Last year, the Acrobat label released the 4-CD All of You: The Last Tour 1960, a collection of live European recordings by the Miles Davis Quintet from 1960. That was the final time that John Coltrane would serve as a member of Davis’ touring outfit; he was restless and ready to move past the music he’d been making to that point. So Many Things is where the following year found him. Also four discs, it culls live dates—from Paris, Copenhagen, Helsinki and Stockholm—by a band that virtually defines the free-spiritedness jazz was engulfing as the ‘60s unfolded. Coltrane on tenor and soprano saxophones, McCoy Tyner playing piano, Reggie Workman on bass and Elvin Jones beating the drums—with multi-instrumentalist Eric Dolphy, one of the more serious boosters of the new progressivism, matching Trane’s innovative sensibilities and quite often dominating. In order to understand just how open-ended this combo’s approach was, one only needs to consider the six different versions of “My Favorite Things” (the title track of Trane’s then-recent breakthrough album) that comprise much of the real estate here. While there are, naturally, thematic similarities from take to take, stark differences emerge: Where one version might lean toward the reserved and melodious, another is full of rage and dissonance, with Dolphy, Trane and Jones, in particular, engaged in fierce battle. Similarly, Coltrane’s own “Naima” and “Blue Train” morph from show to show, from hard and churning to contemplative and conversational. Coltrane was just finding, at this juncture, how much adventurousness he could get away with; the European audiences he encountered in November 1961 were more than willing to support that quest, and the quintet jumped in without looking back.