How do you honour an occasion as momentous as the centennial of John Coltrane? It’s a question saxophonist Branford Marsalis had to ask himself when he was approached by Blue Note records with a commission to record a tribute to the legendary tenor man and innovator, who was born 100 years ago this September.

Marsalis was an obvious choice with past form. Back in 2001, he recorded a faithful and respectful version of all four parts of Coltrane’s timeless suite ‘A Love Supreme’ for his album ‘Footsteps of Our Fathers.’ More recently – with his quartet featuring pianist Joey Calderazzo, bassist Eric Revis and drummer Justin Faulkner – he proved himself adept at reinvigorating past classics with his 2025 Blue Note date, ‘Belonging’, a questing and intense reinterpretation of Keith Jarrett’s 1974 album of the same name.

But rather than diving right into some of Trane’s more challenging works, Marsalis had another idea. “I wanted to take a road less travelled,” he says. For his second recording for Blue Note as a leader, ‘Dedicated to You,’ Marsalis teams his hardworking quartet with vocalist Dianne Reeves to revisit ‘John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman,’ the 1963 album Trane
recorded with singer Hartman.

That original album occupies a curious place in Coltrane’s discography, and not just because his collaboration with Hartman was the only time he ever recorded as a leader with a vocalist. In the early 1960s, Coltrane was already forging ahead with new sounds that not every listener was ready for. Infamously, a live performance of Coltrane’s quartet plus
quixotic reeds-man Eric Dolphy was savaged in the November 1961 edition of Down Beat magazine by critic John Tynan, who described it as “anti-jazz.”

The story goes that Coltrane’s producer at Impulse! records, Bob Thiele, fearing that the saxophonist was in danger of alienating the public, suggested some mellower moods. It might not necessarily have been where Coltrane’s heart lay at that particular moment in his trajectory, but the idea birthed two stone cold classics for Impulse! in 1963: ‘Ballads’ and
‘John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman.’

Recorded in a single three-hour session on 7 March 1963, ‘John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman’ found Trane’s quartet with pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Jimmy Garrison and drummer Elvin Jones turning away from the pyrotechnics to accompany Hartman’s smooth baritone singing six standards and beloved tunes from the Great American Songbook including Billy Strayhorn’s ‘Lush Life’ and Irving Berlin’s ‘They Say It’s Wonderful.’ It is now considered one of the greatest vocal jazz albums of all time: a sumptuous showcase of breath-held restraint, sensitivity and emotional depth with every note and gesture played in service of the song, and Coltrane and Hartman achieving an astonishingly simpatico melding of timbre and phrasing.

For his 21st century tribute, Marsalis turned to Grammy-winning jazz vocalist Dianne Reeves. “There is a magic sound within sound that we call ‘the thing,’ and Dianne’s got the thing,” he says. “She’s heard a lot of people, which attracts me, and she adds so much emotion to whatever she does.” It was a challenge Reeves embraced with gusto.
“Listening to all the great singers coming up, I learned that they stood in the band, not in front of the band,” Reeves says. “They saw themselves as co-creators of the sound.

The members of Branford’s quartet and I all speak the same language, and we all came up with ideas.” Sure enough, ‘Dedicated to You’ feels like a five-way collaboration. Reeves brings a languid elan and deep presence to the tunes that encourage diamond-pointed listening and interaction from the quartet. In Marsalis’s tenor sound – warmer and less
biting than Trane’s – she finds the perfect foil.

Rather than being a just a straight run-through of its predecessor, ‘Dedicated to You’ also engages in some gently playful subversion. “The original album used a consistent form – piano intro, double time after the vocal, arpeggios at the end,” Marsalis observes. “We didn’t want to put the tunes in a box. We played each one together, then decided what had to be added or taken away.”

On ‘Lush Life,’ Reeves’s initial vocal statement gives way to a dreamy fantasia for just saxophone and piano that perfectly captures the song’s mood of heartbroken late-night loneliness. ‘My One and Only Love’ is a duet for voice and piano, with Reeves sounding vulnerable yet resolute, backed by Calderazzo’s melancholy romanticism. In every case, the arrangements strive for the same deep sense of inhabiting the song that Coltrane brought to the 1963 session. “He was sympathetic to the songs he played and that’s our goal,” says Marsalis, “to be sympathetic to the music.”

Interspersed with the six songs originally captured on ‘John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman,’ Marsalis’s quartet also stretch out on six Coltrane instrumentals from around the same period. ‘Big Nick’ (originally recorded in 1962) receives both trio and quartet renditions, strolling proudly with Marsalis switching to soprano sax and flitting between swooning, Sidney Bechet-style bends and rapid runs evoking Coltrane’s famous ‘sheets of sound’ technique. ‘Central Park West’ (from 1964’s ‘Coltrane’s Sound’) is a gorgeously measured meditation. ’26-2’ (first cut during the same sessions as ‘Coltrane’s Sound’) is joyfully hard-swinging, with Marsalis’s tenor full-bodied and the whole band relishing the
chance to burn.

“John Coltrane, in his genius, developed a parallel sonic and intellectual understanding of ecumenical, 40s swing, and early R&B and post-bop, to create a sound that, while intellectually challenging, is emotionally stimulating,” says Marsalis. “His
embodiment of all these sides of music is what any musician – of any style – should strive to achieve. It was our privilege to honour his contributions to jazz. We hope to have done justice to his ideals.”

_{Header Image: BranfordMarsalis&DianneReeves I Photo: Shervin Lainez ©Blue Note Records}

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Daniel Spicer is a Brighton-based writer, broadcaster and poet with bylines in The Wire, Jazzwise, Songlines and The Quietus. He’s the author of books on German free jazz legend Peter Brötzmann and Turkish psychedelic music.

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