Rafael Garrett. I think they recorded Om the night before, and, and apparently, they were on LSD when they made that, and when they made this live record. I didn’t understand what was going on, but something about it was super intoxicating, and I remember lying on my bed, listening to it over, and over, and over again. My parents thought I was insane.
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