SOUND PROJECTIONS
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
SUMMER/FALL, 2015
VOLUME ONE NUMBER FOUR
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
SUMMER/FALL, 2015
VOLUME ONE NUMBER FOUR
BILLIE HOLIDAY
Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of:
ERIC DOLPHY
July 18-24
MARVIN GAYE
July 25-31
ABBEY LINCOLN
August 1-7
RAY CHARLES
August 8-14
SADE
August 15-21
BETTY CARTER
August 22-28
CHARLIE PARKER
August 29-September 4
MICHAEL JACKSON
September 5-11
CHAKA KHAN
September 12-18
JOHN COLTRANE
September 19-25
SARAH VAUGHAN
September 26-October 2
THELONIOUS MONK
October 3-9
FOR JOHN COLTRANE
by Kofi Natambu
Coltrane subdivides the air into
massive columns of Space
He fills all the Space all the
Time with brazen mathematical emotions
Firestorms of disciplined thoughts
burn down the paths of certainty
A roaring expansion into millions of singing
labyrinths thundering toward the precise
articulation of what he knows & does not
No All the Time in all the Space
A face exploding into trillions of sounds
A heart mowing down memories
a soul sucking up the light soaking the bones
in Oceans of Energy Air charging molecules
inside holograms of Awareness
Intervals smashing stars and spitting them out
into the empty black sky
Coltrane is a terrible cleansing force
A holy dive-bomber in saxophone jets
A killer with the Healing Eye
A Melodic Arsonist
A Harmonic Hieroglyph
A Rhythmic Hurricane
Flowers that bleed
real tears (From: THE MELODY NEVER STOPS
Past Tents Press, 1991)
http://www.biography.com/people/john-coltrane-9254106
John Coltrane
Saxophonist, Songwriter (1926–1967)
Synopsis
John Coltrane was born September 23, 1926, in Hamlet, North Carolina. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, he played in nightclubs and on recordings with such musicians as Dizzy Gillespie, Earl Bostic and Johnny Hodges. Coltrane's first recorded solo can be heard on Gillespie's "We Love to Boogie" (1951). Coltrane came to prominence when he joined Miles Davis's quintet in 1955. He died from liver cancer on July 17, 1967, in Huntington, Long Island, New York.
Early Years
A revolutionary and groundbreaking jazz saxophonist, John Coltrane was born on September 23, 1926, in Hamlet, North Carolina.
It's far from an overstatement to say that Coltrane was destined to be a musician. He was surrounded by music as a child. His father, John R. Coltrane, kept his family fed as a tailor, but had a passion for music. He played several instruments, and his interests fueled his son's love for music.
Coltrane's first exposure to jazz came through the records of Count Basie and Lester Young. By the age of 13, Coltrane had picked up the saxophone, and almost from the moment he first started playing, it was apparent he had a talent for it. The young musician loved to imitate the sounds of Charlie Parker and Johnny Hodges.
Family life took a tragic turn in 1939 when Coltrane's father, grandparents and uncle died, leaving the household to be run by his mother, Alice, who found work as a domestic servant. Financial struggles defined this period for Coltrane, and eventually his mother and few other family members moved to New Jersey in the hopes of finding a better paycheck. Coltrane remained in North Carolina, living with family friends until he graduated from high school.
In 1943, he too moved north, to Philadelphia to make a go of it as a musician. For a short time he studied music at the Granoff Studios as well as the Ornstein School of Music. But with the country in the throes of war, Coltrane was called to duty and served a year in a Navy band in Hawaii. It was during his service, in fact, that Coltrane made his first recording, with a quartet of fellow sailors.
Early Music Career
Upon his return to civilian life in the summer of 1946, Coltrane landed back in Philadelphia, where, over the next several years, he proceeded to hook up with a number of jazz bands.
One of the earliest was a group led by Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson, with whom Coltrane played tenor sax. Later he hooked up with Jimmy Heath's band, where the young musician began to fully explore his experimental side.
Then in the fall of 1949 Coltrane signed on with a big band led by Dizzy Gillespie, remaining with the group for the next year and a half.
Coltrane had started to earn a name for himself. But as the 1950s took a shape, he also began to experiment with drugs, mainly heroin. His talent earned him jobs, but his addictions often ended them prematurely. In 1954, Duke Ellington brought him on to temporarily replace Johnny Hodges, but soon fired him because of his drug dependency.
Solo Career
In 1957 Davis fired Coltrane, who'd failed to give up heroin. Whether that was the exact impetus for Coltrane finally getting sober isn't certain, but the saxophonist finally did kick his drug habit. He played a six-month stint with Thelonious Monk and then embarked on a solo career.
By this period, Coltrane had created a definite sound of his own. Part of it was defined by an ability to play several notes at once, creating what would be later dubbed as his "sheets of sound."
Coltrane described it this way: "I start in the middle of a sentence and move both directions at once.”
By 1960 Coltrane had his own band, a quartet that included pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Jimmy Garrison and drummer Elvin Jones. The group, known as the John Coltrane Quartet, produced some of jazz's most enduring albums, including Giant Steps (1960) and My Favorite Things (1961).
The latter album especially catapulted Coltrane to stardom. Over the next several years Coltrane was lauded -- and, to a smaller degree, criticized -- for his sound. His albums from this period included Duke Ellington and John Coltrane (1963), Impressions (1963) and Live at Birdland (1964).
But it was 1965's A Love Supreme that may just be Coltrane's most acclaimed record. The album garnered the saxophonist two Grammy awards, for performance and jazz composition.
Final Years and Impact
In 1964 Coltrane married jazz pianist Alice McCloud, who'd go on to play in his band. Coltrane wrote and recorded a considerable amount of material over the final two years of his life. In 1966 he recorded his final two albums to be released while he was alive, Kulu Se Mama and Meditations. The album Expression was finalized just one day before his death. He died from liver cancer on July 17, 1967, in Huntington, Long Island, New York.
Coltrane's impact on the music world was considerable. He revolutionized jazz music with his experimental techniques and showed a deep reverence for sounds from other cultures, including Africa and Latin America.
In 1992 Coltrane was awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. His work continues to be a part of soundtracks for movies and television, so much so that in 1999 Universal Studios named a street on the Universal lot in his honor. In 1995, the United States Postal Service recognized the late musician with a commemorative stamp. More important, Coltrane's sound has inspired generations of newer jazz musicians.
http://www.johncoltrane.com/biography.html
http://www.britannica.com/biography/John-ColtraneJohn Coltrane
JOHN COLTRANE
American musician
by The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica
Also known as
John William Coltrane
Trane
born September 23, 1926
Hamlet, North Carolina
died July 17, 1967
Huntington, New York
John Coltrane, in full John William Coltrane, byname Trane (born Sept. 23, 1926, Hamlet, N.C., U.S.—died July 17, 1967, Huntington, N.Y.), American jazz saxophonist, bandleader, and composer, an iconic figure of 20th-century jazz.
Coltrane’s first musical influence was his father, a tailor and part-time musician. John studied clarinet and alto saxophone as a youth and then moved to Philadelphia in 1943 and continued his studies at the Ornstein School of Music and the Granoff Studios. He was drafted into the navy in 1945 and played alto sax with a navy band until 1946; he switched to tenor saxophone in 1947. During the late 1940s and early ’50s, he played in nightclubs and on recordings with such musicians as Eddie (“Cleanhead”) Vinson, Dizzy Gillespie, Earl Bostic, and Johnny Hodges. Coltrane’s first recorded solo can be heard on Gillespie’s “We Love to Boogie” (1951).
Coltrane came to prominence when he joined Miles Davis’s quintet in 1955. His abuse of drugs and alcohol during this period led to unreliability, and Davis fired him in early 1957. He embarked on a six-month stint with Thelonious Monk and began to make recordings under his own name; each undertaking demonstrated a newfound level of technical discipline, as well as increased harmonic and rhythmic sophistication.
During this period Coltrane developed what came to be known as his “sheets of sound” approach to improvisation, as described by poet LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka): “The notes that Trane was playing in the solo became more than just one note following another. The notes came so fast, and with so many overtones and undertones, that they had the effect of a piano player striking chords rapidly but somehow articulating separately each note in the chord, and its vibrating subtones.” Or, as Coltrane himself said, “I start in the middle of a sentence and move both directions at once.” The cascade of notes during his powerful solos showed his infatuation with chord progressions, culminating in the virtuoso performance of “Giant Steps” (1959).
Coltrane’s tone on the tenor sax was huge and dark, with clear definition and full body, even in the highest and lowest registers. His vigorous, intense style was original, but traces of his idols Johnny Hodges and Lester Young can be discerned in his legato phrasing and portamento (or, in jazz vernacular, “smearing,” in which the instrument glides from note to note with no discernible breaks). From Monk he learned the technique of multiphonics, by which a reed player can produce multiple tones simultaneously by using a relaxed embouchure (i.e., position of the lips, tongue, and teeth), varied pressure, and special fingerings. In the late 1950s, Coltrane used multiphonics for simple harmony effects (as on his 1959 recording of “Harmonique”); in the 1960s, he employed the technique more frequently, in passionate, screeching musical passages.
Coltrane returned to Davis’s group in 1958, contributing to the “modal phase” albums Milestones (1958) and Kind of Blue (1959), both considered essential examples of 1950s modern jazz. (Davis at this point was experimenting with modes—i.e., scale patterns other than major and minor.) His work on these recordings was always proficient and often brilliant, though relatively subdued and cautious.
After ending his association with Davis in 1960, Coltrane formed his own acclaimed quartet, featuring pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Jimmy Garrison, and drummer Elvin Jones. At this time Coltrane began playing soprano saxophone in addition to tenor. Throughout the early 1960s Coltrane focused on mode-based improvisation in which solos were played atop one- or two-note accompanying figures that were repeated for extended periods of time (typified in his recordings of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s “My Favorite Things”). At the same time, his study of the musics of India and Africa affected his approach to the soprano sax. These influences, combined with a unique interplay with the drums and the steady vamping of the piano and bass, made the Coltrane quartet one of the most noteworthy jazz groups of the 1960s. Coltrane’s wife, Alice (also a jazz musician and composer), played the piano in his band during the last years of his life.
During the short period between 1965 and his death in 1967, Coltrane’s work expanded into a free, collective (simultaneous) improvisation based on prearranged scales. It was the most radical period of his career, and his avant-garde experiments divided critics and audiences.
Coltrane’s best-known work spanned a period of only 12 years (1955–67), but, because he recorded prolifically, his musical development is well-documented. His somewhat tentative, relatively melodic early style can be heard on the Davis-led albums recorded for the Prestige and Columbia labels during 1955 and ’56. Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane (1957) reveals Coltrane’s growth in terms of technique and harmonic sense, an evolution further chronicled on Davis’s albums Milestones and Kind of Blue. Most of Coltrane’s early solo albums are of a high quality, particularly Blue Train (1957), perhaps the best recorded example of his early hard bop style (see bebop). Recordings from the end of the decade, such as Giant Steps (1959) and My Favorite Things (1960), offer dramatic evidence of his developing virtuosity. Nearly all of the many albums Coltrane recorded during the early 1960s rank as classics; A Love Supreme (1964), a deeply personal album reflecting his religious commitment, is regarded as especially fine work. His final forays into avant-garde and free jazz are represented by Ascension and Meditations (both 1965), as well as several albums released posthumously.
http://www.allaboutjazz.com/john-coltrane-there-was-no-end-to-the-music-john-coltrane-by-rob-armstrong.php
John Coltrane: There Was No End To The Music
All About Jazz
For all their practicing, education and discipline, Coltrane and his fellow jazz contemporaries could count on playing to packed houses every night during the late 1940s and 1950s. Much of the action was on Columbia Avenue, in a world almost entirely eviscerated by Urban Renewal—the building of Yorktown and the expansion of Temple University's campus—and by the race riot of 1964 and its aftereffects of intensifying disinvestment and poverty: the 820 Club at 8th and Columbia, Café Society on Columbia between 12th and 13th Streets, and further west, the Crystal Ball on Columbia between 15th and 16th Streets, the Web Bar on Columbia between 16th and 17th Streets, and The Northwestern and The Point on 23rd and Columbia. Nearby was Café Holiday at 13th and Diamond, the Sun Ray at 16th and Susquehanna and North Philly's largest nightclub in the 1950s, the Blue Note, at 15th Street and Ridge Avenue.
However, the best jazz "institution" of the era was the Woodbine Club, located at 12th and Master Streets, for it was here that jazz musicians would gather at 2AM when their gigs ended. During these sessions, says Pope, musicians learned new ideas and showed younger players techniques that would then be incorporated back into the repertoires and sounds coming out of Philly, all adding to the vibrancy of the institution in this most musical of cities.
Playing consistently, night after night, in clubs allowed Trane and others to develop their unique sound. By the time he left Philadelphia for New York in 1958, "all of the information he had acquired in Philadelphia gave him the opportunity to open up all his ideas and concepts," says Pope. This knowledge was based not just on touring regularly with Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, and other major jazz greats, but also in the uniqueness of the tight knit scene developing here and the way Trane would share his ideas with other musicians he knew and trusted in Philadelphia, gathering insight into his own methods in the process.
Miles Davis was a good authority on the saxophonist John Coltrane, who played in one of the trumpeter's bands in the 1950s. Their time spent working together began with Davis's rise to stardom and ended not long after the magnificent Kind of Blue, on which Coltrane played a masterful role. In his autobiography written with Quincy Troupe, Davis summed up Coltrane:
"Trane was the loudest, fastest saxophonist I've ever heard. He could play real fast and real loud at the same time and that's very difficult to do ... it was like he was possessed when he put that horn in his mouth. He was so passionate- fierce – and yet so quiet and gentle when he wasn't playing."
Coltrane, who died of liver failure at 40, has probably been the most influential saxophonist in any musical genre, including Lester Young, Ornette Coleman, Sonny Rollins and even Charlie Parker. His dazzling solos are now transcribed as exercises for students, while players all over the world still try to mimic his characteristically intense and soulful sound more than 40 years after his death.
Giant Steps, an astonishing tenor-saxophone improvisation Coltrane recorded in 1959, has been a model for aspiring sax players ever since, but it's far more than a technical exercise, pointing the way toward the lava-flows of scales and runs that the critic Ira Gitler famously described as "sheets of sound". Like an engineer obsessively building a machine that could blast free of the restraints of time, space and mortality, Coltrane assembled a distinctive technique from miniscule parts and infinitesimal details. But his mission was to fuse them all into one single, huge, imploring sound in which all the details, while crucial, were no longer individually audible. For him, Giant Steps was more like a first step.
