On Saturday night, Nov. 29 (two days after Thanksgiving), the 2025-26 season of the San Diego Symphony’s “Jazz @ The Jacobs” concert series opens with trumpeter Gilbert Castellanos at the head of a stacked sextet interpreting John Coltrane’s one and only recording for Blue Note Records, 1957’s iconic Blue Train.
Joining Castellanos are A-list musicians from both coasts: Brian Levy, the director of SDSU’s jazz studies program, plays tenor sax; Mike Gurrola (Eric Reed, Benny Green, Terry Gibbs, Benny Golson) plays bass; Ivan Malespin (Clayton-Hamilton Jazz Orchestra) plays trombone; Grammy nominee Victor Gould (Jeremy Pelt, Jazzmeia Horn, Black Art Jazz Collective, Wallace Roney) plays piano; and rhythmic royalty in the form of Joe Farnsworth (Eric Alexander, Harold Mabern, Cedar Walton, Benny Golson) plays drums.
Together they’ll revisit the period during which John Coltrane went from promising to pre-eminent.
After kicking the heroin addiction that got him booted from his first stint in Miles Davis’s band in the spring of 1957, Coltrane kicked his musical development into overdrive, first by joining Thelonious Monk’s quartet for a transformative six-month run at The Five Spot in midsummer, then by pumping out a voluminous amount of sides as a leader for the legendary Prestige label, which he’d continue to do like a man possessed through 1958.
But September 1957 marked a real plot point.
From left: Curtis Fuller, Coltrane, Donald Byrd, recording session for “Sonny's Crib.” (Blue Note, 1957). Photo by Francis Wolff.
'Trane kicked off the month as a sideman on pianist Sonny Clark’s iconic Blue Note release, Sonny’s Crib. He’d guested before on others’ Blue Note sessions — Johnny Griffin’s A Blowing Session with Hank Mobley five months earlier — and would appear, just two months later, as a featured guest of Monk's quartet at Carnegie Hall… but he’d never led one.
And after September 15th, 1957, he’d never lead one again.
But, for a one and done, Blue Note Records sure got their money’s worth with Blue Train. Blue Train was so impactful that — together with Sonny’s Crib — it’s considered the epitome of Blue Note’s hard bop sound. Paul Chambers and Curtis Fuller carried over from the Clark-led session, while Coltrane added Kenny Drew on piano, Philly Joe Jones on drums, and a fellow Philadelphian on trumpet who’d just turned 19 two months prior — Lee Morgan.
The photo that became the cover of “Blue Train,” 1957. Photo by Francis Wolff.
There are certainly more uniformly celebrated Coltrane recordings — Giant Steps, A Love Supreme, and virtually anything else produced by the Classic Quartet of Coltrane, Tyner, Jones, and Garrison — but Blue Train is Coltrane’s first truly independent musical statement. And, like Kobe without Shaq, Coltrane demonstrated the capacity to carry out an iconic session just fine without Miles Davis.
Presenting an historic musical flag-planting of that magnitude requires contemporary musicians who not only know how to say something on the bandstand but have total control over what they’re saying. With a rhythm section of Gould, Gurrola, and Farnsworth and a front line of Levy, the electrifying young trombonist Malespin, and Castellanos reprising a role originated by Lee Morgan, there won’t be a better jazz repertory concert this holiday season.
Tickets and more info HERE.
