Only three of the tracks on this album were actually recorded live. “Afro-Blue,” “I Want to Talk About You,” and “The Promise” were all taped at the titular New York club on October 8, 1963. A month later, on November 18, Coltrane and band — pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Jimmy Garrison, and drummer Elvin Jones — went to Rudy Van Gelder’s New Jersey studio and cut two more tracks, the mournful “Alabama” (a tribute to the four young girls killed in the terrorist bombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church that September) and the rumbling “Your Lady.” This was a transitional period for the saxophonist. His music was starting to take on the incantatory, spiritual qualities that would mark his last years, but he was still firmly enough anchored in bebop and mainstream jazz that the public would follow in his wake. “I Want to Talk About You” in particular is a brilliant showcase for his improvisatory skills; he’d first recorded it on 1958’s Soultrane, but here he appends a nearly four-minute unaccompanied cadenza that seems to stop time.