Coltrane forged on through the 60s, shedding and recruiting band-members on the way, providing a model for the difficult art of larger-group free-improv with his 1965 recording Ascension, and in his final years forming an uncompromising new band with his second wife, Alice, on keyboards, saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, and Rashied Ali – a more abstract, textural performer than Elvin Jones had been – on drums and percussion. John Coltrane died in New York on 17 July 1967.
https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/jazz/strickla.htm
As originally published in
The Atlantic Monthly
December 1987
What Coltrane Wanted
The legendary saxophonist forsook lyricism for the quest for ecstasy
by Edward Strickland
JOHN COLTRANE died twenty years ago, on July 17, 1967, at the age of forty. In the years since, his influence has only grown, and the stellar avant-garde saxophonist has become a jazz legend of a stature shared only by Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker. As an instrumentalist Coltrane was technically and imaginatively equal to both; as a composer he was superior, although he has not received the recognition he deserves for this aspect of his work. In composition he excelled in an astonishing number of forms--blues, ballads, spirituals, rhapsodies, elegies, suites, and free-form and cross-cultural works.
The closest contemporary analogy to Coltrane's relentless search for possibilities was the Beatles' redefinition of rock from one album to the next. Yet the distance they traveled from conventional hard rock through sitars and Baroque obligatos to Sergeant Pepper psychedelia and the musical shards of Abbey Road seems short by comparison with Coltrane's journey from hard-bop saxist to daring harmonic and modal improviser to dying prophet speaking in tongues.
Asked by a Swedish disc jockey in 1960 if he was trying to "play what you hear," he said that he was working off set harmonic devices while experimenting with others of which he was not yet certain. Although he was trying to "get the one essential . . . the one single line," he felt forced to play everything, for he was unable to "work what I know down into a more lyrical line" that would be "easily understood." Coltrane never found the one line. Nor was he ever to achieve the "more beautiful . . . more lyrical" sound he aspired to. He complicated rather than simplified his art, making it more visceral, raw, and wild. And even to his greatest fans it was anything but easily understood. In this failure, however, Coltrane contributed far more than he could have in success, for above all, his legacy to his followers is the abiding sense of search, of the musical quest as its own fulfillment.
BORN and raised in North Carolina, Coltrane studied in Philadelphia and after working as a clarinetist in Navy marching and dance bands in 1945-1946 he began a decade of playing with Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson, Dizzy Gillespie, Earl Bostic, and Johnny Hodges, and also such undistinguished rhythm-and-blues artists as King Kolax, Bull Moose Jackson, and Daisy Mae and the Hepcats. He came to wide notice in 1955 in the now legendary Miles Davis Quintet and was immediately acknowledged as an original--or an oddity. Critics who in Coltrane's last years all but waved banners to show their devotion to him were among those casting stones for much of his career. At first many urged Davis to fire the weird tenor, but when, in April of 1957, after a year and a half with the quintet, Coltrane left or was dropped (the truth remains unclear), the reason seems to have been indulgence not in stylistic extremism but in heroin and alcohol, problems he conquered that same year. The controversy had to do not only with his harmonic experimentation, on which Dexter Gordon was initially the chief influence, but with the speed (to some, purely chaotic) of his playing and the jaggedness (to some, unmusical) of his phrasing.
All three characteristics were intensified in 1957 during several months with Thelonious Monk at the Five Spot, after which he rejoined Davis, who was now experimenting with sparer chord changes, and became fully involved in what Ira Gitler, in Down Beat, called the "sheets of sound" approach. This technique of runs so rapid as to make the notes virtually indistinguishable seems itself to have been a by-product of Coltrane's harmonic exploration. Coltrane spoke of playing the same chord three or four different ways within a measure or overlapping chords before the change, advancing further the investigation of upper harmonic intervals begun by Charlie Parker and the boppers. Attempting to articulate so many harmonic variants before the change, Coltrane was necessarily led to preternatural velocity and occasionally to asymmetrical subdivision of the beat. Despite Davis's suggestion that Coltrane could trim his twenty-seven or twenty-eight choruses if he tried taking the saxophone out of his mouth, Coltrane's attempt "to explore all the avenues" made him the perfect stylistic complement to Davis, with his cooler style, which featured sustained blue notes and brief cascades of sixteenths almost willfully retreating into silence, and also Monk, with his spare and unpredictable chords and clusters. Davis, characteristically, paid the tersest homage, when, on being told that his music was so complex that it required five saxophonists, he replied that he'd once had Coltrane.
Although in the late fifties Coltrane released a number of sessions for Prestige (and, more notably, Blue Train and Giant Steps for Blue Note and Atlantic respectively) in which he was the nominal bandleader, it was really after leaving Davis for the second time, in 1960, shortly after a European tour, that he came into his own as a creative as well as an interpretive force. His first recording session as leader after the break, on October 21, 1960, produced "My Favorite Things," an astonishing fourteen-minute reinterpretation, or overhaul, of the saccharine show tune, which thrilled jazz fans with its Oriental modalism and Atlantic executives with its unexpected commercial success. In it Coltrane revived the straight soprano sax (whose only previous master in jazz had been Sidney Bechet), and in so doing led a generation of young musicians, from Wayne Shorter to Keith Jarrett to Jon Gibson, to explore the instrument. The work remained Coltrane's signature piece until his death (of liver disease) despite bizarre stylistic metamorphoses in the next five and a half years.
Coltrane signed with Impulse Records in April of 1961 and the next month began rehearsing and playing the long studio sessions for Africa/Brass, a large-band experiment with arrangements by his close friend Eric Dolphy. This was in part an extension of the modal experimentation in which he had been involved with Davis in the late fifties, notably on the landmark Kind of Blue. The modal style replaced chordal progressions as the basis for improvisation, with a slower harmonic rhythm and patterns of intervals corresponding only vaguely to traditional major and minor scales. The modal approach proved to be the modulation from bop to free jazz, as is clear in Coltrane's revolutionary use of a single mode throughout "Africa," the piece that takes up all of side one of the album. Just as his prolonged modal solos were emulated by rock guitarists (the Grateful Dead, the Byrds of "Eight Miles High," the unlamented Iron Butterfly, and others), so the astonishing variety Coltrane superimposed on that single F was, according to the composer Steve Reich, a significant, if ostensibly an unlikely, influence on the development of minimalism. The originator of minimalism, La Monte Young, acknowledges the influence of Coltrane's "My Favorite Things" on his use of rapid permutations and combinations of pitches on sopranino sax to simulate chords as sustained tones.
From the start, and especially from the opening notes of Coltrane's solo, which bursts forth like a tribal summons, "Africa" is the aural equivalent of a journey upriver. The elemental force of this polyrhythmic modalism was unknown in the popular music that came before it. Coltrane experimented with two bassists--a hint of wilder things to come, as he sought progressively to submerge himself in rhythm. He was later to employ congas, bata, various other Latin and African percussion instruments, and, incredibly, two drummers--incredibly insofar as Coltrane already had, in Elvin Jones, the most overpowering drummer in jazz. The addition of Rashied Ali to the drum corps, in November of 1965, made for a short-lived collaboration or, rather, competition between Jones and Ali; a disgruntled Jones left the Coltrane band in March of 1966 to join Duke Ellington's. But it was the culmination of Coltrane's search for the rhythmic equivalent of the oceanic feeling of visionary experience. Having employed the gifted accompanists McCoy Tyner and Jimmy Garrison during the years of the "classic quartet" (late 1961 to mid-1965), Coltrane tended to subordinate them, preferring that his accompanists play spare wide-interval chords and a solid rather than showy bass, which would permit him a maximum of flexibility as a soloist. Coltrane would often take long solos accompanied only by his drummer, and in his penultimate recording session, which produced the posthumous Interstellar Space, he is supported only by Ali. Solo sax against drums (against may be all too accurate a word to describe Coltrane's concert duets with the almost maniacal Jones) was Coltrane's conception of naked music, the lone voice crying not in the wilderness but from some primordial chaos. His music evokes not only the jungle but all that existed before the jungle.
COLTRANE'S spiritual concerns led him to a study of Indian music, some elements of which are present in the album Africa/Brass and more of which are in the cut from the album Impressions titled "India," which was recorded in November of 1961. The same month saw the birth of "Spiritual," featuring exotic and otherworldly solos by Coltrane on soprano sax and Dolphy on bass clarinet. Recorded at the Village Vanguard, the piece made clear, if any doubts remained, that Coltrane was attempting to raise jazz from the saloons to the heavens. No jazzman had attempted so overtly to offer his work as a form of religious expression. If Ornette Coleman was, as some have argued, the seminal stylistic force in sixties avant-garde jazz, Coltrane's Eastern imports were the main influence on the East-West "fusion" in the jazz and rock of the late sixties and afterward. In his use of jazz as prayer and meditation Coltrane was beyond all doubt the principal spiritual force in music.
This is further evident in "Alabama," a riveting elegy for the victims of the infamous Sunday-morning church bombing in Birmingham in 1963. Here, as in the early version of his most famous ballad, "Naima," Coltrane is as spare in phrasing as he is bleak in tone. That tone, criticized by many as hard-edged and emotionally impoverished, is inseparable from Coltrane's achievement, conveying as it does a sense of absolute purity through the abnegation of sentimentality. Sonny Rollins, the contemporary tenor most admired by Coltrane, always had a richer tone, and Coltrane himself said of the mellifluous Stan Getz, "Let's face it--we'd all sound like that if we could." Despite these frequent and generous tributes, Coltrane's aim was different, as is clear in his revival of the soprano sax. Rather than lushness he sought clarity and incisiveness. As with pre-nineteenth-century string players, the rare vibrato was dramatic ornamentation.
Coltrane's religious dedication, which as much as his music made him a role model, especially but by no means exclusively among young blacks, is clearest of all in the album titled A Love Supreme, recorded in late 1964 with Tyner, Jones, and Garrison. The album appeared in early 1965 to great popular and critical acclaim and remains generally acknowledged as Coltrane's masterpiece. In a sense, though, it is stylistically as much a summation as a new direction, for its modalism and incantatory style recall "Spiritual," "India," and the world-weary lyricism of his preceding and still underrated album, Crescent. Within months Coltrane was to shift his emphasis from incantation to the freer-form glossolalia of his last period--a transition evident in a European concert performance of A Love Supreme in mid-1965.
Meditations, recorded a year after A Love Supreme, is the finest creation of the late Coltrane, and possibly of any Coltrane. It may never be as accessible as A Love Supreme, but it is the more revolutionary and compelling work. While some of the creations of Coltrane's last two years are all but amorphous, Meditations succeeds not only for the transcendental force it shares with A Love Supreme but by virtue of the contrasts among the shamanistic frenzy of Coltrane and fellow tenor Pharoah Sanders in the opening movement "The Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost" and elsewhere, the sense of stoic resignation and perseverance in the solos of Garrison and Tyner, and the repeated, spiraling phrases of yearning in Coltrane's "Love" and the concluding "Serenity." This unity, encompassing radical stylistic and affective diversity, is the unique feature of Meditations, even in relation to its Ur-version for quartet, which has an additional and quite obtrusive movement. Nothing that came after Meditations approached it in structural complexity and subtlety.
These may be the missing ingredients in the music of Coltrane's final period. The drummer Elvin Jones said, "Only poets can understand it," though maybe only mystics could, for until his final album Coltrane seemingly forsook lyricism for an unfettered quest for ecstasy. The results remain virtually indescribable, and they forestall criticism with the furious directness of their energy. Yet their effect depends more on the abandonment of rationality, which most listeners achieve only intermittently if at all. In fact, it may be the listener himself who is abandoned, for it seems clear that Coltrane is no longer primarily concerned with a human audience. His final recording of "My Favorite Things" and "Naima," at the Village Vanguard in 1966, uses the musical texts as springboards to visionary rhapsody--almost, in fact, as pretexts. All songs become virtually interchangeable, and there is really no point any longer in requests. The only favorite thing he is playing about now is salvation. Coltrane's second wife, Alice, who had by then replaced Tyner as the group's pianist, has remarked, "Some of his latest works aren't musical compositions." This may be their glory and their limitation, the latter progressively more evident in the uninspired emulation by the so-called "Coltrane machines" who followed the last footsteps of the master, and also in the current dismissal of free jazz as a dead end by both jazz mainstreamers and the experimental composer Anthony Davis (who nonetheless recently used Coltrane as a model in the "Mecca" section of his opera X).
The last album that Coltrane recorded was Expression, in February and March of 1967. The album has an aura of twilight, of limbo, particularly in the piece "To Be," in which Coltrane and Sanders play spectral flute and piccolo respectively. The sixteen ametrical minutes of "To Be," which could readily have added to its title the second part of Hamlet's question, are as eerie as any in music.
The most striking characteristic of the album is its sense of consummation, which is clear in the abandonment of developmental structure and often bar divisions, and in the phantasmal rather than propulsive lines that pervade the work. There had always been in Coltrane a profound tension between the pure virtuosity of his elongated phrases and the high sustained cries or eloquent rests that followed. The cries, wails, and shrieks remain in Expression but they are subsumed by the hard-won simplicity that predominates in the album--the lyricism not of "the one essential" line he had sought seven years earlier and never found but one born of courageous resignation. Pater said that all art aspires to the condition of music. Coltrane seems to suggest here that music in turn aspires to the condition of silence.
Those who criticize Coltrane's virtuosic profusion are of the same party as those who found Van Gogh's canvases "too full of paint"--a criticism Henry Miller once compared to the dismissal of a mystic as "too full of God." In Coltrane, sound--often discordant, chaotic, almost unbearable--became the spiritual form of the man, an identification perhaps possible only with a wind instrument, with which the player is of necessity fused more intimately than with strings or percussion. This physical intimacy was all the more intense for his characteristically tight embouchure, the preternatural duration and complexity of his phrases, and his increasing use of overblowing techniques. The whole spectrum of Coltrane's music--the world-weary melancholy and transcendental yearning that ultimately recall Bach more than Parker, the jungle calls and glossolalic shrieks, the whirlwind runs and spare elegies for murdered children and a murderous planet--is at root merely a suffering man's breath. The quality of that music reminds us that the root of the word inspiration is "breathing upon." This country has not produced a greater musician.
Copyright © 1987 by Edward Strickland. All rights reserved. The Atlantic Monthly; December 1987; "What Coltrane Wanted"; Volume 260, No. 6; pages 100-102.
