Search - Trane Tracks: The Legacy of John Coltrane on DVD

WAIT!! Better Made Documentaries Are Out There

James Bonevich | Kalamazoo, MI | 06/21/2006

(2 out of 5 stars)

"Hold on a minute there, folks. Before you go spending precious money on this low-fidelity British DVD, please seek out the far superior Masters Of American Music program called "The World According To John Coltrane" (widely available on DVD). It was done with much higher production values, and that could be why it is the only product on the market to have been made with the full cooperation of Coltrane's estate. Next in line for quality would be the VAI program called "The Coltrane Legacy" which is out there on DVD but may be harder to find. If you decide that you simply must have "Trane Tracks", then be prepared for a very low-budget production. The audio quality in the interview segments is so poor that sub-titles had to be added. None of the performance clips are complete (whole songs), none of them are identified by either location or date, and none of them are "new" to this product. The narration is also poorly recorded, extremely dry to listen to, and contains some innaccurate statements (McCoy Tyner, for example, was NOT just 17 years old when he joined Coltrane's group full-time in 1960). I know we can't all be Ken Burns and have huge budgets to make lush productions for multi-media markets, but "Trane Tracks" looks and sounds like it was thrown together in a real hurry with little else in mind besides a fast buck. Please consider spending your hard-earned money elsewhere first, because there are definitely better made documentaries about John Coltrane available."