Personnel: John Coltrane (tenor saxophone); McCoy Tyner (piano); Jimmy Garrison (bass); Roy Haynes (drums).

Producer: Bob Thiele.

Reissue producer: Michael Cuscuna.

Recorded at the Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey on April 29, 1963 and May 26, 1965. Includes liner notes by David Wild.

Digitally remastered by Robert Stoughton.

DEAR OLD STOCKHOLM gathers together studio sessions the Coltrane Quartet made with the great drummer Roy Haynes who was filling in for the remarkable Elvin Jones. "I always tried to get him when Elvin Jones wasn't able to make it," Coltrane explained. The resulting studio sessions, now gathered together on one disc for the first time, paint an intriguing sonic alternative to the great Coltrane Quartet of the '60s.

Where Elvin Jones' is all rolling thunder and elemental energy, Haynes' polyrhythmic style is more stacatto and jagged. What both drummers had in common was an uncanny intuition for orchestrating Coltrane's epic melodic inventions, and setting up a freewheeling rhythmic counterpoint to his most complex passages. "One Down, One Up" and "After The Crescent" are among the most expansive, lyrical group improvisations in the entire Coltrane canon, as Haynes shadows each tenor motif with complex variations that inspire Coltrane to dig down deeper. And yet it is the work of the quartet as a whole on the poignant ballad "After The Rain" that lingers in the listener's imagination long after the disc has stopped. And for long time fans of the Impulse! recordings, the exceptional quality of GRP's recent digital remasterings reveal details hidden in the grooves for many years.

Q (6/93, p.117) - 4 Stars - Excellent - "...On `One Up, One Down' he displays combative form on the fringes of free jazz but it is the ballads that still amaze with their beauty. The descriptive `After The Rain' is a powerful, understated and integrated performance..."

Down Beat (6/93, p.44) - 4.5 Stars - Very Good Plus - "...The change of drummers apparently doesn't affect Coltrane at all. You can hardly go wrong by this stage of Coltrane's career...he had become a remarkably dependable improviser in terms of quality..."

JazzTimes (5/93, p.62) - "...One need search no further than the superb cadenza Coltrane tags onto the title track to know that you've made a wise investment....The latter three tracks...were captured with Trane peering over the edge of the precipice, not long before the seminal free improvisations of the ASCENSION session..."

Musician (6/93, p.92) - "...generates a unified portrait of Coltrane in the spring of '63 and '65...and does it swing...you get a good idea about how inside Trane's outside really was..."