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/coltranes-free-jazz-awesome
November 10, 2014
Coltrane’s Free Jazz Wasn’t Just “A Lot of Noise”
by Richard Brody
The New Yorker
The discovery and release of a previously unknown recording by the saxophonist John Coltrane, who died at the age of forty in 1967, is cause for rejoicing—and I’m rejoicing in “Offering: Live at Temple University,” the release of a tape, made for the school’s radio station, of a concert that Coltrane and his band gave on November 11, 1966, a mere nine months before his death.
I knew and already loved this concert, on the basis of a bootleg of three of its five numbers. But the legitimate release offers much better sound and contains the pièce de résistance: a climactic performance of “My Favorite Things,” the Richard Rodgers tune that Coltrane turned into a jazz classic in 1960. Yet this 1966 performance of it is very different from that of 1960, and, indeed, even from Coltrane recordings from a year or two before the Temple concert. In the intervening years, Coltrane’s musical conception had shifted toward what can conveniently be called “free jazz.”
The term started as the name of an album by one of the form’s key artists, Ornette Coleman, from 1960, even though that recording only hinted at the further extremes of free jazz, some of which were in evidence in Coltrane’s final two years. The idea, roughly, involves playing without a set harmonic structure (the framework of chords that lasts a pre-set number of bars and gives jazz performances a sense of sentences and paragraphs), without a foot-tapping beat, and sometimes even without the notion of solos, allowing musicians to join in or lay out as the spirit moves them. Lacking beat, harmony, and tonality, free jazz cuts the main connection to show tunes, dance-hall performances, or even background music to which jazz owed much of whatever popularity it enjoyed.
There’s a temptation to consider free jazz as a freedom from: freedom from structures and formats and preëxisting patterns of any sort. But it’s also a freedom to: a freedom to musical disinhibition of tone, a vehemence and fervor, as well as a freedom to invent. The very word “freedom” meant something particular to black Americans in the nineteen-sixties. They didn’t have it, and there’s an implicit, and sometimes explicit, political idea in free jazz: a freedom from European styles, a freedom to seek African and other musical heritages, and, also, a freedom to cross-pollinate jazz with other arts. In the process, jazz musicians developed new forms and new moods that reflected a new generation’s experiences and ideals. The politics of free jazz were inseparable from its aesthetic transformation of jazz into overt and self-conscious modernism.
Coltrane’s turn to free jazz, in his last two years of performance, gave rise to a more overtly transcendent yet frenzied yearning. His playing on “Offering” is even more fervent and, at times, furious than it had been, even two years earlier, on the celebrated album “A Love Supreme.” Yet his heightened, trance-like playing has a core of stillness, of devotional tranquility; his music is like a whirlwind with an eye of serenity.
The difference in Coltrane’s own playing goes hand in hand with that of his group over all. In his last years, he radically changed his very conception of his band, and what resulted was a new musical tone. Coltrane’s former group was a classic quartet (featuring the pianist McCoy Tyner, the bassist Jimmy Garrison, and the drummer Elvin Jones). His new band, heard in “Offering,” was a quintet, augmented by the saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, in which Coltrane’s wife, Alice Coltrane, replaced Tyner and Rashied Ali replaced Jones. (Garrison stayed in the group, though in the “Offering” concert he was replaced by Sonny Johnson.) Also, for the Temple gig, Coltrane supplemented the band with four more percussionists and two guest alto saxophonists, Coltrane’s longtime acquaintance Arnold Joyner and the teen-ager Steve Knoblauch, whom Coltrane invited to solo on “My Favorite Things.” (The liner notes, by Ashley Kahn, feature their accounts of the concert.) The big group, playing free of harmonic structures and foot-tapping rhythm, gives the succession and shift of musical events a tumultuous, organic flow. In the grand scope of its development and in the tumble of its frenetic incidents, the performances make perfect, natural dramatic sense.
Not everyone seems as enamored of this recording—or, for that matter, of Coltrane’s later performances in general. Geoff Dyer, writing at the New York Review of Books site, describes the music as “shrieking, screaming, and wildness.” He loves Coltrane—the works of the classic quartet, featuring Elvin Jones and McCoy Tyner. But Dyer calls late Coltrane “catastrophic”; and Dyer is an honorable fan. He tells the story of Coltrane’s musical transformations around 1965, and, demeaning the recording of “Offering,” cites approvingly Jones’s view of them:
The epilogue of “But Beautiful” is an essay in which Dyer makes clear that free jazz altogether was already his bête noire—pun entirely intended. He asserts the centrality of “tradition” in jazz—as if it needed his defense—and relies on this principle to justify the limits of his taste. In this essay, too, he writes in veneration of Coltrane’s classic quartet, only to assert that, in Coltrane’s later performances, “there is little beauty but much that is terrible.” Dyer is so bound to his own idea of what jazz is, and to its popular and classical roots, that he can’t hear the ideas of one of its greatest creators. He listens to jazz like a consumer or a patron rather than like an artist; he doesn’t enter into imaginative sympathy with the musicians, and he can’t conceive or, for that matter, feel what the creator of “Spiritual” or “Dearly Beloved” finds necessary in “Interstellar Space” or “Offering.”
In “Offering,” there are astonishing, deeply moving moments in which Coltrane uses his voice—he cries out during a solo by Sanders, and twice sings in a sort of vocalise, pounding his chest to make his voice warble. Dyer writes condescendingly in his review that “these eagerly anticipated moments actually sound a bit daft—which is not to say that they were without value.” They don’t sound “daft” at all; they sound like spontaneous and ingenuous expressions of rapturous joy. But they are gestures that would have had little place amid the prodigious musical strength of Coltrane’s classic quartet. On the other hand, they’re right at home in Coltrane’s open-ended quasi-hangout band, in the familial intimacy that gives rise to its vulnerable furies.
'A LOVE SUPREME' ON IMPULSE RECORDS
(1964)
http://panopticonreview.blogspot.com/2008/08/john-coltrane-vs-philosophical.html
FROM THE PANOPTICON REVIEW ARCHIVES
(Originally posted on August 4, 2008):
Monday, August 4, 2008
The Art of John Coltrane vs. The Philosophical Limitations of Jazz Criticism
Book Review
by Kofi Natambu
Coltrane: The story of a sound. By Ben Ratliff.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2007
This is a curiously schizophrenic, self-serving, and ultimately shallow book. On the one hand it proposes to provide readers with a broad general outline of the ‘artistic history’ of John Coltrane’s career and on the other critically examine his ongoing impact and influence, musical and extramusical, on both his contemporaries and subsequent generations of musicians since his early death at the age of forty in 1967.
Throughout, the author--Ben Ratliff, Jazz critic for the New York Times—engages in a highly digressive commentary on what he thinks Coltrane’s career as player, composer, and cultural avatar means to the history of Jazz and to our understanding and appreciation of an individual American aesthetic and cultural icon.
However, these otherwise laudable, useful, and intriguing ambitions are seriously marred by Ratliff’s intellectually reductive presumptions about both the music he proposes to critique and examine and the cultural philosophy of the individual creative personality he wants to portray. The major source of Ratliff’s analytical flaws and blind spots (which are considerable) lies with his studied quasi-philosophical over-reliance and even lazy intellectual dependency on an empirical framework that consistently reduces profound and unsettling questions of aesthetic, cultural and expressive identity and philosophy to almost rudimentary descriptions and examinations of the largely academic categories of style, formal structure, method, and technique(s). Thus we are treated to quite a bit of admittedly lucid but predominately expository writing about how and why Coltrane’s music differs in cosmetic terms from that of other musical styles, traditions, forms, and genres in Western music particularly of the United States and Europe. However, the much broader and more specific historical, social, cultural, ideological, economic, and political contexts of Coltrane’s music (and persona) as it was actually created, produced, marketed, distributed and consumed in the society he and his music lived/lives in is either ignored or given very short shrift in Ratliff’s analysis.
Ratliff’s annoying and often condescending tendency to churlishly dismiss or discount the significance of the central historical roles that political economy, racism, and most importantly, competing cultural and aesthetic philosophies have played and continue to play in both the creative and social ecosphere of Jazz is a major weakness in a book that almost coyly demands that we accept, if not embrace, its highly problematic fundamental premises. These premises are the following: That Coltrane was not primarily interested in expressing and supporting creatively provocative ideas and values per se but in obsessively pursuing matters of craft, stylistic expression, and technical prowess; that Coltrane was not really interested in the social, cultural, and political implications of what he was playing or the form and content of the highly varied reactions of audiences to what he was playing and why; that the 1960s ‘black power’ movement had a negative or distorting effect on the study, appreciation, and understanding of what the complex musical evolution known as “late Coltrane” (1965-1967) meant to the artist and black and white American audiences alike. And that to fully grasp what Coltrane finally accomplished or was trying to do in his work one had to surrender to a romantic aesthetic notion rooted in the 19th century and later promulgated in the 20th century by the late modernist poet Robert Lowell (an aesthetic theory Ratliff suggestively paraphrases and appropriates for a historically different artistic and cultural context) that Coltrane and his music represented and embodied the “monotony of the sublime” found in other radical forms of American art making. Further Ratliff asserts that Coltrane was making a music of “his interior cosmos” and was finally consumed by a music of “meditation and chant” in the last years after December 1964 (and the pivotal appearance of Coltrane’s magnum opus composition suite ‘A Love Supreme’) until his death in July, 1967.
What Ratliff also fails to address and seriously investigate is the complex and varied receptions of, and responses to, this music by other musicians and the larger listening audience meant in terms of the history of Jazz up until the late 1960s (and by implication ever afterward). While Ratliff readily acknowledges and broadly surveys the intense chaotic volatility of art, society, and culture of that era (and Coltrane’s important, even mythic, participation in it) what he fails to provide is an informed analytical and theoretical critique of precisely why Coltrane, Jazz in general, and the larger society remained in a dire and fundamental conflict over what role the concept of “art” and its various uses and identities should or could be in the music. At one point Ratliff even mentions that as far as he knew Coltrane had never publicly used or uttered the word ‘art’ to describe what his music was about. I was hoping that Ratliff would subsequently examine what he thought this fact meant to his general analysis of Jazz as a musical aesthetic in the post-WWII period, but he simply chalked it up to Coltrane’s tendency toward verbal reticence in publicly talking about his music in openly intellectual terms and his personal indifference to categorical labeling. The result is a book that manages to raise important and previously neglected questions about the specific nature and identity of Coltrane’s work and his profound contributions to American music, while at the same time almost willfully refusing to take any discernible theoretical or ideological position(s) on what Ratliff himself as critic and historian thought Coltrane’s music and reputation represents.
It is Ratliff’s failure to seriously confront and intellectually engage the previously published critical literature on both Coltrane and Jazz of the 1955-1970 era that is most disapointing. Among this rather extensive body of texts is very important work by a number of African American intellectuals, historians, and critics like Dr. C.O. Simpkins (who wrote a major book on Coltrane as early as 1975—which Ratliff himself even curiously acknowledges as “one of the best Coltrane biographies” and then proceeds to say not one more word about), the late James Stewart who wrote a number of powerful and influential essays on Jazz of the 1960s and ‘70s, Bill Cole, prominent ethnomusicologist and former Professor of Music at Dartmouth College who wrote a seminal musical biography on Coltrane in 1976, the extraordinary poet and cultural historian A.B. Spellman, author of one of the most prescient books ever published on black avant-garde music ‘Four Lives in the BeBop Business’ (later titled ‘Black Music: Four Lives) in 1966, and finally one of the leading Jazz critics and historians in the entire modern canon of 20th century Jazz literature, the legendary poet, playwright, essayist, novelist, and activist Amiri Baraka (formerly Leroi Jones). It is especially revealing that when Ratliff does briefly mention Baraka’s work (he quotes part of a poem by him on Coltrane and also a small segment from an essay on Black nationalism in his art) he doesn’t really focus on Baraka as a music critic; rather he summarizes in a couple sentences what Baraka’s fundamental stance was in the late 1960s on the cultural and social uses and function of what black art is or could be. But tellingly Ratliff does not talk about or examine Baraka’s major Jazz criticism of this period (1964-1967) qua criticism. This omission is not merely incidental but goes to the heart of what Ratliff refuses to deal with generally in his text: the larger meaning of the contentious discourse raging then and now over what Coltrane and the so-called ‘Free-Jazz’ players and composers of the 1960s and ‘70s represented (and currently represents) to an understanding of the Jazz tradition and U.S. culture generally over the past century.
This is especially significant with respect to the philosophical acuity and depth of the major book of Jazz criticism that Baraka published in 1967 entitled ‘Black Music.’ Dedicated to ‘John Coltrane, the heaviest spirit’ this book, made up of formerly published magazine essays and articles comprises one of the most important statements ever conceived and written about the specific dynamics, formal and stylistic challenges, cultural theory, and ideological identity of the so-called black musical “avant garde” of the 1959-1967 era. Pivotal to this text’s visionary stance is the first essay from the book, which is quoted at the beginning of this review. “Jazz and the White Critic” published in 1963 and which initially appeared in Down Beat magazine, was a major advance in the history of Jazz criticism because it openly and courageously addressed one of the most important but largely ignored issues in the canonical history of Jazz writing—the contradiction and separation between the major black players of the music and the almost completely exclusive white writers and critics of the music. By raising questions about what this contradiction said and implied about Jazz music and its history as art, science, history, sociology, ideology, and political economy, Baraka revealed that what white critics said about the music, reflected intellectual, cultural, and personal biases that had to be acknowledged and taken serious account of.
Ironically, Ratliff as critic and historian ultimately avoids these and other related issues by insisting that the individual icon in Jazz (like Coltrane) is not only an indispensable touchstone in the music’s evolution but that even more importantly the bands that they and others lead are even more significant. As Ratliff puts it at the end of his study “The truth of Jazz is in its bands.” While this statement seems accurate enough on its surface with its philosophical emphasis on the time honored Western notion of the “artist” as being central to an understanding and appreciation of any cultural or aesthetic expression, it appears that Ratliff winds up failing to notice that Jazz is first and foremost a public, collective, collaborative, and thus social expression whose major focus is not merely on the players and composers involved but on the communities that it engages in any given cultural environment. Thus the role of the individual “genius” in the music’s identity and evolution is not the dominant one. Of course, the marketing and processed packaging of the individual musician (or ensemble) as readily available commodity in the economic context of the capitalist marketplace where commodities are routinely promoted, bought, and sold may give the distinct impression that the individual “great man or woman” is the most important driving force behind the music but that would be an ultimately false and greatly mistaken notion. Even with such astonishingly advanced and gifted players and composers as the late, great John Coltrane it would be far more accurate to suggest that actually “the truth of Jazz lies in its music.” As critic and historian Ratliff misses, neglects, or ignores this crucial point and his book (and his analysis of Coltrane) greatly suffers for it.
http://www.jerryjazzmusician.com/2014/01/liner-notes-live-birdland-leroi-jones/
Liner Notes: LeRoi Jones on John Coltrane’s Live at Birdland
January 31, 2014
Political, fiery, critical, poetic, inspirational…All of this shows up in Amiri Baraka’s brilliant liner notes to the 1963 recording of John Coltrane’s Live at Birdland. At the time known as LeRoi Jones, Baraka’s liner notes to this album were the first time the jazz writer Stanley Crouch “had seen that kind of poetic sensibility brought to the discussion of jazz. It was as new to me as the way Coltrane and his band were reinventing the 4/4 swing, blues, ballads, and Afro-Hispanic rhythms that are the four elements essential to jazz…His was the first Negro voice that sailed to the center of my taste by combining the spunk and the raw horrors of the sidewalk with the library, for an elegant manhandling of the form.”
