****AMG ‘With Ballads Coltrane looksinto the warmer side of things,a path he would take with bothJohnny Hartman and with DukeEllington. Here he lays out forMcCoy Tyner mostly, and theresults positively shimmer attimes. He’s not aggressive.Instead he’s introspective andat times even predictable,but that is precisely Ballads’draw.’ (Sam Samuelson) Besides achieving a very personal andcharacteristic sound, John Coltrane opened theway to free jazz, allowing himself to play long andcomplex improvisations that increasingly strayedfrom the tunes in which they were based. However,even though he forced himself to continuallymove further away from traditional melodies andconventional music structures, he always found time(even during his final years) to record some ballads.On these recordings he showed another of his manyfacets, which was perhaps less revolutionary, butequally personal: his sensitivity and his capacity tocreate an intimate mood, reinve