Stories of Standards: “Moments Notice”

Tune in weekday mornings for Stories of Standards to hear our favorite versions of “Moment’s Notice.” Rodney Franks present Stories of Standards Monday through Friday at 7:50 and 8:50 a.m. starting Monday, August 12!

Stories of Standards is sponsored by ListenUp – If you love music, you’ll love ListenUp.

“Moment’s Notice” was featured on John Coltrane’s 1957 recording “Blue Train”, with John Coltrane on tenor saxophone, Paul Chambers on double bass , Kenny Drew on piano, Curtis Fuller on trombone, Philly Joe Jones on drums and Lee Morgan on trumpet. While Coltrane only recorded it once, other soloists as well as listeners have regarded it as a standard ever since.

John William Coltrane (23 Sept 1926-17 Jul 1967) grew up in North Carolina. Shortly after his twelfth birthday Coltrane’s father, aunt and grandparents all died within the space of a few months, after which he was raised by his mother and a close cousin. He initially played clarinet and alto horn before acquiring his first saxophone, an alto. He joined the navy in August 1945, where he became one of a very few Navy men to serve as a musician in the base swing band without having first been granted musician’s rating. By the end of his Navy service he was acting as a leader in the band and had already made his first recordings. He then moved back to Philadelphia, played with a number of bands, and switched to tenor saxophone in 1947. During this period he was introduced to bop, with a major development resulting from seeing Charlie Parker perform on June 5, 1945. In a 1960 interview he said, “the first time I heard Bird play, it hit me right between the eyes.” Coltrane went on to play with Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis and many others, sometimes freelance, sometimes in bands that he formed. He switched from plastic mouthpieces to metal mouthpieces with a stiff #5 reed. Among John Coltrane’s many honors and awards are induction into the Down Beat “Jazz Hall of Fame” in 1965, a posthumous Grammy for Best Jazz Solo Performance on the album “Bye Bye Blackbird”, the 1991 tribute to Miles Davis, the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997, a special Pulitzer Prize in 2007 which cited his “masterful improvisation, supreme musicianship and iconic centrality to the history of jazz” and induction into the North Caroline Music Hall of Fame in 2009. His spiritual searches are recognized in his veneration by the African Orthodox Church in San Francisco, which incorporates his music and lyrics into its liturgy.