Few record labels have a catalogue quite like Impulse! Records.
Behind those instantly recognisable orange-and-black spines are some of the most extraordinary jazz albums ever recorded — from John Coltrane at his most spiritual and ambitious to landmark music by Charles Mingus, Alice Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders and more.
Impulse! launched in 1960, when ABC-Paramount asked trumpeter-turned-producer Creed Taylor to create a new jazz label. He signed Coltrane from Atlantic and established the striking visual identity that helped make Impulse! records unmistakable, complete with the famous slogan: “The New Wave in Jazz… Feel It on Impulse!”
Taylor soon left for Verve, but under his successor Bob Thiele the label became closely associated with some of the most adventurous jazz of the 1960s — much of it captured by Rudy Van Gelder at his studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey.
So where should you start? These ten essential Impulse! albums tell the story of one of the most important record labels in jazz — and include some of the greatest music it ever released.
1. Gil Evans, Out of the Cool (1961)
One of the first four albums Impulse! ever released, and the one that set the sonic template. Evans had spent the late fifties writing for Miles Davis on Columbia; here he had his own orchestra and no soloist to serve.
The centrepiece is “La Nevada”, fifteen and a half minutes built on a rhythmic vamp that Evans lets the band settle into rather than resolve, with Johnny Coles on trumpet and Ray Crawford on guitar carrying long stretches of it.
Ron Carter is on bass, and both Elvin Jones and Charlie Persip appear on drums across the sessions. Evans reportedly kept the band standing around in the studio between takes to preserve the loose feel, and you can hear it in the way the ensemble breathes.
2. John Coltrane, Africa/Brass (1961)
Coltrane’s first record for the label, made in May and June of 1961 with a brass ensemble of French horns, euphonium and tuba stacked behind his quartet.
McCoy Tyner devised the arrangements, with Eric Dolphy orchestrating his ideas for the larger ensemble and conducting. “Africa” runs on a bass ostinato played by two bassists at once, with Reggie Workman and Art Davis doubling to thicken it, and it is essentially a modal drone with sixteen brass players hanging above it.
The session also produced the soprano saxophone reading of “Greensleeves” that Coltrane kept in his live sets for years.
3. Duke Ellington & John Coltrane (1963)
The whole album was cut in a single session on 26 September 1962, with the two rhythm sections swapped in and out: Ellington’s bassist Aaron Bell and drummer Sam Woodyard on some tracks, Coltrane’s Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones on others.
Coltrane, who was thirty-six and used to working through multiple takes, asked to do “In a Sentimental Mood” again. Ellington, who was sixty-three, told him not to bother, on the grounds that he would only lose what he already had. The first take is the one on the record, and it is the most played thing either man made for Impulse!
4. Charles Mingus, The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady (1963)
Mingus arrived at Impulse! not long after the shambolic Town Hall concert of October 1962, which had been recorded before the music was finished and released against his wishes. He then made this in one day, 20 January 1963, with an eleven-piece band, and spent weeks afterwards cutting and overdubbing the tape, which almost nobody in jazz was doing at the time.
Charlie Mariano’s alto parts were added separately. Mingus refused to call it jazz and had it marketed as ethnic folk-dance music, the four tracks named for dancers rather than tunes. The gatefold carries two sets of liner notes: one by Mingus, and one by Dr Edmund Pollock, his psychotherapist, who writes about his patient’s music as a clinician.
5. John Coltrane, A Love Supreme (1965)
Recorded on 9 December 1964 by the quartet of Coltrane, Tyner, Garrison and Elvin Jones, in a single evening session. The four-part suite came with Coltrane’s own devotional poem printed inside the gatefold, and on the closing movement, “Psalm”, he plays the poem rather than a melody, following the words syllable by syllable on the tenor.
The day after the quartet session he brought Archie Shepp and a second bassist back in and recorded an expanded version, which Impulse! shelved and did not release until 2002. A Love Supreme became by some distance the best-selling record Coltrane made, and the money it generated is a large part of why the label could afford the four albums below.
