Originally recorded in June 2007 for Jazz on 3 to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Coltrane's death on 17 July 1967, Dave Liebman describes how the session was hastily convened in late June 2007 in the liner notes. It seems Jazz on 3 asked for Saxophone Summit, but as Liebman explains, “Regular group members Ravi Coltrane and Cecil McBee were unavailable, but we were fortunate to get Ron McClure as a substitute for McBee”. Previously, Saxophone Summit had visited Coltrane's late period with Gathering of the Spirits when the summit comprised Liebman, Lovano and Mike Brecker, and following Brecker's death, with Ravi Coltrane in Brecker's stead on Seraphic Light. However, during Coltrane's 40th anniversary year, Liebman and Lovano decided they would present music from all three periods of Coltrane's life. “Each period represents such a different outlook and concept that it's incredible to imagine one accomplished all this in such a short period,” Liebman reminds us. One of the most prolifically documented artists in jazz, Liebman has recorded with countless groups around the world, but it was the challenge of playing alongside players such as Brecker and Lovano in Saxophone Summit that really stirred his creative juices. From Coltrane's early, change running period comes ‘Locomotion’, which uses an AABA form, with A comprising a 12-bar blues and B eight bars of chromatically descending 7th chords (actually 2 bars each of Ab7, G7, Gb7, F7). Simple stuff, but it's one of the best performances on the album because Liebman and Lovano are such masterful blues players, and on an album marked by collaboration, competition also stirs – this is rousing stuff that reminds us of how Coltrane's patterns have become ingrained into the contemporary jazz saxophone vocabulary. It's followed by a ballad medley ‘Central Park West/Dear Lord’, the former from 1960 revealing Coltrane's interest in major third movement (that found its apotheosis in Giant Steps) and the latter, the staunchly diatonic melody ‘Dear Lord’, originally recorded in 1965 and poised eloquently between his middle and late periods. ‘Olé’ from Coltrane's middle, or modal, period uses the Phrygian mode. Implications of the ‘exotic’ are signalled in the intro by Liebman's wooden recorder and Lovano's flute that lead into Liebman on soprano morphing ‘Olé’ into Chick Corea's ‘La Fiesta’ (strangely not acknowledged in the customarily extensive liner notes we have come to enjoy with Resonance releases) and with Lovano now on tenor it gradually builds into a swirling performance via Markowitz on piano (tinny recorded sound). Lovano's somewhat unwieldy aulachrome (which looks for all the world like two soprano saxophones stuck together) makes an appearance on ‘Compassion’, the second tune on Coltrane's 1965 album Meditations. A long, 17-minute performance, it ends up sounding like a good idea loved to death. Diffuse in its execution it leaves 1987's Tribute to John Coltrane (King Records), where Liebman and Wayne Shorter lock horns against a rhythm section of Richie Beirach, Eddie Gomez and Jack DeJohnette at the Live Under the Sky '87 festival, as the Coltrane tribute, 30 years and countless Coltrane tributes, later.