request, Thiele approached him about working with Coltrane. "I didn't know if John could play that kind of stuff I did," he told writer Frank Kofsky a decade later. "So I was a little reluctant at first. John was working at Birdland, and he asked me to come down there, and after hearing him play ballads the way he did, man, I said, 'Hey ..., beautiful.' So that's how we got together." After the club closed, Hartman, Coltrane, and Coltrane's pianist, McCoy Tyner, went over some songs together. Some time after the initial recordings, Coltrane returned to the studio to fill in some solo parts. The myth of additional tracks or alternate takes gained credibility when Impulse released an early pressing of the album without Coltrane's additions. They quickly replaced that album with the completed versions but some people, having heard both pressings and noticing more saxophone in places, assumed they were hearing entirely different takes rather than the same takes with added tracks. Coltrane was very much in favor of recording a third album of ballads at that time and specifically sought out Hartman. Later, in an interview with Frank Kofsky, he said:"I just felt something about him; I don't know what it was. I like his sound, I thought there was something there I had to hear, so I looked him up and did that album." By the mid-1960s, popular tastes were embracing rock and roll, and Hartman's style had much less commercial appeal. With the 1970s being difficult times for singers working from the American songbook, Hartman turned to playing cocktail lounges in New York City and Chicago. He did a television special in Australia and recorded several albums in Japan, including a tribute to Coltrane after the saxophonist's death in 1967. Recording with small, independent labels such as Perception and Musicor, Hartman produced music of mixed quality as he attempted to be viewed as a more versatile vocalist. Speaking about his approach to interpreting a song, he said: "Well, to me a lyric is a story, almost like talking, telling somebody a story, try to make it believable." When he returned to the jazz combo format of his earlier albums, Hartman recorded Once in Every Life for the Bee Hive label, which earned him a Grammy nomination for Best Male Jazz Vocalist in 1981. He quickly followed this up with his last album of new material,