Universal have been remarkably coy about The Lost Album with security surrounding its release the equal of that protecting the crown jewels and the Mona Lisa combined; album details have been thin on the ground, nothing on their website prior to release and no review copies circulated, instead a time-sensitive link that if you didn't use right away it expired. Was it all worth it? Well, it's one way of getting everybody's attention since previously unissued Impulse! studio sessions by Coltrane are rare as hen's teeth these days. In the context of Coltrane's Impulse! discography, The Lost Album falls between Ballads, recorded on 13 November 1962, and John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman, recorded on 6 March 1963 – the day after The Lost Album was recorded. Eight months later Coltrane was interviewed in Paris – on 1 November – where he said he needed to get away from playing the “same tunes over and over”. In fact, The Lost Album seems to anticipate these thoughts by several months, since other than a warm-up on ‘Impressions’, by then a staple of his repertoire live, and a subtle reharm of the blues called simply ‘Slow Blues’, the rest of The Lost Session is all new pieces – Franz Lehar's ‘Vilia’, two new unnamed originals plus ‘Nature Boy’ and ‘One Up, One Down’. There's always a fascination about newly discovered material, how it adds to our received knowledge, why it wasn't released at the time, what happened to the tapes in the interim and so on. Everything will become clear in time, no doubt, as does any significant addition to a major artist's work, but for now, this would seem to be an essential purchase, plenty deep enough to satisfy both pleasure and study.