ORIGINAL AUTOGRAPHED JOHN COLTRANE ALBUM "SOULTRANE"

$

610

Stunning autographed John Coltrane 1958 album titled "Soutltrane". On several places I looked on the Internet it is said Soultrane is for many people at the top of their list of Coltrane favorites. John Coltrane autographed both the date ('58) and the club where he was appearing (the Hi Hat in Pittsburgh) beside his name. The album and record cover are original Prestige. PLEASE CLICK ON THE SCANS TO ENLARGE. Note: there is a 5 inch split at the top of the album seam starting on the right side, and a 1 and a 1/2" split on the bottom seam. You wouldn't see it when the album is laid flat or framed. The record itself was well used and has scratches. John Coltrane signed the album in old magic marker. I say old because when I tilt it toward the sunlight its a tiny bit faded. It looks new on my scans but the album and autograph do show their age. When you hold the signed album up to the light it has many surface markings that cover his autograph on the album cover. But when you look at it straight ahead, they don't show much because of the white background, only when you look at it sideways in the sunlight. The album is historical and very rare. Buyer pays shipping via priority mail or 3-day FedEx only because of the rarity of this item. *Here is some info I found on the net about the club which was situated in Pittsburgh. Each statement is by another writer, but you might find it interesting... "When James Blood Ulmer came to Pittsburgh in 1957, the guitarist found himself at the crossroads. Not the type of crossroads that Robert Johnson sang about. This son of a Baptist preacher was told from an early age that the music that spawned that classic song -- the blues -- was an evil that should be feared. Ulmer's crossroads were the type that required a life-altering decision...Born in South Carolina 15 years earlier, he had been playing the guitar for half of his life, but he never considered it as a vocation. Pittsburgh had a thriving club scene in the 1950s and Ulmer still remembers all of them. "I played everywhere in Pittsburgh because I lived there for four or five years," he says. "I played the Hi-Hat, the Hurricane, the Crawford Grill, the Elks -- everything they had in Pittsburgh. Man, Pittsburgh was a good music town." ...(another article)... "Few nightspots offered more thrills than the Crawford Grill, which has recently reopened and is offering live jazz again after closing for repairs.. In its heyday, the Hill District nightclub featured groups ranging from Miles Davis and John Coltrane to Charlie Mingus and Eric Dolphy. It was after an engagement at the Grill that drummer Max Roach hired Pittsburgh bassist Bobby Boswell, trumpeter Tommy Turrentine and his younger brother, Stanley. The Grill was a procurer of major talent," said trumpeter Chuck Austin, who recently turned 75. "But there was so much going on everywhere. There were clubs and after-hours joints from Rankin to Monessen. Musicians always had work."...(another article) " He had spent many a night watching and listening to musicians like Ramsey Lewis, Horace Silver, Ahmad Jamal and Ray Bryant at Crawford's Grill and the Hi-Hat but when he experienced Jimmy Smith for the first time his mind was made up. (And this last interesting one): " Crabtree and I had discovered the Hi-Hat together, in the course of one of his first visits to Pittsburgh, during the period between my second and third marriages -- the last great era of our friendship, of our pirate days, before stars were lost from certain constellations, when the woods and railroad wastes and dark street corners of the world still concealed Indians and poetical madmen and razor-sharp women with the eyes of tarot-card queens. I was still a monstrous thing then, a Yeti, a Swamp Thing, the chest-thumping Sasquatch of American fiction. I wore my hair long and tipped the scales at an ungraceful but dirigible two hundred and thirty-five pounds. I exercised my appetites freely, with a young man's wild discipline. I moved my big frame across the floors of barrooms like a Cuban dancer with a knife in his boot and a hibiscus in the band of his Panama hat...We found Carl Franklin's Hi-Hat, or the Hat, as it was known to regulars on the Hill, stranded in a forlorn block of Centre Avenue between the boarded-up storefront of a Jewish fish wholesaler and a medical supply company whose grimy display windows featured, and had gone on featuring ever since, a miniature family of headless and limbless human torsos dressed up in exact, tiny replicats of hernia trusses. On the avenue side there were only a fire door and a rusted sign that said FRANKLIN'S in looping script; you got in through the alley around back, where you found a small parking lot and a large man named Clement, who was there to look you over, assess your character, and pat you down if he thought you might be packing. He didn't come off as a very nice person the first time you met him, and he never got any friendlier. The owner, Carl Franklin, was a local boy -- he'd grown up on Conkling Street, a few blocks away -- who'd worked as a drummer in big bands and small combos during the fifties and sixties, including a stint in one of the late Ellington configurations, and then come home to open the Hi-Hat as a jazz supper club, aiming to attract a class clientele. There was a beautiful old Steinway grand, a luminous bar of glass brick, and the walls were still hung with photographs of Billy Eckstine, Ben Webster, Errol Garner, Sarah Vaughan; but the place had long since devolved into a loud R&B joint, lit with pink floodlights, smelling of hair spray, spilt beer, and barbecue sauce, catering to a shadowy, not particularly sociable crowd".