The Lost Coltrane Reappears

What if there was no longer any need for a ‘lost and found’. That was my first thought as I read the recent stories about the release of a new album, entitled “Both Directions at Once: The Lost Album” by legendary jazz saxophonist John Coltrane and his quartet.

The story seems to be that Coltrane and his bandmates—pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Jimmy Garrison, and drummer Elvin Jones—had a single-day recording session at the Van Gelder studios in New Jersey. At the end of that day, Coltrane took what’s called a reference or session tape with him to his home in Queens, NY, where he told his wife Naima about it. The studio’s master tape itself was filed away and then given up for lost (or, as some reports say, that Impulse, the label Coltrane was recording for at the time, destroyed the original master tape as a cost-cutting move). Naima Coltrane’s family recently uncovered the reference tape and let the label know of its existence. The album, which is to be released on June 29, contains seven tracks, two of which have never been heard before.

This is all great for jazz aficionados and people who like to find things that have been thought lost, though I can only think that if Wasabi hot cloud storage had been around in 1963, none of this would have happened! The entire session would have been stored in the cloud, retrieved freely by the musicians and the studio, and not lost to time. This is the Wasabi value proposition of cloud storage as a commodity—a world without lost and founds and where great art will never again be forgotten or discarded.