John Coltrane - Ballads (Verve Essential Vinyl Series)

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Verve Essential Vinyl Series 140-gram black vinyl
Release Date Oct 9, 2026
Pre-order Regular price $20.00
Pre-order Release Date: Oct 09, 2026
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Product details

  • Label Verve
  • Format 1 x Vinyl LP, Album, Reissue, 140g, Black
  • Format details Verve Essential Vinyl Series 140-gram black vinyl
  • Media 1 x Vinyl
  • Release date Oct 9, 2026
  • Originally released 1963
  • Region US
  • Genres Jazz
  • UPC 600574213037
Releases Oct 9, 2026

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Verve Essential Vinyl Series 140-Gram Black Vinyl LP

This is the Verve Essentials pressing of Ballads: a single 140-gram black LP mastered from high-resolution digital masters and housed in the original Impulse! cover art. Verve Records and UMe created the Verve Essentials series for Verve's 70th anniversary, drawing on the catalogs of Verve and its family of labels. Ballads is one of the five titles in the opening wave, alongside records by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, Stan Getz and João Gilberto, Billie Holiday, and Charles Mingus. The label presents every Essentials title in a standard sleeve as a non-limited edition, so the run stays in print rather than selling through once.

Ballads first appeared on Impulse! in 1963, catalog A-32 in mono and AS-32 in stereo, produced by Bob Thiele and engineered by Rudy Van Gelder at his Englewood Cliffs studio. Coltrane plays tenor saxophone with McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass and Elvin Jones on drums. Reggie Workman holds the bass chair on "It's Easy to Remember," the one track cut earlier, on December 21, 1961, and first issued in 1962 as the B-side of Coltrane's "Greensleeves" single. Five of the eight pieces come from a session on November 13, 1962, with "What's New" and "Nancy (With the Laughing Face)" recorded on September 18 of that year.

Critic Gene Lees wrote that the quartet had never played these standards before the sessions. They arrived with music-store sheet music, talked through each tune, wrote out the changes and rehearsed for about half an hour before recording. Every piece on the album is a single take except "All or Nothing at All." Ballads entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2008.

Tracklist

Side A

  1. Say It (Over And Over Again)
  2. You Don't Know What Love Is
  3. Too Young To Go Steady
  4. All Or Nothing At All

Side B

  1. I Wish I Knew
  2. What's New
  3. It's Easy To Remember
  4. Nancy (With The Laughing Face)

UPC: 600574213037
Label: Verve
Release Date: 10.9.26
Format: Vinyl