These notes were written at the time of Jones’ 1963 Down Beat essay “Jazz and the White Critic,” which, in the words of Blowin’ Hot and Cool: Jazz and its Critics author John Gennari, was a “challenge to jazz writers of all backgrounds to reckon with the lived experience of black Americans and to consider how this experience had been embedded in the notes, tones, and rhythms of the music.” Keep that in mind when reading these notes…
One of the most baffling things about America is that despite its essentially vile profile, so much beauty continues to exist here. Perhaps it’s as so many thinkers have said, that it is because of the vileness, or call it adversity, that such beauty does exist. (As balance?).
Thinking along these lines, even the title of this album can be rendered “symbolic” and more directly meaningful. John Coltrane Live At Birdland. To me, Birdland is only America in microcosm, and we know how high the mortality rate is for artists in this instant tomb. Yet, the title tells us that John Coltrane is there live. In this tiny America where the most delirious happiness can only be caused by the dollar, a man continues to make daring reference to some other kind of thought. Impossible? Listen to I Want To Talk About You.
Coltrane apparently doesn’t need an ivory tower. Now that he is a master, and the slightest sound from his instrument is valuable, he is able, literally, to make his statements anywhere. Birdland included. It does not seem to matter to him (nor should it) that hovering in the background are people and artifacts that have no more to do with his music than silence.
But now I forget why I went off into this direction. Nightclubs are, finally, nightclubs. And their value is that even though they are raised or opened strictly for gain (and not the musician’s) if we go to them and are able to sit, as I was for this session, and hold on, if it is a master we are listening to, we are very likely to be moved beyond the pettiness and stupidity of our beautiful enemies. John Coltrane can do this for us. He has done it for me many times, and his music is one of the reasons suicide seems so boring.
There are three numbers on the album that were recorded Live at Birdland, Afro-Blue, I Want To Talk About You, and The Promise. And while some of the non-musical hysteria has vanished from the recording, that is, after riding a subway through New York’s bowels, and that subway full of all the things any man should expect to find in some thing’s bowels, and then coming up stairs, to the street, and walking slowly, head down, through the traffic and failure that does shape the area, and then entering “The Jazz Corner Of The World” (a temple erected in praise of what God?), and then finally amidst that noise and glare to hear a man destroy all of it, completely, like Sodom, with just the first few notes from his horn, your “critical” sense can be erased completely, and that experience can place you somewhere a long way off from anything ugly. Still, what was of musical value that I heard that night does remain, and the emotions … some of them completely new … that I experience at each “objective” rehearing of this music are as valuable as anything else I know about. And all of this is on this record, and the studio pieces, Alabama and Your Lady, are among the strongest efforts on the album.
But since records, recorded “Live” or otherwise, are artifacts, that is the way they should be talked about. The few people who were at Birdland the night of October 8 who really beard what Coltrane, Jones, Tyner and Garrison were doing will probably tell you, if you ever run into them, just “exactly” what went on, and how we all reacted. I wish I had a list of all those people so that interested parties could call them and get the whole story, but then, almost anyone who’s heard John and the others at a nightclub or some kind of live performance has got stories of their own. I know I’ve got a lot of them.
But in terms of the artifact, what you’re holding in your hand now, I would say first of all, if you can hear, you’re going to be moved. Afro-Blue, the long tune of the album, is in the tradition of all the African-Indian-Latin flavored pieces Trane has done on soprano, since picking up that horn and reclaiming it as a jazz instrument. (In this sense The Promise is in that same genre.) Even though the head-melody is simple and song-like, it is a song given by making what feels to me like an almost unintelligible lyricism suddenly marvelously intelligible. McCoy Tyner too, who is the polished formalist of the group, makes his less cautious lyrical statements on this, but driven, almost harassed, as Trane is too, by the mad ritual drama that Elvin Jones taunts them with. There is no way to “describe” Elvin’s playing, or, I would suppose, Elvin himself. The long tag of Afro-Blue, with Elvin thrashing and cursing beneath Trane’s line, is unbelievable. Beautiful has nothing to do with it, but it is. (I got up and danced while writing these notes, screaming at Elvin to cool it.) You feel when this is finished, amidst the crashing cymbals, bombarded tomtoms, and above it all Coltrane’s soprano singing like any song you can remember, that it really did not have to end at all, that this music could have gone on and on like the wild pulse of all living.
Trane did Billy Eckstine’s I Want To Talk About You some years ago, but I don’t think it’s any news that his style has changed a great deal since then, and so this Talk is something completely different. It is now a virtuoso tenor piece (and the tenor is still Trane’s “real” instrument) and instead of the simplistic though touching note-for-note replay of the ballad’s line, on this performance each note is tested given a slight tremolo or emotional vibrato (note to chord to scale reference), which makes it seem as if each one of the notes is given the possibility of “infinite” qualification, i.e., scalar or chordal, expansion, “threatening” us with those “sheets of sound,” but also proving that the ballad as it was written was only the beginning of the story. The tag on this is an unaccompanied solo of Trane’s that is a tenor lesson-performance that seems to get more precisely stated with each rehearing.
If you have heard Slow Dance or After The Rain, then you might be prepared for the kind of feeling that Alabama carries. I didn’t realize until now what a beautiful word Alabama is. That is one function of art, to reveal beauty, common or uncommon, uncommonly. And that’s what Trane does. Bob Thiele asked Trane if the title “had any significance to today’s problems.” I suppose he meant literally. Coltrane answered, “It represents, musically, something that I saw down there translated into music from inside me.” Which is to say, Listen. And what we’re given is a slow delicate introspective sadness, almost hopelessness, except for Elvin, rising in the background like something out of nature … a fattening thunder, storm clouds or jungle war clouds. The whole is a frightening emotional portrait of some place, in these musicians’ feelings. If that “real” Alabama was the catalyst, more power to it, and may it be this beautiful, even in its destruction.
Your Lady is the sweetest song in the album. And it is pure song, say, as an accompaniment for some very elegant uptown song and dance man. Elvin Jones’ heavy tingling parallel counterpoint sweeps the line along, and the way he is able to solo constantly beneath Trane’s flights, commenting, extending, or just going off on his own, is a very important part of the total sound and effect of this Coltrane group. Jimmy Garrison’s constancy and power, which must be fantastic to support, stimulate and push this group of powerful (and diverse) personalities, is already almost legendary. On tunes like Lady or Afro-Blue Garrison’s bass booms so symmetrically and steadily and emotionally, and again, with such strength, that one wild guess that he must be able to tear safes open with his fingers. All the music on this album is Live, whether it was recorded above drinking and talk at Birdland, in the studio. There is a daringly human quality to John Coltrane’s music that makes itself felt, wherever he records. If you can hear, this music will make you think of a lot of weird and wonderful things. You might even become one of them.
http://decanting-cerebral.tumblr.com/post/72872532210/amiri-baraka-speaks-of-john-coltrane
10th Jan 2014 | 7 notes
Amiri Baraka Speaks Of John Coltrane
1. Trane emerged as the process of historical clarification itself, of a particular social/aesthetic development. When we see him standing next to Bird and Diz, an excited young inlooker inside the torrent of the rising bop statement, right next to the chief creators of that fervent expression of new black life, we are seeing actually point and line, note and phrase of the continuum. As if we could also see Louis and Bechet hovering over them, with Pres hovering just to the side awaiting his entrance, and then beyond, in a deeper, yet-to-be-revealed hover, Pharoah and Albert and David and Wynton or Olu in the mist, there about to be, when called by the notes of what had struck yet before all mentioned.
2. Trane carried the deepness in as thru Bird and Diz, and back to us. He reclaimed the bop fire, the Africa, polyrythmic, improvisational, blue, spirituality of us. The starter of one thing yet the anchor of something before. In the relay of our constant rise and rerise, phoenix describing its birth as a description of yet another (though there is not another) process. Trane carrying Bird-Diz bop revolution and its opposing force to the death force of slavery and corporate co-optation, went through various changes in life, in music. He carried the Southern black church music, and blues and rhythm & blues, as way stations of his personal development, not just theory or abstract history. He played in all these musics and was all these persons. His apprenticeship was extensive and deep; the changes a revealed continuity.
3. The point of demarcation was Miles’ classic quintet, with Cannonball the other up-front stylistic vector. Style and philosophy confirmed each other. As I have said before, Cannonball was Miles’ confection of blues that would later be called fusion. Simple and charming in that context, but very soon commercial on the way to not. Trane, on the other side, was the way of expressionism. Nuclear and carrying the rush of birth and death and rebirth and redeath and new life and yet again forever, what is, as the Africans said, Is Is. Ja Is (Jazz) The Come Music.
4. The ‘60s, when he appeared full-up, was a period, a rhythm of intensity, the giant steps of revolution. This is why we always associate him with Malcom X, as a parallel of that turbulence. Trane’s annihilation of the popular song, so-called, was its restatement as a broader, more universal popular. His “My Favorite Things” could not be Hollywood’s. Hollywood is to make animalism and exploitation glamorous, and Trane was trying to speak of what will exist beyond animals, what had created them, and what will carry them away as waste. What is disposed.
5. Trane’s constant assaults on the given, the status quo, the Tin Pan Alley of the soul, was what Malcolm attempted in our social life. And both African Americans, they carried that reference, Black Life, as their starting point and historical confirmation. The Truth sounds bland only if we don’t understand what it is said in opposition to. Since it is transcendent, invincible, existent even past whatever else we claim exists. Even the lie must use real life as a reference to trick us, as it claims to be truth. But Trane made no claims, either in his life or his work - what he did, he got from life, and we either recognize it with our selves or risk being wasted. Like Malcolm, what he was was reality; not to grasp it defines the quality of our consciousness, our closeness to what cannot finally be denied.
–- Amiri Baraka, “The Coltrane Legacy,” from liner notes included with “The Last Giant: The John Coltrane Anthology,” Rhino Records, 1993
http://edwardbyrne.blogspot.com/2008/09/john-coltrane-michael-s-harper-and.html
Monday, September 22, 2008
John Coltrane, Michael S. Harper, and Amiri Baraka: Jazz Music and Poetry
In Jazz Is, his collection of reflections on jazz musicians, Nat Hentoff describes John Coltrane: “Coltrane, a man of almost unbelievable gentleness made human to us lesser mortals by his very occasional rages. Coltrane, an authentically spiritual man, but not innocent of carnal imperatives. Or perhaps more accurately, a man, in his last years, especially but not exclusively consumed by affairs of the spirit. That is, having constructed a personal world view (or view of the cosmos) on a residue of Christianity and an infusion of Eastern meditative practices and concerns, Coltrane became a theosophist of jazz. The music was a way of self-purgation so that he could learn more about himself to the end of making himself and his music part of the unity of all being. He truly believed this, and in this respect, as well as musically, he has been a powerful influence on many musicians since.”
As we approach John Coltrane’s birthday tomorrow (born September 23, 1926), this occasion offers another opportunity to recognize the close associations between jazz and poetry during the last half-century. Perhaps no example displays the merging of these two art forms better than Michael S, Harper’s “Dear John, Dear Coltrane,” the title poem from his 1970 collection that responds to Coltrane’s music, particularly his magnificent 1965 recording, A Love Supreme. (A rare film clip of Coltrane performing an excerpt of “A Love Supreme” appears above.) Harper explains his poem actually was written just before Coltrane’s death in 1967, yet the poem’s later publication and its content certainly lend a sense of elegy to the work.
DEAR JOHN, DEAR COLTRANE
by Michael S. Harper
a love supreme, a love supreme
a love supreme, a love supreme
Sex fingers toes
in the marketplace
near your father's church
in Hamlet, North Carolina—
witness to this love
in this calm fallow
of these minds,
there is no substitute for pain:
genitals gone or going,
seed burned out,
you tuck the roots in the earth,
turn back, and move
by river through the swamps,
singing: a love supreme, a love supreme;
what does it all mean?
Loss, so great each black
woman expects your failure
in mute change, the seed gone.
You plod up into the electric city—
your song now crystal and
the blues. You pick up the horn
with some will and blow
into the freezing night:
a love supreme, a love supreme—
Dawn comes and you cook
up the thick sin 'tween
impotence and death, fuel
the tenor sax cannibal
heart, genitals, and sweat
that makes you clean—
a love supreme, a love supreme—
Why you so black?
cause I am
why you so funky?
cause I am
why you so black?
cause I am
why you so sweet?
cause I am
why you so black?
cause I am
a love supreme, a love supreme:
So sick
you couldn't play Naima,
so flat we ached
for song you'd concealed
with your own blood,
your diseased liver gave
out its purity,
the inflated heart
pumps out, the tenor kiss,
tenor love:
a love supreme, a love supreme—
a love supreme, a love supreme—
Some of Harper’s own comments on John Coltrane, jazz, spirituality, and this poem inspired by Coltrane’s music or biographical details are engaging and enlightening:
Black musicians have always melded the private and the historical into the aesthetics of human speech and music, the blues and jazz. The blues and jazz are the finest extensions of a bedrock of the testamental process. Blacks have been witnesses victims; they have paid their dues. “Dear John, Dear Coltrane” was written before John Coltrane died; its aim is the redemptive nature of black experience in terms of the private life of a black musician. Coltrane’s music should be seen as a progression from the personal to incantation and prophesy. It is a fusing of tenderness, pain, and power in their melding, and the [furbishing] is at once an internal and external journey or passage: to live with integrity means “to live”—“to create”; its anthem—“there is no substitute for pain”—The poem is a declaration of tenderness, and a reminder to the reader of a suffering beyond the personal and historical to the cultural, that there can be no reservations fixed to sensibility, that personality gives power through the synthesis of personal history and the overtones of America in and by contact. The poem begins with a catalog of sexual trophies, for whites, a lesson to blacks not to assert their manhood, and that black men are suspect because they are potent. The mingling of trophy and Christian vision, Coltrane’s minister-father, indicates an emphasis on physical facts—that there is no refinement beyond the body. The antiphonal, call-response/retort stanza simulates the black church, and gives the answer of renewal to any question raised—“cause I am.” It is Coltrane himself who chants, in life, “a love supreme”; jazz and the blues, as open-ended forms, cannot be programmatic or abstract, but modal . . .. Coltrane’s music is the recognition and embodiment of life-force; his music is testament in modal forms of expression that unfold in their many modal aspects. His music testifies to life; one is witness to the spirit and power of life; and one is rejuvenated and renewed in a living experience, the music that provides images strong enough to give back that power that renews. . ..
