Jazz
“The Tiberi Tapes”, the live John Coltrane recordings that saxophonist Frank Tiberi secretly made in Philadelphia and New York clubs from 1960 onwards, came out on Impulse! on 6 November. Eleven pieces, out on four LPs, three CDs and digitally, it’s the centrepiece of Coltrane 100, the programme marking the centenary of the saxophonist, born on 23 September 1926.
Tiberi carried a portable reel-to-reel recorder in a satchel, with the microphone hidden under his coat. “I had all of them,” he says of Coltrane’s albums in the essay by music historian Ashley Kahn that comes with the release. “To me they were not anywhere near the kind of playing and inspiration that he would display at a club.” He did it to learn: “My main purpose of recording him was to get information and harmonic values, so that I could be able to really play myself.” By the time Coltrane died, in 1967, Tiberi had more than eighty reels.
The set opens with two takes of “Giant Steps” at 226 and 262 beats per minute, followed by “Thing in D Flat”, “Lover”, “West 42nd St.”, “Impressions”, an untitled original in F minor, “Satellite”, “Good Bait”, “Resolution” and “It’s Easy to Remember”. From the whole archive, Tiberi’s own favourite is a long “Satellite”, “where he really builds it up, and by the end of the 18 minutes, the audience is just screaming!”, he told the Boston Globe.
Tiberi is 97. He joined Woody Herman’s big band in 1969, became its director shortly before Herman’s death in 1987, and joined the faculty of Berklee College of Music in 1995, where he used the tapes with his students. Joe Lovano, who joined Herman’s band in 1976, remembers Tiberi putting the headphones over his ears on the tour bus so he could hear the tapes.
A complete edition, “The Tiberi Tapes: The Complete Recordings”, gathers more than eighty performances and nearly twenty-six hours of music on a USB drive, with an LP and a hardback book. It’s limited to 750 hand-numbered copies and ships in early 2027.
Text by Aina Torrents