Three years ago the release of Both Directions At Once offered up something genuinely new; unearthed tapes of Coltrane playing compositions hitherto unknown to the wider public. This release, the latest in a line of sumptuously packaged and officially undersigned issues by Impulse! brings us something familiar yet in an unfamiliar light, a live recording of the saxophonist’s legendary 1964-penned devotional suite played not to the four walls of Rudy Van Gelder’s studio, but to the patrons of a Washington State nightclub. What’s more, this isn’t a live dust-down by the ‘classic’ Coltrane Quartet but a wholesale revision by the quartet plus guests, its free-ranging soundscape taking in all the uplift and energy that was to characterise the post-Ascension phase of its leader’s work.

Although this recording - in clean, up-close if occasionally misbalanced audio - was known only to intimates of the individual who taped it, saxophonist/flautist Joe Brazil (it even fails to make it into Ashley Kahn’s masterly and forensic study A Love Supreme: The Creation of John Coltrane’s Classic Album, published in 2002), serious Coltrane students will have detected its sonic imprint in two earlier issues culled from this autumn 1965 stint at the Penthouse – Impulse’s 1971-released Live in Seattle (bumped up to double-CD length in 1994) and a bootleg of a radio broadcast from the same venue briefly distributed by RLR Records in 2011. Its atmosphere of, at times, otherworldly intensity, was also mirrored in the studio-taped (and allegedly acid-fuelled) Om, recorded a day earlier on which Brazil also features. Each of these albums captured Coltrane’s music at the point of regeneration; Tyner, Garrison and Jones were still present, but with Pharoah Sanders ripsaw tenor sharing the front line, the future was as present as the past, helping find new things in well-worn Coltrane anthems like ‘Afro-Blue’ and ‘Out Of This World’.

This album further explodes this moment, taking Coltrane’s holy shrine of a suite into the realms of the secular, making it seem far more like part of a vast continuum of music rather than a stand-alone, fetishized edifice. In this sense, hearing its iconic themes twisted this way and that, wilfully altered and reconstructed as part of a Saturday evening club set is both refreshing and disquieting, demystifying ‘A Love Supreme’ in a manner wholly unexpected. Whether this is a good thing or not depends on the individual’s attitude to the whole cult of ‘lost’ recordings, their ‘historic’ value and marketable ‘spin’.

What cannot be argued against, however, is the sheer power of this performance. Indeed, even across a 75 minute expanse, its highlights are tightly packed. These range from the characteristic – Coltrane’s see-sawing between the registers of the tenor, Tyner’s mix of right-hand detail and massive pan-tonal chording, Jones’ ferocious energy – to the novel: Sanders’ fluttery articulation on the opening ‘Acknowledgement’, Garrett’s more rubbery bass tone, each adding to a feeling of the ‘suite’ being a workable canvass rather than a static creation. Occasionally, though, contrast sounds more akin to conflict. Guest altoist Carlos Ward plays spiritedly enough on ‘Resolution’ but he’s in a different space to Tyner, who, elbowing for room and close to the end of his tenure with the band, shows than he was more than prepared to go down swinging. Jones’ too seems to play as if fighting his corner at times. On the astonishingly unremitting ‘Pursuance’ (which garners the best applause of the night) his snare drum chatter fitfully recalls Roy Haynes, yet these well-crafted asides are almost rendered yesterday’s music by a Sanders solo for which the word disturbing might have been coined. And it’s so often Jones who holds the intersection between ‘old’ and ‘new’ on this recording, making one appreciate afresh what Coltrane’s music lost when he chose to depart the band some three months later.

If all this make it sound as if the leader is a mere bystander on his own album, then it needs to be stated that he most certainly isn’t. True, he’s off-mic for some of the time (Sanders seems to fair better in this regard) but when soloing he’s as palpable a presence as he ever was. His entry on ‘Resolution’ is the capstone of the performance, garrulous, gobbling phrases alternating with preaching calls, finally ascending to exalted Ayleresque screams. Yet beneath all the passion is a pin-sharp mind at work, those virtuoso leaps and remarkable control the mark of a man who never truly abandoned discipline. The closing ‘Psalm’ doesn’t cleave quite as close to the saxophonist’s famous text printed on the original LP issue of A Love Supreme, and with Sanders playing a brief second ‘reading’ it’s a reminder that this time around the suite was less a personal offering than a pluralistic entreaty. Nor is the climax as tidily realised as on the studio set, finishing with an unidentified voice asking ‘it that it?’, lending an album very much about tension and release an oddly anticlimactic denouement.

The same question could be asked of Coltrane’s recorded legacy. What more gems like this might there be to still be mined, one wonders? In the meantime, this convoluted, complex, at times difficult but consistently engrossing set will more than delight his fan-base. It’s patently not a ‘live’ version of a ‘Greatest Hit’, a faithful facsimile of a past glory; in fact, it runs almost like a ‘director’s cut’, sprawling and outgrowing its original pattern to suggest still more narrative avenues. An astonishing record documenting an arresting moment, it cannot be recommended highly enough.