Len Lyons, in The 101 Best Jazz Albums: A History of Jazz on Records, has written about Coltrane’s music: “A Love Supreme, recorded in December, is a remarkably warm, hopeful, and energetic outpouring. Coltrane was explicit about the religious inspiration of the music in his poem which serves as the album’s liner notes. John once told his mother that he had experienced visions of God while preparing the music, which was ominous to her because she felt that ‘when someone is seeing God, that means he is going to die.’”
Although obviously not demonstrating the quality of Harper’s poetry, John Coltrane explicitly indicated his own understanding of the interaction between poetry and music with the inclusion of his poem as guidance to listeners in the liner notes for A Love Supreme:
A LOVE SUPREME
by John Coltrane
I will do all I can to be worthy of Thee O Lord.
It all has to do with it.
Thank you God.
Peace.
There is none other.
God is. It is so beautiful. Thank you God. God is all.
Help us to resolve our fears and weaknesses.
Thank you God.
In You all things are possible.
We know. God made us so.
Keep your eye on God.
God is. he always was. he always will be.
No Matter what . . . it is God.
He is gracious and merciful.
It is most important that I know Thee.
Words, sounds, speech, men, memory, thoughts,
fears and emotions—time—all related . . .
all made from one . . . all made in one.
Blessed be His name.
Thought waves—heat waves—all vibrations—
all paths lead to God. Thank you God.
His way . . . it is so lovely . . . it is gracious.
it is merciful — Thank you God.
One thought can produce millions of vibrations
and they all go back to God . . . everything does.
Thank you God.
Have no fear . . . believe . . . Thank you God.
The universe has many wonders. God is all.
His way . . . it is so wonderful.
Thoughts—deeds—vibrations, etc.
They all go back to God and He cleanses all.
He is gracious and merciful . . .
Thank you God.
Glory to God . . . God is so alive.
God is.
God loves.
May I be acceptable in thy sight.
We are all one in His grace.
The fact that we do exist is acknowledgement
of Thee O Lord.
Thank you God.
God will wash away all our tears . . .
He always has . . .
He always will.
Seek Him everyday. In all ways seek God everyday.
Let us sing all songs to God
To whom all praise is due . . . praise God.
No road is an easy one, but they all go back to God.
With all we share God.
It is all with god.
It is all with Thee.
Obey the Lord
Blessed is He.
We are all from one thing . . . the will of God . . .
thank you God
I have seen God—I have seen ungodly—
none can be greater—none can compare to God.
Thank you God.
He will remake us . . . He always has and he
always will.
It is true—blessed be His name—thank you God.
God breathes through us so completely . . .
so gently we hardly feel it . . . yet,
it is everything.
Thank you God.
ELATIONS—ELEGANCE—EXALTATION—
All from God.
Thank you God. Amen.
In the liner notes to the Coltrane retrospective album released by Rhino Records in 1993, The Last Giant: The John Coltrane Anthology, poet Amiri Baraka reported on the inspiration for his poem dedicated to Coltrane and imitative of Coltrane’s music: “The poem ‘I Love Music’ was written to recall when I was locked up in solitary confinement after the Newark rebellions in 1967. I sat one afternoon and whistled all the Trane I remembered. And then later that afternoon they told me he had died. But I knew even then that that was impossible.” (A recording of Amiri Baraka performing “I Love Music” is available as an mp3 at the University of Pennsylvania archives.) As Baraka suggested then, and now as we remember this significant musician on his birthday, John Coltrane’s spirit remains alive in his recordings, as well as in the music and the poetry later composed by the many he influenced or inspired.
http://www.njarts.net/350-jersey-songs/i-love-music-for-john-coltrane-amiri-baraka/
‘I Love Music (For John Coltrane),’ Amiri Baraka
by Jay Lustig | March 16, 2015
New Jersey Arts
New Jersey poet and activist Amiri Baraka was inspired by music, wrote about music, and collaborated with musicians throughout his entire career. The Newark native — who died last year at the age of 79, and was the father of current Newark mayor Ras Baraka — audaciously tried to summon the wild, liberating spirit of John Coltrane with his words in the 1982 live version of “I Love Music (For John Coltrane)” that can be heard in the YouTube video below. He is backed on the recording by the free jazz group Air (saxophonist Henry Threadgill, bassist Fred Hopkins and drummer Steve McCall).
“The poem ‘I Love Music’ was written to recall when I was locked up in solitary confinement after the Newark rebellions in 1967,” Baraka once said.”I sat one afternoon and whistled all the Trane I remembered. And then later that afternoon they told me he had died. But I knew even then that that was impossible.”
Coltrane did in fact die on July 17, 1967, the last day of the Newark riots. What Baraka meant, I’m sure, was that the spirit of his music would never die.
New Jersey celebrated its 350th birthday last year. And in the 350 Jersey Songs series, we are marking the occasion by posting 350 songs — one a day, for almost a year — that have something to do with the state, its musical history, or both. We started in September 2014, and will keep going until late in the summer.
http://www.npr.org/2000/10/23/148148986/a-love-supreme
The Story Of 'A Love Supreme'
March 07, 2012
by Eric Westervelt
Listen To The Story
All Things Considered
National Public Radiio (NPR)
AUDIO: 12:56: <iframe src="http://www.npr.org/player/embed/148148986/147872677" width="100%" height="290" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe>
John Coltrane recorded A Love Supreme
in December of 1964 and released it the following year. He presented it
as a spiritual declaration that his musical devotion was now
intertwined with his faith in God. In many ways, the album mirrors
Coltrane's spiritual quest that grew out of his personal troubles,
including a long struggle with drug and alcohol addiction.
From the opening gong and tenor saxophone flutter, a four-note bass line builds under the sound. This simple riff becomes the musical framework for the rich improvisations that comprise John Coltrane's 33-minute musical journey.
It made sense to try to imitate the dim-lighted intimacy of a club during the studio recordings, he says, because it was on stage during live shows where the quartet would explore, practice and rehearse new material. He says there was an amazing unspoken communication during the "Love Supreme" sessions. In fact, he says, Coltrane gave very few verbal directions. Tyner calls the album a culmination and natural extension of chemistry honed through years of playing together live.
"You see, one thing about that music is that it showed you that we had reached a level where you could move the music around. John had a very wonderful way of being flexible with the music, flexing it, stretching it. You know, we reflected that kind of thing. He gave us the freedom to do that. We thought of something, 'Oh, then we'll play it,' you know? And he said, 'Yeah, I have a feeling'—you know? And all that freedom just came together when we did that record."
It was that free-wheeling openness which allowed the musicians—Coltrane, Tyner, along with drummer Elvin Jones and bassist Jimmy Garrison—to build a complex four-part suite around a relatively basic musical idea.
Lewis Porter heads the masters program in jazz history and research at Rutgers University-Newark. He's the author of John Coltrane: His Life and Music. Porter says that simple idea culminating in the first movement with an unprecedented verbal chant by Coltrane forms the foundation of the entire suite. It's a theme Coltrane consciously uses in subtle and careful ways throughout A Love Supreme. For example, toward the end of part one, "Acknowledgement," Coltrane plays the riff in every key.
"Coltrane's more or less finished his improvisation, and he just starts playing the 'Love Supreme' motif, but he changes the key another time, another time, another time. This is something very unusual. It's not the way he usually improvises. It's not really improvised. It's something that he's doing. And if you actually follow it through, he ends up playing this little 'Love Supreme' theme in all 12 possible keys," says Porter. "To me, he's giving you a message here. First of all, he's introduced the idea. He's experimented with it. He's improvised with it with great intensity. Now he's saying it's everywhere. It's in all 12 keys. Anywhere you look, you're going to find this 'Love Supreme.' He's showing you that in a very conscious way on his saxophone. So to me, he's really very carefully thought about how he wants to present the idea."
http://radioopensource.org/speaking-of-coltrane-five-conversations-2/
Amiri Baraka
The poet Amiri Baraka
(then: Leroi Jones) chanced to live over the Five Spot in Manhattan in
the summer of 1957 when Coltrane and Thelonius Monk had a five-month
learning-by-doing gig on the Bowery. Willem de Kooning and Jack Kerouac
were also among the listeners and drinkers at the Five Spot. Baraka
says he missed barely a session of the music that culminated in the
Monk-Coltrane Carnegie Hall concert in November, 1957 — a Blue Note
best-seller only after the Library of Congress unearthed the tapes in
2005. This was early, lyrical Coltrane, at the dawn of the civil-rights
era — “the rebellion” in Baraka’s phrasing, then and now — for which
Coltrane became a sort of soundtrack. For Baraka, Coltrane’s “My
Favorite Things” planted a bomb inside the sentimentality of Richard
Rodgers and “The Sound of Music.” The hostility in Baraka’s listening
has softened a lot, but Coltrane is still perhaps his highest
representation of black art with social traction. Baraka follows
Coltrane to the yowling last recordings — Coltrane’s ultimate showdown
with self and life — with a shudder of shared pain. But if that is what
Coltrane wanted us to hear, serious devotees have no choice. “You have
to listen to it.”
While A Love Supreme is a recognized musical masterpiece,
it had enormous personal significance for Coltrane. In the spring of
1957, his dependence on heroin and alcohol lost him one of the best jobs
in jazz. He was playing sax and touring with Miles Davis'
popular group when he became unreliable and strung out. Alternately
catatonic and brilliant, Coltrane's behavior and playing became
increasingly erratic. Davis fired him after a live show that April.
Soon after, Coltrane resolved to clean up his act. He would later write, in the 1964 liner notes to A Love Supreme, "In the year of 1957, I experienced, by the grace of God, a spiritual awakening, which was to lead me to a richer, fuller, more productive life."
But Coltrane didn't always stay the clean course. As he also wrote in the album's notes, "As time and events moved on, I entered into a phase which is contradictory to the pledge and away from the esteemed path. But thankfully now, through the merciful hand of God, I do perceive and have been fully reinformed of his omnipotence. It is truly a love supreme."
The album is, in many ways, a reaffirmation of faith. And the suite lays out what you might call its four phases: "Acknowledgement," "Resolution," "Pursuance" and "Psalms." A Love Supreme has even spawned something of a religious sect. Reverend Franzo Wayne King is pastor of the Saint John Coltrane African Orthodox Church in San Francisco. The congregation mixes African Orthodox liturgy with Coltrane's quotes and a heavy dose of his music. Pastor King calls the album the cornerstone of his 200-member church.
"When you look at the composition of titles and the sequence in which John has them laid out, we say that there's formula in that album. When he says, 'Acknowledgements, resolutions and pursuance,' it's like saying, 'Father, Son and Holy Ghost.' It's like saying, 'Melody, harmony and rhythm.' In other words, you have to acknowledge and then you resolve and then you pursue, and the manifestation of it is a love supreme."
While it's unknown whether Coltrane would have wanted to be worshiped or have his art deified, it's clear in every way that he saw A Love Supreme as much more than just another recording. Coltrane took control of every detail of the album, unlike any of his other works, including writing the liner notes and an accompanying poem. The poem, it's been discovered, is written to match the slow music of the fourth movement, "Psalms." It's a connection Coltrane hints at cryptically in the liner notes.
Pastor King remembers the day his congregation made the discovery. "It was so funny. We were here. We had been collected as a community, and we used to just read it and try to put some passion in it, you know. And then one day, we were reading the album, because he said the last part is 'Psalms,' which is in context, written context. And we said, 'Well, what is he trying to say here?' And then we put it on and sang, 'A love supreme. I would do all I can to be worthy of you, oh, Lord.' It's kind of like Pentecostal preaching, you know," Pastor King says. "We had a great day. We woke up and found out that the music and the words went together, and that was like a further encouragement that John Coltrane was, indeed, you know, sent by God and that that sound had really jumped down from the throne of heaven, so to speak."
While Pastor King sees explicit Christian symbolism in A Love Supreme, others point out that Coltrane took a much more general view. Coltrane was careful to say that while he was raised Christian, his searchings had led him to realize that all religions had a piece of the truth.
Only once did Coltrane perform the entire "Love Supreme" suite live, and there are no recorded interviews in which he talks about the album's personal significance. In fact, Coltrane didn't even talk about it with his band mates. "We didn't talk about a lot of things," says Tyner. But he does say the band knew that A Love Supreme had unique chemistry.
"He told me, he says, 'I respond to what's around me,'" remembers Tyner. "That's the way it should be, you know? And it was just—I couldn't wait to go to work at night. It was just such a wonderful experience. I mean, I didn't know what we were going to do. We couldn't really explain why things came together so well, you know, and why it was, you know, meant to be. I mean, it's hard to explain things like that."
http://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Coltrane-at-80-a-talent-supreme-2469266.php
Coltrane at 80 -- A talent supreme
by Greg Tate
Special to The San Francisco Chronicle
September 22, 2006
This song as well as many other classic Coltrane performances can be found on this DVD-http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000..
John Coltrane: Tenor Saxophone
Track listing:
Despite a relatively brief career (he first came to notice as a sideman at age 29 in 1955, formally launched a solo career at 33 in 1960, and was dead at 40 in 1967), saxophonist John Coltrane was among the most important, and most controversial, figures in jazz. It seems amazing that his period of greatest activity was so short, not only because he recorded prolifically, but also because, taking advantage of his fame, the record companies that recorded him as a sideman in the 1950s frequently reissued those recordings under his name and there has been a wealth of posthumously released material as well. Since Coltrane was a protean player who changed his style radically over the course of his career, this has made for much confusion in his discography and in appreciations of his playing. There remains a critical divide between the adherents of his earlier, more conventional (if still highly imaginative) work and his later, more experimental work. No one, however, questions Coltrane's almost religious commitment to jazz or doubts his significance in the history of the music.