6. Archie Shepp, Fire Music (1965)
Shepp got his Impulse! contract because Coltrane pushed Thiele to give him one. Most of Fire Music was cut on 16 February 1965 with a sextet including Ted Curson and Marion Brown. Five days later Malcolm X was shot at the Audubon Ballroom, and when Shepp returned to Van Gelder’s on 9 March he recorded “Malcolm, Malcolm — Semper Malcolm”, reciting his own poem over bowed bass from David Izenzon and drums from J.C. Moses.
The same album also contains an eight-and-a-half-minute version of “The Girl from Ipanema”, then about a year old and inescapable on American radio, which Shepp plays with total seriousness and no irony at all.
7. Albert Ayler, In Greenwich Village (1967)
Ayler was another Coltrane recommendation, and this is the record that captures him with an audience in front of him: two nights, one at the Village Vanguard in December 1966 and one at the Village Theatre in February 1967. The band includes his brother Donald on trumpet, Michel Samson on violin, Joel Freedman on cello and two bassists.
Ayler’s themes here are marches and hymns played at enormous volume, closer to a Salvation Army band than to bebop. He switches to alto for “For John Coltrane”. Coltrane died that July, and Ayler played at the funeral.
8. Pharoah Sanders, Karma (1969)
Sanders had joined Coltrane’s late group in 1965 and was still, in 1969, thought of by many listeners as the man making the noise on Ascension. Karma is mostly one piece, “The Creator Has a Master Plan”, running thirty-two minutes and opening with a simple, singable theme that Leon Thomas delivers half sung and half yodelled, using a technique he had picked up from listening to Central African pygmy music.
The band on “The Creator Has a Master Plan” has two bassists, Reggie Workman and Richard Davis, Billy Hart on drums, and Julius Watkins on French horn. It sold in numbers no free-jazz record was supposed to sell, and it gave the label a template for the spiritual jazz it released through the early seventies.
9. Alice Coltrane, Journey in Satchidananda (1971)
Alice Coltrane had inherited her husband’s contract and, by 1970, had also become a student of Swami Satchidananda, travelling to India with him. This album is named for him.
Most of it was recorded in the studio at her house in Dix Hills on Long Island, with Pharoah Sanders on soprano, Cecil McBee on bass and a tambura drone underneath. She plays harp, an instrument John Coltrane had ordered for her and which arrived after his death. The closing track was taped live at the Village Gate, with Vishnu Wood on oud and Charlie Haden on bass. It is the record most responsible for the fact that Impulse! is now a reference point for musicians who have never played a bar of hard bop.
10. Sons of Kemet, Your Queen Is a Reptile (2018)
Impulse! effectively went quiet after ABC sold its catalogue to MCA in 1979, and spent the following decades as a reissue imprint. Its revival in the late 2010s produced this: Shabaka Hutchings’ band of tenor saxophone, Theon Cross on tuba and two drummers, with every track titled for a woman offered as an alternative monarch.
The list runs from Hutchings’ own great-grandmother, Ada Eastman, through Harriet Tubman, Nanny of the Maroons, Angela Davis and Doreen Lawrence. It was shortlisted for the Mercury Prize, and it carried the orange and black spine for a generation of listeners who found the label through it rather than through Coltrane.
What didn’t make the list
Ten is a cruel number for a catalogue this deep. Coltrane alone could fill it, and leaving out Ballads, Crescent, Live at Birdland and Ascension is indefensible on any grounds except variety.
Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra, recorded in 1969 with Carla Bley’s arrangements of Spanish Civil War songs, belongs in any honest account of what the label stood for. So does Sonny Rollins’ East Broadway Run Down, made in 1966 with two thirds of Coltrane’s rhythm section, and Keith Jarrett’s run of American quartet albums in the mid-seventies, which is the part of the Impulse! story that gets skipped most often.
