The Music Club, 2018

Being with all of you, if only virtually, is always a happy place to be. One of the albums I can't stop listening to this year is Both Directions at Once: The Lost Album. Recorded in 1963 by sublime saxophonist John Coltrane during his "classic quartet" period, the original master tapes were lost or destroyed by the Impulse! This year, the 55-year-old project was unearthed from his family's surviving reference copy. Both Directions at Once occasionally veers into the superlative--it provides a glimpse into the tension between rehearsal process and commercial artifact that informed Coltrane's music in the aftermath of his 1961 juggernaut My Favorite Things--but it's hardly the jazz musician's most transcendent work.