Coltrane was the son of John R. Coltrane, a tailor and amateur musician, and Alice (Blair) Coltrane. Two months after his birth, his maternal grandfather, the Reverend William Blair, was promoted to presiding elder in the A.M.E. Zion Church and moved his family, including his infant grandson, to High Point, NC, where Coltrane grew up. Shortly after he graduated from grammar school in 1939, his father, his grandparents, and his uncle died, leaving him to be raised in a family consisting of his mother, his aunt, and his cousin. His mother worked as a domestic to support the family. The same year, he joined a community band in which he played clarinet and E flat alto horn; he took up the alto saxophone in his high school band. During World War II, his mother, aunt, and cousin moved north to New Jersey to seek work, leaving him with family friends; in 1943, when he graduated from high school, he too headed north, settling in Philadelphia. Eventually, the family was reunited there.
Coltrane's association with Davis inaugurated a period when he began to frequently record as a sideman. Davis may have been trying to end his association Prestige, but Coltrane began appearing on many of the label's sessions. After he became better known in the 1960s, Prestige and other labels began to repackage this work under his name, as if he had been the leader, a process that has continued to the present day. (Prestige was acquired by Fantasy Records in 1972, and many of the recordings in which Coltrane participated have been reissued on Fantasy's Original Jazz Classics [OJC] imprint.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Coltrane
John William Coltrane, also known as "Trane" (September 23, 1926 – July 17, 1967),[1] was an American jazz saxophonist and composer. Working in the bebop and hard bop idioms early in his career, Coltrane helped pioneer the use of modes in jazz and was later at the forefront of free jazz. He led at least fifty recording sessions during his career, and appeared as a sideman on many albums by other musicians, including trumpeter Miles Davis and pianist Thelonious Monk.
As his career progressed, Coltrane and his music took on an increasingly spiritual dimension. Coltrane influenced innumerable musicians, and remains one of the most significant saxophonists in music history. He received many posthumous awards and recognitions, including canonization by the African Orthodox Church as Saint John William Coltrane and a special Pulitzer Prize in 2007.[2] His second wife was pianist Alice Coltrane and their son Ravi Coltrane is also a saxophonist.
To avoid being drafted by the Army, Coltrane enlisted in the Navy on August 6, 1945, the day the first U.S. atomic bomb was dropped on Japan. He was trained as an apprentice seaman at Sampson Naval Training Station in upstate New York before he was shipped to Pearl Harbor, where he was stationed at Manana Barracks, the largest posting of African-American servicemen in the world. By the time he got to Hawaii, in late 1945, the Navy was already rapidly downsizing. Coltrane's musical talent was quickly recognized, though, and he became one of the few Navy men to serve as a musician without having been granted musicians rating when he joined the Melody Masters, the base swing band. He continued to perform other duties when not playing with the band, including kitchen and security details. By the end of his service, he had assumed a leadership role in the band. His first recordings, an informal session in Hawaii with navy musicians, occurred on July 13, 1946.[8] Coltrane played alto saxophone on a selection of jazz standards and bebop tunes.[9]
After being discharged from his duties in the navy, as a seaman first class in August 1946, Coltrane returned to Philadelphia, where he "plunged into the heady excitement of the new music and the blossoming bebop scene."[10] After touring with King Kolax, he joined a Philly-based band led by Jimmy Heath, who was introduced to Coltrane's playing by his former Navy buddy, the trumpeter William Massey, who had played with Coltrane in the Melody Masters [11] In Philadelphia after the war, he studied jazz theory with guitarist and composer Dennis Sandole and continued under Sandole's tutelage through the early 1950s. Originally an altoist,[12] during this time Coltrane also began playing tenor saxophone with the Eddie Vinson Band. Coltrane later referred to this point in his life as a time when "a wider area of listening opened up for me. There were many things that people like Hawk [Coleman Hawkins], and Ben [Webster] , and Tab Smith were doing in the '40s that I didn't understand, but that I felt emotionally."[13] A significant influence, according to tenor saxophonist Odean Pope, was the Philadelphia pianist, composer, and theorist Hasaan Ibn Ali. "Hasaan was the clue to ... the system that Trane uses. Hasaan was the great influence on Trane’s melodic concept." [14]
An important moment in the progression of Coltrane's musical development occurred on June 5, 1945, when he saw Charlie Parker perform for the first time. In a DownBeat article in 1960 he recalled: "the first time I heard Bird play, it hit me right between the eyes."[12] Parker became an early idol, and they played together on occasion in the late 1940s.
Contemporary correspondence shows that Coltrane was already known as "Trane" by this point, and that the music from some 1946 recording sessions had been played for trumpeter Miles Davis—possibly impressing him.[1]
Coltrane was a member of groups led by Dizzy Gillespie, Earl Bostic and Johnny Hodges in the early to mid-1950s.
Coltrane was freelancing in Philadelphia in the summer of 1955 while studying with guitarist Dennis Sandole when he received a call from Davis. The trumpeter, whose success during the late forties had been followed by several years of decline in activity and reputation, due in part to his struggles with heroin, was again active and about to form a quintet. Coltrane was with this edition of the Davis band (known as the "First Great Quintet"—along with Red Garland on piano, Paul Chambers on bass, and Philly Joe Jones on drums) from October 1955 to April 1957 (with a few absences), a period during which Davis released several influential recordings which revealed the first signs of Coltrane's growing ability. This quintet, represented by two marathon recording sessions for Prestige in 1956 that resulted in the albums Cookin', Relaxin', Workin', and Steamin', disbanded due in part to Coltrane's heroin addiction.[1]
During the later part of 1957 Coltrane worked with Thelonious Monk at New York’s Five Spot, and played in Monk's quartet (July–December 1957), but, owing to contractual conflicts, took part in only one official studio recording session with this group. Coltrane recorded many albums for Prestige under his own name at this time, but Monk refused to record for his old label. A private recording made by Juanita Naima Coltrane of a 1958 reunion of the group was issued by Blue Note Records as Live at the Five Spot—Discovery! in 1993. A high quality tape of a concert given by this quartet in November 1957 was also found later, and was released by Blue Note in 2005. Recorded by Voice of America, the performances confirm the group's reputation, and the resulting album, Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall, is widely acclaimed.[citation needed]
Blue Train, Coltrane's sole date as leader for Blue Note, featuring trumpeter Lee Morgan, bassist Paul Chambers, and trombonist Curtis Fuller, is often considered his best album from this period. Four of its five tracks are original Coltrane compositions, and the title track, "Moment's Notice", and "Lazy Bird", have become standards. Both tunes employed the first examples of his chord substitution cycles known as Coltrane changes.[1]
Coltrane formed his first quartet for live performances in 1960 for
an appearance at the Jazz Gallery in New York City. After moving through
different personnel including Steve Kuhn, Pete La Roca, and Billy Higgins, the lineup stabilized in the fall with pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Steve Davis, and drummer Elvin Jones.
Tyner, from Philadelphia, had been a friend of Coltrane's for some
years and the two men had an understanding that the pianist would join
Coltrane when Tyner felt ready for the exposure of regularly working
with him. Also recorded in the same sessions[clarification needed] were the later released albums Coltrane's Sound and Coltrane Plays the Blues.
Coltrane's first record with his new group was also his debut playing the soprano saxophone, the hugely successful My Favorite Things (1960). Around the end of his tenure with Davis, Coltrane had begun playing soprano, an unconventional move considering the instrument's neglect in jazz at the time. His interest in the straight saxophone most likely arose from his admiration for Sidney Bechet and the work of his contemporary, Steve Lacy, even though Davis claimed to have given Coltrane his first soprano saxophone. The new soprano sound was coupled with further exploration. For example, on the Gershwin tune "But Not for Me", Coltrane employs the kinds of restless harmonic movement (Coltrane changes) used on Giant Steps (movement in major thirds rather than conventional perfect fourths) over the A sections instead of a conventional turnaround progression. Several other tracks recorded in the session utilized this harmonic device, including "26–2", "Satellite", "Body and Soul", and "The Night Has a Thousand Eyes".
In May 1961, Coltrane's contract with Atlantic was bought out by the newly formed Impulse! Records label.[15] An advantage to Coltrane recording with Impulse! was that it would enable him to work again with engineer Rudy Van Gelder, who had taped both his and Davis' Prestige sessions, as well as Blue Train. It was at Van Gelder's new studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey that Coltrane would record most of his records for the label.
By early 1961, bassist Davis had been replaced by Reggie Workman, while Eric Dolphy joined the group as a second horn around the same time. The quintet had a celebrated (and extensively recorded) residency in November 1961 at the Village Vanguard, which demonstrated Coltrane's new direction. It featured the most experimental music he had played up to this point, influenced by Indian ragas, the recent developments in modal jazz, and the burgeoning free jazz movement. John Gilmore, a longtime saxophonist with musician Sun Ra, was particularly influential; after hearing a Gilmore performance, Coltrane is reported to have said "He's got it! Gilmore's got the concept!"[16] The most celebrated of the Vanguard tunes, the 15-minute blues, "Chasin' the 'Trane", was strongly inspired by Gilmore's music.[17]
During this period, critics were fiercely divided in their estimation of Coltrane, who had radically altered his style. Audiences, too, were perplexed; in France he was booed during his final tour with Davis. In 1961, Down Beat magazine indicted Coltrane and Dolphy as players of "Anti-Jazz", in an article that bewildered and upset the musicians.[17] Coltrane admitted some of his early solos were based mostly on technical ideas. Furthermore, Dolphy's angular, voice-like playing earned him a reputation as a figurehead of the "New Thing" (also known as "Free Jazz" and "Avant-Garde") movement led by Ornette Coleman, which was also denigrated by some jazz musicians (including Davis) and critics. But as Coltrane's style further developed, he was determined to make each performance "a whole expression of one's being".[18]
In 1962, Dolphy departed and Jimmy Garrison
replaced Workman as bassist. From then on, the "Classic Quartet", as it
came to be known, with Tyner, Garrison, and Jones, produced searching,
spiritually driven work. Coltrane was moving toward a more harmonically
static style that allowed him to expand his improvisations rhythmically,
melodically, and motivically. Harmonically complex music was still
present, but on stage Coltrane heavily favored continually reworking his
"standards": "Impressions", "My Favorite Things", and "I Want to Talk
About You".
The criticism of the quintet with Dolphy may have had an impact on Coltrane. In contrast to the radicalism of his 1961 recordings at the Village Vanguard, his studio albums in the following two years (with the exception of Coltrane, 1962, which featured a blistering version of Harold Arlen's "Out of This World") were much more conservative. He recorded an album of ballads and participated in collaborations with Duke Ellington on the album Duke Ellington and John Coltrane and with deep-voiced ballad singer Johnny Hartman on an eponymous co-credited album. The album Ballads (recorded 1961–62) is emblematic of Coltrane's versatility, as the quartet shed new light on old-fashioned standards such as "It's Easy to Remember". Despite a more polished approach in the studio, in concert the quartet continued to balance "standards" and its own more exploratory and challenging music, as can be heard on the Impressions (recorded 1961–63), Live at Birdland and Newport '63 (both recorded 1963). Impressions consists of two extended jams including the title track along with "Dear Old Stockholm", "After the Rain" and a blues. Coltrane later said he enjoyed having a "balanced catalogue."[citation needed]
The Classic Quartet produced their best-selling album, A Love Supreme, in December 1964. It is reported that Coltrane, who struggled with repeated drug addiction, derived inspiration for A Love Supreme through a near overdose in 1957 which galvanized him to spirituality.[19] A culmination of much of Coltrane's work up to this point, this four-part suite is an ode to his faith in and love for God. These spiritual concerns would characterize much of Coltrane's composing and playing from this point onwards, as can be seen from album titles such as Ascension, Om and Meditations. The fourth movement of A Love Supreme, "Psalm", is, in fact, a musical setting for an original poem to God written by Coltrane, and printed in the album's liner notes. Coltrane plays almost exactly one note for each syllable of the poem, and bases his phrasing on the words. The album was composed at Coltrane's home in Dix Hills on Long Island.
The quartet played A Love Supreme live only once—in July 1965 at a concert in Antibes, France.[citation needed]
In his late period, Coltrane showed an increasing interest in avant-garde jazz, purveyed by Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, Sun Ra and others. In developing his late style, Coltrane was especially influenced by the dissonance of Ayler's trio with bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Sunny Murray, a rhythm section honed with Cecil Taylor as leader. Coltrane championed many younger free jazz musicians such as Archie Shepp, and under his influence Impulse! became a leading free jazz record label.
After A Love Supreme was recorded, Ayler's style became more prominent in Coltrane's music. A series of recordings with the Classic Quartet in the first half of 1965 show Coltrane's playing becoming increasingly abstract, with greater incorporation of devices like multiphonics, utilization of overtones, and playing in the altissimo register, as well as a mutated return of Coltrane's sheets of sound. In the studio, he all but abandoned his soprano to concentrate on the tenor saxophone. In addition, the quartet responded to the leader by playing with increasing freedom. The group's evolution can be traced through the recordings The John Coltrane Quartet Plays, Living Space, Transition (both June 1965), New Thing at Newport (July 1965), Sun Ship (August 1965), and First Meditations (September 1965).
In June 1965, he went into Van Gelder's studio with ten other musicians (including Shepp, Pharoah Sanders, Freddie Hubbard, Marion Brown, and John Tchicai) to record Ascension, a 40-minute piece that included solos by the young avant-garde musicians (as well as Coltrane), and was controversial primarily for the collective improvisation sections that separated the solos. After recording with the quartet over the next few months, Coltrane invited Sanders to join the band in September 1965. While Coltrane used over-blowing frequently as an emotional exclamation-point, Sanders would overblow his entire solo, resulting in a constant screaming and screeching in the altissimo range of the instrument.
By late 1965, Coltrane was regularly augmenting his group with Sanders and other free jazz musicians. Rashied Ali joined the group as a second drummer. This was the end of the quartet; claiming he was unable to hear himself over the two drummers, Tyner left the band shortly after the recording of Meditations. Jones left in early 1966, dissatisfied by sharing drumming duties with Ali. Both Tyner and Jones subsequently expressed displeasure in interviews, after Coltrane's death, with the music's new direction, while incorporating some of the free-jazz form's intensity into their own solo projects.
