story 011 · music · john coltrane, 1960
he taped coltrane with a hidden recorder.
the short, written out
this is john coltrane in 1960, taped from the audience by a man with a hidden recorder.
his name was frank tiberi, a saxophonist in philadelphia. he owned all of coltrane’s records, but said they were nothing like coltrane in a club.
so that summer he bought a portable tape recorder. he kept it in a cloth bag on his lap and ran the microphone under his coat.
the reels were three inches wide, and one tune could run half an hour, so he learned to change them by touch, inside the bag.
by the time coltrane died, in 1967, tiberi had more than eighty reels: over twenty-six hours.
he made them to learn from, and for sixty years only a few musicians heard them.
on 6 november 2026, eleven of those performances come out.
frank tiberi still teaches at berklee, and says he learned his method from those tapes.
the print that goes with it
rings on black
kandinsky style, colorful rings on black, mid century modern
no. 56 · 8″×10″ or 16″×20″ · from $20.00 · see the print
sources
- impulse! records’ announcement, 23 september 2026
- the set’s track listing (store.johncoltrane.com)
- berklee college of music, and berklee archives
- the john coltrane estate
pictures
- john coltrane on stage, the concertone recorder, the box set and its cover: impulse! records
- frank tiberi, 1976: tom marcello webster (cc by-sa 2.0)
- john coltrane in amsterdam, 1963: hugo van gelderen / anefo, nationaal archief (cc0)
- the reels are a drawing
every sentence of the short was checked against its sources before it went out.
