"Equinox" is one of John Coltrane's most enduring original compositions, a minor blues in D-flat minor recorded on October 26, 1960, for the album Coltrane's Sound. The piece's dark, brooding melody has become a standard in its own right, widely performed by jazz musicians in the decades since its creation. Coltrane's eight-chorus tenor saxophone solo builds with masterful pacing from understated opening phrases through increasingly intense explorations of the minor blues form, demonstrating his unparalleled ability to construct long, architecturally coherent improvisations. McCoy Tyner follows with seven choruses of his own, his percussive comping style and quartal harmonies proving ideally suited to the tune's modal ambiguity. The medium swing tempo allows both soloists room to develop their ideas with patience and logic. Elvin Jones's polyrhythmic drumming and Steve Davis's rock-solid bass lines anchor the performance with the rhythmic intensity that made this quartet one of the most powerful small groups in jazz history. Named after the astronomical event marking equal periods of day and night, "Equinox" captures a moment of creative balance in Coltrane's career, bridging his harmonically dense earlier work with the more spiritually focused explorations that lay ahead.