There is speculation that in 1965 Coltrane began using LSD,[20][21] informing the "cosmic" transcendence of his late period. After the departure of Jones and Tyner, Coltrane led a quintet with Sanders on tenor saxophone, his second wife Alice Coltrane on piano, Garrison on bass, and Ali on drums. Coltrane and Sanders were described by Nat Hentoff as "speaking in tongues". When touring, the group was known for playing very lengthy versions of their repertoire, many stretching beyond 30 minutes and sometimes being an hour long. Concert solos for band members often extended beyond fifteen minutes.
The group can be heard on several concert recordings from 1966, including Live at the Village Vanguard Again! and Live in Japan. In 1967, Coltrane entered the studio several times; though pieces with Sanders have surfaced (the unusual "To Be", which features both men on flutes), most of the recordings were either with the quartet minus Sanders (Expression and Stellar Regions) or as a duo with Ali. The latter duo produced six performances that appear on the album Interstellar Space.
One of his biographers, Lewis Porter, has suggested that the cause of Coltrane's illness was hepatitis, although he also attributed the disease to Coltrane's heroin use.[22] In a 1968 interview Ayler claimed that Coltrane was consulting a Hindu meditative healer for his illness instead of Western medicine, although Alice Coltrane later denied this.[citation needed]
Coltrane's death surprised many in the musical community who were not aware of his condition. Davis said that "Coltrane's death shocked everyone, took everyone by surprise. I knew he hadn't looked too good... But I didn't know he was that sick—or even sick at all."[23]
In 1955, Coltrane married Juanita Naima Grubbs, a Muslim convert, for whom he later wrote the piece "Naima", and came into contact with Islam.[25] They had no children together and were separated by the middle of 1963. Not long after that, Coltrane met pianist Alice McLeod.[26] He and Alice moved in together and had two sons before he was "officially divorced from Naima in 1966, at which time John and Alice were immediately married."[27] John Jr. was born in 1964, Ravi in 1965, and Oranyan ("Oran") in 1967.[27] According to the musician and author Peter Lavezzoli, "Alice brought happiness and stability to John's life, not only because they had children, but also because they shared many of the same spiritual beliefs, particularly a mutual interest in Indian philosophy. Alice also understood what it was like to be a professional musician."[27]
Coltrane was born and raised in a Christian home, and was influenced by religion and spirituality from childhood. His maternal grandfather, the Reverend William Blair, was a minister at an African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church[28][29] in High Point, North Carolina, and his paternal grandfather, the Reverend William H. Coltrane, was an A.M.E. Zion minister in Hamlet, North Carolina.[28] Critic Norman Weinstein noted the parallel between Coltrane's music and his experience in the southern church,[30] which included practicing music there as a youth.
In 1957, Coltrane had a religious experience which may have led him to overcome the heroin addiction[31][32] and alcoholism[32] he had struggled with since 1948.[33] In the liner notes of A Love Supreme, Coltrane states that, in 1957, "I experienced, by the grace of God, a spiritual awakening which was to lead me to a richer, fuller, more productive life. At that time, in gratitude, I humbly asked to be given the means and privilege to make others happy through music." The liner notes appear to mention God in a Universalist sense, and do not advocate one religion over another.[34] Further evidence of this universal view regarding spirituality can be found in the liner notes of Meditations (1965), in which Coltrane declares, "I believe in all religions."[27]
After A Love Supreme, many of the titles of Coltrane's songs and albums were linked to spiritual matters: Ascension, Meditations, Om, Selflessness, "Amen", "Ascent", "Attaining", "Dear Lord", "Prayer and Meditation Suite", and "The Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost".[27] Coltrane's collection of books included The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, the Bhagavad Gita, and Paramahansa Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi. The last of these describes, in Lavezzoli's words, a "search for universal truth, a journey that Coltrane had also undertaken. Yogananda believed that both Eastern and Western spiritual paths were efficacious, and wrote of the similarities between Krishna and Christ. This openness to different traditions resonated with Coltrane, who studied the Qur'an, the Bible, Kabbalah, and astrology with equal sincerity."[35] He also explored Hinduism, Jiddu Krishnamurti, African history, the philosophical teachings of Plato and Aristotle,[36] and Zen Buddhism.[37]
In October 1965, Coltrane recorded Om, referring to the sacred syllable in Hinduism which symbolizes the infinite or the entire Universe. Coltrane described Om as the "first syllable, the primal word, the word of power".[38] The 29-minute recording contains chants from the Hindu Bhagavad Gita[39] and the Buddhist Tibetan Book of the Dead,[40] and a recitation of a passage describing the primal verbalization "om" as a cosmic/spiritual common denominator in all things.
Coltrane's spiritual journey was interwoven with his investigation of world music. He believed not only in a universal musical structure which transcended ethnic distinctions, but in being able to harness the mystical language of music itself. Coltrane's study of Indian music led him to believe that certain sounds and scales could "produce specific emotional meanings." According to Coltrane, the goal of a musician was to understand these forces, control them, and elicit a response from the audience. Coltrane said: "I would like to bring to people something like happiness. I would like to discover a method so that if I want it to rain, it will start right away to rain. If one of my friends is ill, I'd like to play a certain song and he will be cured; when he'd be broke, I'd bring out a different song and immediately he'd receive all the money he needed."[41]
After Coltrane's death, a congregation called the Yardbird Temple in San Francisco began worshipping him as God incarnate. The group was named after Parker, whom they equated to John the Baptist.[42] The congregation later became affiliated with the African Orthodox Church; this involved changing Coltrane's status from a god to a saint.[42] The resultant St. John Coltrane African Orthodox Church, San Francisco is the only African Orthodox church that incorporates Coltrane's music and his lyrics as prayers in its liturgy.[43]
Samuel G. Freedman wrote in a New York Times article that "the Coltrane church is not a gimmick or a forced alloy of nightclub music and ethereal faith. Its message of deliverance through divine sound is actually quite consistent with Coltrane's own experience and message."[42] Freedman also commented on Coltrane's place in the canon of American music:
Documentaries on Coltrane and the church include Alan Klingenstein's The Church of Saint Coltrane (1996),[46][47] and a 2004 program presented by Alan Yentob for the BBC.[48]
In the early 1960s, during his engagement with Atlantic Records, he increasingly played soprano saxophone as well.[1] Toward the end of his career, he experimented with flute in his live performances and studio recordings (Live at the Village Vanguard Again!, Expression). After Dolphy died in June 1964, his mother is reported to have given Coltrane his flute and bass clarinet.[50]
Coltrane's tenor (Selmer Mark VI, serial number 125571, dated 1965) and soprano (Selmer Mark VI, serial number 99626, dated 1962) saxophones were auctioned on February 20, 2005 to raise money for the John Coltrane Foundation. The soprano raised $70,800 but the tenor remained unsold.[51]
The influence Coltrane has had on music spans many genres and musicians. Coltrane's massive influence on jazz, both mainstream and avant-garde, began during his lifetime and continued to grow after his death. He is one of the most dominant influences on post-1960 jazz saxophonists and has inspired an entire generation of jazz musicians.
In 1965, Coltrane was inducted into the Down Beat Jazz Hall of Fame. In 1972, A Love Supreme was certified gold by the RIAA for selling over half a million copies in Japan. This album, as well as My Favorite Things, was certified gold in the United States in 2001. In 1982 he was awarded a posthumous Grammy for "Best Jazz Solo Performance" on the album Bye Bye Blackbird, and in 1997 he was awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.[13] In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante named Coltrane one of his 100 Greatest African Americans.[52] Coltrane was awarded a special Pulitzer Prize in 2007 citing his "masterful improvisation, supreme musicianship and iconic centrality to the history of jazz."[2] He was inducted into the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame in 2009.[53]
His widow, Alice Coltrane, after several decades of seclusion, briefly regained a public profile before her death in 2007. A former home, the John Coltrane House in Philadelphia, was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1999. His last home, the John Coltrane Home in the Dix Hills district of Huntington, New York, where he resided from 1964 until his death, was added to the National Register of Historic Places on June 29, 2007. One of their sons, Ravi Coltrane, named after the sitarist Ravi Shankar, is also a saxophonist.
The Coltrane family reportedly possesses much more unreleased music, mostly mono reference tapes made for the saxophonist, and, as with the 1995 release Stellar Regions, master tapes that were checked out of the studio and never returned.[citation needed] The parent company of Impulse!, from 1965 to 1979 known as ABC Records, purged much of its unreleased material in the 1970s.[54] Lewis Porter has stated that Alice Coltrane intended to release this music, but over a long period of time; Ravi Coltrane is responsible for reviewing the material.[citation needed]
John Coltrane. allmusic
"The 2007 Pulitzer Prize Winners: Special Awards and Citations". The Pulitzer Prizes. Retrieved June 29, 2009. With reprint of short biography.
DeVito et al., p. 1
DeVito et al., p. 2
DeVito et al., p. 3
Porter, pp. 15–17
DeVito et al., p. 5
DeVito et al., p. 367
DeVito et al., pp. 367–368
Porter, Lewis. John Coltrane: His Life and Music Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1999. ISBN 0-472-10161-7
Wilson, Joe. "Musically Speaking." The Mananan 30 Oct. 1945: 7
John Coltrane "Coltrane on Coltrane", Down Beat, September 29, 1960
"John Coltrane Biography". The John Coltrane Foundation. May 11, 2007. Retrieved June 29, 2009.
Armstrong, Rob (February 8, 2013). "There Was No End to the Music". Hidden City Philadelphia. Retrieved July 12, 2015.
Ben Ratliff (2007). Coltrane: The Story of a Sound. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. ISBN 0-374-12606-2.
Corbett, John. "John Gilmore: The Hard Bop Homepage". Down Beat.
Kofsky, Frank (1970). Black Nationalism and the Revolution in Music: John Coltrane: An Interview. Pathfinder Press. p. 235.
Nisenson, p. 179
"A Love Supreme: John Coltrane". abbeville.com.
Porter, pp. 265–266.
Mandel, Howard (January 30, 2008). "John Coltrane: Divine Wind". The Wire (221). Retrieved June 29, 2009.
Porter, p. 292
Porter, p. 290
Jenkins, Todd S. (2004). "The Path to Freedom". Free Jazz and Free Improvisation: An Encyclopedia. Vol. 2. Greenwood Publishing Group. ISBN 0313333149.
Jessie Carney Smith (ed.). "John Coltrane". Gale (Cengage). Retrieved June 26, 2009.
Lavezzoli, p. 281
Lavezzoli, p. 286
Porter, pp. 5–6
Lavezzoli, p. 270
Weinstein, Norman C. (1993) A Night in Tunisia: Imaginings of Africa in Jazz, Hal Leonard Corporation, p. 61, ISBN 0-87910-167-9
Porter, p. 61
Lavezzoli, p. 271
Lavezzoli, pp. 272–273
John Coltrane's liner notes to A Love Supreme, December 1964
Lavezzoli, pp. 280–281
Emmett G. Price III. "John Coltrane, "A Love Supreme" and GOD". allaboutjazz.com. Retrieved October 9, 2008.
Lavezzoli, pp. 286–287
Porter, p. 265
Lavezzoli,
p. 285: "Coltrane and one or two other musicians begin and end the
piece by chanting in unison a verse from chapter nine ("The Yoga of
Mysticism") of the Bhagavad Gita: Rites that the Vedas
ordain, and the rituals taught by the scriptures: all these I am, and
the offering made to the ghosts of the fathers, herbs of healing and
food, the mantram, the clarified butter. I the oblation,
and I the flame into which it is offered. I am the sire of the world,
and this world's mother and grandsire. I am he who awards to each the
fruit of his action. I make all things clean. I am Om!"
Nisenson, p. 183
Porter, p. 211
Samuel G. Freedman (December 1, 2007) "Sunday Religion, Inspired by Saturday Nights", New York Times.
Article "The Jazz Church" by Gordon Polatnick at www.elvispelvis.com
The Dancing Saints. Saint Gregory's of Nyssa Episcopal Church
"John Coltrane The Case for Sainthood" at the Wayback Machine (archived May 10, 2009). St. Barnabas Episcopal Church website.
"The Church of Saint Coltrane (1996)". The New York Times. Retrieved 2012-04-16.
"Alan Klingenstein". Huffington Post. 2008-02-05. Retrieved 2012-04-16.[dead link]
"Secret of John Coltrane's high notes revealed", Roger Highfield, The Telegraph, Sunday June 12, 2011
Cole, Bill (2001). John Coltrane. New York. p. 158. ISBN 030681062X.
"John Coltrane's Saxophones/ Benefit Auction /see description below". drrick.com. Retrieved April 7, 2011.
Asante, Molefi Kete (2002). 100 Greatest African Americans: A Biographical Encyclopedia. Amherst, New York. Prometheus Books. ISBN 1-57392-963-8.
"2009 Inductees". North Carolina Music Hall of Fame. Retrieved September 10, 2012.
[Editor's Note: All About Jazz, Hidden City Philadelphia, and the Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia
have collaborated to present a series of articles on the local jazz
scene that John Coltrane inhabited, developed in, and ultimately
transcended between 1943 and 1958, when he called the city home.]
When 18 year old John Coltrane moved to Philadelphia, in 1943 the nation's third largest city, he entered a fundamentally different world from his hometown of High Point, N.C. Like many African-Americans who migrated to major cities of the North, Coltrane joined older family members and friends already settled there. They lived in an apartment at 1450 N. 12th Street between Jefferson and Master Streets in an area since demolished for the Yorktown Urban Renewal project.
What Coltrane, already a studious musician even in high school, encountered here was a vibrant and intense nightlife scene almost completely centered on live jazz. Trane entrenched himself among a large group of highly skilled musicians and took advantage of the affordable, serious musical education available, all of which would have been inconceivable in the small town Jim Crow South. According to saxophonist Odean Pope, Philadelphia was the "institution" that fostered great talents like Coltrane, pianist McCoy Tyner, saxophonist Jimmy Heath, organist Jimmy Smith, trumpeter Lee Morgan, drummer Philly Joe Jones, saxophonist Benny Golson, bassist Reggie Workman, and Pope himself.
Pope makes the case that with New York relying on talent from other cities but not entirely fostering its own brand of jazz, Philly was the greatest jazz scene in the United States between World War II and the mid-1960s. New York, headquarters of the top labels and largest venues, was where you went when you made it big. Instead, Philadelphia was the proving ground for jazz artists, and its working-class people fostered the talent by packing rooms every week from Tuesday to Saturday nights. The sheer number of clubs, musicians' culture of sharing, strong instruction available at both the Ornstein School of Music, located at 19th and Spruce Streets, and the Granoff Studios, located at 2118 Spruce Street, and the discipline and practice regimen of key musicians in the scene, gave young men like Coltrane a true Philly jazz education.
