VA - Red Hot On Impulse (1994)

Something of a bachelor-pad offering for avant-garde jazz fans, Red Hot on Impulse features exotically transcendent meditations by Alice Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, John Coltrane, and Archie Shepp. And while Coltrane's relatively sober "Acknowledgement" section from A Love Supreme is the odd song out in ways, the numbers by Sanders and Alice Coltrane overflow with spiritually fired solos, Far-Eastern touches, and layers of horns, percussion, and strings in Afro-cosmic proportions. The 1970-1971 tracks by Alice Coltrane are of particular interest, since up until the release of this compilation, the three albums they come from had been mostly out of circulation. She not only plays harp, piano, tamboura, and organ, but also shares the spotlight with a swami on an amazingly over-the-top version of "A Love Supreme." Sanders' weighs in with classics like "The Creator Has a Master Plan" (edited down from the lengthy original) and "Astral Traveling," aided nicely by the likes of Cecil McBee, Lonnie Liston Smith, Sonny Sharrock, James Spaulding, and Leon Thomas. Balancing out these lofty sides are relatively straightforward but passionate cuts by Charles Mingus, Max Roach, and Oliver Nelson. More a subjective sampler of jazz' spiritual terrain than a balanced introduction to Impulse's '60s jazz catalog.