Lush Life

Coltrane recorded this Billy Strayhorn ballad in 1958 for Prestige, and the version is famous partly for what it lacks: the sessions produced a take with vocals from Johnny Hartman that never materialized here, leaving the tenor to carry a lyric it can only imply. That absence gives the performance its strange weight. The tune itself is Strayhorn's precocious masterpiece of world-weariness — cocktail bars, jaded conversation, someone burying a wound in gin and company — and its harmony is famously treacherous, chromatic and restless, refusing the resolutions a standard usually grants. Coltrane doesn't attack it. He plays with an unusual tenderness, tone rounded and slightly husky, phrasing across the barline, letting the changes bloom rather than sprinting through them as he would soon do on Giant Steps. Red Garland's piano sets the room's dim lighting; Paul Chambers walks with unhurried gravity. What emerges is a portrait of sophistication as a defense mechanism, played by a man who would spend the next decade dismantling defenses. This is late-night music in the literal sense: after midnight, one lamp, no company you need to talk to, a drink you're not really drinking. It rewards volume low and attention high.