Edition №14
On Thursday, 18 August 1966, Frank Kofsky took the train out to Deer Park, on Long Island, to interview John Coltrane. Coltrane met him at the station and drove to a shopping center nearby, and they talked in the car with a tape running.
Kofsky brought up what he called a change of pace after "Chasin' the Trane" and "Impressions": the album with Duke Ellington, Ballads, and the album with Johnny Hartman. "Whose ideas were those albums?" he asked. "Were they yours, or were they Impulse's?" Coltrane started with a mouthpiece, and the transcript keeps every stumble. "I did a foolish thing. I, I got dissatisfied with my mouthpiece [laughs] and I had some work done on this thing, and instead of making it better, it, it ruined it." He talked about "that certain fast thing that I was reaching for—that I couldn't get." Kofsky asked whether it had undermined his confidence. "It could have, it certainly could have."
Then he came to the songs. "I chose them, and they seemed to be something that were laying around in my mind—from my, [laughs] you know, youth, or somewhere—that I just had to do." Impulse, he said, wanted "a balanced sort of thing, a diverse sort of a catalogue."
In 1968 Kofsky interviewed Bob Thiele, who produced the record, and heard a different origin. "Ballads was really my idea to try and educate more listeners," Thiele told him, and the songs were "sort of a joint effort… I selected a few and he selected a few." Kofsky had now heard the story from both men, and their accounts do not agree.
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