"There was no end to the music," says Pope, who would regularly practice with Coltrane and pianist Hasaan Ibn Ali, a Philly legend who Pope claims was the most advanced player to ever develop in the city. Pope lived on Colorado Street in North Philly, near Hasaan's residence on Gratz Street. Together, they'd walk the few blocks to Trane's house on N. 33rd Street, once the saxophonist took up residence there in 1952, and have long jam sessions, trading ideas, practicing scales and showing each other the harmonic possibilities of their instruments. Hasaan's ideas were very advanced and Trane "practiced, practiced, practiced." Unfortunately, there is only one recording session available featuring Hasaan Ibn Ali: "The Max Roach Trio Featuring the Legendary Hasaan," from 1964 on Atlantic.
Pope argues that it's possible to draw a direct line from the technique that Hasaan taught Trane to the harmony Trane developed later on tunes like "Giant Steps." "Hasaan was the clue to all of that, to the system that Trane uses. Hasaan was the great influence on Trane's melodic concept," he says.
At the Granoff Studios, Coltrane studied under music theorist Dennis Sandole, who is credited with providing Coltrane with the thorough knowledge of the theory and philosophy of the complicated rhythmic, harmonic and melodic structures necessary to create, compose and play his highly sophisticated brand of jazz.
When 18 year old John Coltrane moved to Philadelphia, in 1943 the nation's third largest city, he entered a fundamentally different world from his hometown of High Point, N.C. Like many African-Americans who migrated to major cities of the North, Coltrane joined older family members and friends already settled there. They lived in an apartment at 1450 N. 12th Street between Jefferson and Master Streets in an area since demolished for the Yorktown Urban Renewal project.
What Coltrane, already a studious musician even in high school, encountered here was a vibrant and intense nightlife scene almost completely centered on live jazz. Trane entrenched himself among a large group of highly skilled musicians and took advantage of the affordable, serious musical education available, all of which would have been inconceivable in the small town Jim Crow South. According to saxophonist Odean Pope, Philadelphia was the "institution" that fostered great talents like Coltrane, pianist McCoy Tyner, saxophonist Jimmy Heath, organist Jimmy Smith, trumpeter Lee Morgan, drummer Philly Joe Jones, saxophonist Benny Golson, bassist Reggie Workman, and Pope himself.
Pope makes the case that with New York relying on talent from other cities but not entirely fostering its own brand of jazz, Philly was the greatest jazz scene in the United States between World War II and the mid-1960s. New York, headquarters of the top labels and largest venues, was where you went when you made it big. Instead, Philadelphia was the proving ground for jazz artists, and its working-class people fostered the talent by packing rooms every week from Tuesday to Saturday nights. The sheer number of clubs, musicians' culture of sharing, strong instruction available at both the Ornstein School of Music, located at 19th and Spruce Streets, and the Granoff Studios, located at 2118 Spruce Street, and the discipline and practice regimen of key musicians in the scene, gave young men like Coltrane a true Philly jazz education.
"There was no end to the music," says Pope, who would regularly practice with Coltrane and pianist Hasaan Ibn Ali, a Philly legend who Pope claims was the most advanced player to ever develop in the city. Pope lived on Colorado Street in North Philly, near Hasaan's residence on Gratz Street. Together, they'd walk the few blocks to Trane's house on N. 33rd Street, once the saxophonist took up residence there in 1952, and have long jam sessions, trading ideas, practicing scales and showing each other the harmonic possibilities of their instruments. Hasaan's ideas were very advanced and Trane "practiced, practiced, practiced." Unfortunately, there is only one recording session available featuring Hasaan Ibn Ali: "The Max Roach Trio Featuring the Legendary Hasaan," from 1964 on Atlantic.
Pope argues that it's possible to draw a direct line from the technique that Hasaan taught Trane to the harmony Trane developed later on tunes like "Giant Steps." "Hasaan was the clue to all of that, to the system that Trane uses. Hasaan was the great influence on Trane's melodic concept," he says.
At the Granoff Studios, Coltrane studied under music theorist Dennis Sandole, who is credited with providing Coltrane with the thorough knowledge of the theory and philosophy of the complicated rhythmic, harmonic and melodic structures necessary to create, compose and play his highly sophisticated brand of jazz.
For all their practicing, education and discipline, Coltrane and his fellow jazz contemporaries could count on playing to packed houses every night during the late 1940s and 1950s. Much of the action was on Columbia Avenue, in a world almost entirely eviscerated by Urban Renewal—the building of Yorktown and the expansion of Temple University's campus—and by the race riot of 1964 and its aftereffects of intensifying disinvestment and poverty: the 820 Club at 8th and Columbia, Café Society on Columbia between 12th and 13th Streets, and further west, the Crystal Ball on Columbia between 15th and 16th Streets, the Web Bar on Columbia between 16th and 17th Streets, and The Northwestern and The Point on 23rd and Columbia. Nearby was Café Holiday at 13th and Diamond, the Sun Ray at 16th and Susquehanna and North Philly's largest nightclub in the 1950s, the Blue Note, at 15th Street and Ridge Avenue.
However, the best jazz "institution" of the era was the Woodbine Club, located at 12th and Master Streets, for it was here that jazz musicians would gather at 2AM when their gigs ended. During these sessions, says Pope, musicians learned new ideas and showed younger players techniques that would then be incorporated back into the repertoires and sounds coming out of Philly, all adding to the vibrancy of the institution in this most musical of cities.
Playing consistently, night after night, in clubs allowed Trane and others to develop their unique sound. By the time he left Philadelphia for New York in 1958, "all of the information he had acquired in Philadelphia gave him the opportunity to open up all his ideas and concepts," says Pope. This knowledge was based not just on touring regularly with Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, and other major jazz greats, but also in the uniqueness of the tight knit scene developing here and the way Trane would share his ideas with other musicians he knew and trusted in Philadelphia, gathering insight into his own methods in the process.
50 great moments in jazz: John Coltrane's giant step for improvisation
Perhaps the most influential saxophonist all of time, Coltrane produced
an intensely soulful sound that reached way beyond the jazz cognoscenti
Supreme lovely. John Coltrane channels the divine through his sax. Photograph: Redferns
Redferns/REDFERNS / Redferns
Miles Davis was a good authority on the saxophonist John Coltrane, who played in one of the trumpeter's bands in the 1950s. Their time spent working together began with Davis's rise to stardom and ended not long after the magnificent Kind of Blue, on which Coltrane played a masterful role. In his autobiography written with Quincy Troupe, Davis summed up Coltrane:
"Trane was the loudest, fastest saxophonist I've ever heard. He could play real fast and real loud at the same time and that's very difficult to do ... it was like he was possessed when he put that horn in his mouth. He was so passionate- fierce – and yet so quiet and gentle when he wasn't playing."
Coltrane, who died of liver failure at 40, has probably been the most influential saxophonist in any musical genre, including Lester Young, Ornette Coleman, Sonny Rollins and even Charlie Parker. His dazzling solos are now transcribed as exercises for students, while players all over the world still try to mimic his characteristically intense and soulful sound more than 40 years after his death.
Giant Steps, an astonishing tenor-saxophone improvisation Coltrane recorded in 1959, has been a model for aspiring sax players ever since, but it's far more than a technical exercise, pointing the way toward the lava-flows of scales and runs that the critic Ira Gitler famously described as "sheets of sound". Like an engineer obsessively building a machine that could blast free of the restraints of time, space and mortality, Coltrane assembled a distinctive technique from miniscule parts and infinitesimal details. But his mission was to fuse them all into one single, huge, imploring sound in which all the details, while crucial, were no longer individually audible. For him, Giant Steps was more like a first step.
This was music to dazzle jazz fans, but Coltrane was to unexpectedly
win over a completely new audience with his best-known album, the much
more contemplative A Love Supreme, from 1964. It became a hit with the
hippy audience of the day (and with plenty of rock guitarists too),
notably for the mantra-like chant inspired by Coltrane's absorption in
Indian music and eastern religious thought. His sense of victory over
alcohol and heroin use, which had undermined his health and resulted in Miles Davis firing him twice, also contributed to the album (though it turned out to be tragically shortlived).
Born in Hamlet, North Carolina on 23 September 1926, Coltrane took up alto saxophone at 15, after beginning his musical education on alto horn and clarinet. Music studies at college were interrupted by military service, but Coltrane played in navy bands, and switched to tenor sax to work with r'n'b stars Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson and Earl Bostic in 1947. Influenced by Dexter Gordon and Charlie Parker, and later Sonny Rollins, then Sun Ra tenorist John Gilmore, Coltrane steadily developed his own style; laboriously at first, and then with growing assurance and freedom. He played in the prestigious Dizzy Gillespie Orchestra, and with Duke Ellington saxophonist Johnny Hodges's group in the early 50s, with the organist Jimmy Smith, and then from 1955 with Miles Davis. Later that decade, Coltrane also worked briefly in an adventurous and now legendary quartet with pianist Thelonious Monk.
Coltrane pushed bebop as far as it could go with Giant Steps, then began exploring overtones to play off-the-register high sounds and more than one note at a time ("multiphonics"). He revolutionised scale-based "modal" improvising, and with his 60s quartet featuring pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Jimmy Garrison and drummer Elvin Jones, produced some of the most creative and exciting small-group jazz of all time. Coltrane also took up the then rarely used soprano saxophone, which he played on his famous version of My Favourite Things.
Born in Hamlet, North Carolina on 23 September 1926, Coltrane took up alto saxophone at 15, after beginning his musical education on alto horn and clarinet. Music studies at college were interrupted by military service, but Coltrane played in navy bands, and switched to tenor sax to work with r'n'b stars Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson and Earl Bostic in 1947. Influenced by Dexter Gordon and Charlie Parker, and later Sonny Rollins, then Sun Ra tenorist John Gilmore, Coltrane steadily developed his own style; laboriously at first, and then with growing assurance and freedom. He played in the prestigious Dizzy Gillespie Orchestra, and with Duke Ellington saxophonist Johnny Hodges's group in the early 50s, with the organist Jimmy Smith, and then from 1955 with Miles Davis. Later that decade, Coltrane also worked briefly in an adventurous and now legendary quartet with pianist Thelonious Monk.
Coltrane pushed bebop as far as it could go with Giant Steps, then began exploring overtones to play off-the-register high sounds and more than one note at a time ("multiphonics"). He revolutionised scale-based "modal" improvising, and with his 60s quartet featuring pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Jimmy Garrison and drummer Elvin Jones, produced some of the most creative and exciting small-group jazz of all time. Coltrane also took up the then rarely used soprano saxophone, which he played on his famous version of My Favourite Things.
Coltrane forged on through the 60s, shedding and recruiting band-members on the way, providing a model for the difficult art of larger-group free-improv with his 1965 recording Ascension, and in his final years forming an uncompromising new band with his second wife, Alice, on keyboards, saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, and Rashied Ali – a more abstract, textural performer than Elvin Jones had been – on drums and percussion. John Coltrane died in New York on 17 July 1967.
https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/jazz/strickla.htm
As originally published in
The Atlantic Monthly
December 1987
What Coltrane Wanted
The legendary saxophonist forsook lyricism for the quest for ecstasy
by Edward Strickland
JOHN COLTRANE died twenty years ago, on July 17, 1967, at the age of forty. In the years since, his influence has only grown, and the stellar avant-garde saxophonist has become a jazz legend of a stature shared only by Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker. As an instrumentalist Coltrane was technically and imaginatively equal to both; as a composer he was superior, although he has not received the recognition he deserves for this aspect of his work. In composition he excelled in an astonishing number of forms--blues, ballads, spirituals, rhapsodies, elegies, suites, and free-form and cross-cultural works.
The closest contemporary analogy to Coltrane's relentless search for possibilities was the Beatles' redefinition of rock from one album to the next. Yet the distance they traveled from conventional hard rock through sitars and Baroque obligatos to Sergeant Pepper psychedelia and the musical shards of Abbey Road seems short by comparison with Coltrane's journey from hard-bop saxist to daring harmonic and modal improviser to dying prophet speaking in tongues.
Asked by a Swedish disc jockey in 1960 if he was trying to "play what you hear," he said that he was working off set harmonic devices while experimenting with others of which he was not yet certain. Although he was trying to "get the one essential . . . the one single line," he felt forced to play everything, for he was unable to "work what I know down into a more lyrical line" that would be "easily understood." Coltrane never found the one line. Nor was he ever to achieve the "more beautiful . . . more lyrical" sound he aspired to. He complicated rather than simplified his art, making it more visceral, raw, and wild. And even to his greatest fans it was anything but easily understood. In this failure, however, Coltrane contributed far more than he could have in success, for above all, his legacy to his followers is the abiding sense of search, of the musical quest as its own fulfillment.
BORN and raised in North Carolina, Coltrane studied in Philadelphia and after working as a clarinetist in Navy marching and dance bands in 1945-1946 he began a decade of playing with Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson, Dizzy Gillespie, Earl Bostic, and Johnny Hodges, and also such undistinguished rhythm-and-blues artists as King Kolax, Bull Moose Jackson, and Daisy Mae and the Hepcats. He came to wide notice in 1955 in the now legendary Miles Davis Quintet and was immediately acknowledged as an original--or an oddity. Critics who in Coltrane's last years all but waved banners to show their devotion to him were among those casting stones for much of his career. At first many urged Davis to fire the weird tenor, but when, in April of 1957, after a year and a half with the quintet, Coltrane left or was dropped (the truth remains unclear), the reason seems to have been indulgence not in stylistic extremism but in heroin and alcohol, problems he conquered that same year. The controversy had to do not only with his harmonic experimentation, on which Dexter Gordon was initially the chief influence, but with the speed (to some, purely chaotic) of his playing and the jaggedness (to some, unmusical) of his phrasing.
All three characteristics were intensified in 1957 during several months with Thelonious Monk at the Five Spot, after which he rejoined Davis, who was now experimenting with sparer chord changes, and became fully involved in what Ira Gitler, in Down Beat, called the "sheets of sound" approach. This technique of runs so rapid as to make the notes virtually indistinguishable seems itself to have been a by-product of Coltrane's harmonic exploration. Coltrane spoke of playing the same chord three or four different ways within a measure or overlapping chords before the change, advancing further the investigation of upper harmonic intervals begun by Charlie Parker and the boppers. Attempting to articulate so many harmonic variants before the change, Coltrane was necessarily led to preternatural velocity and occasionally to asymmetrical subdivision of the beat. Despite Davis's suggestion that Coltrane could trim his twenty-seven or twenty-eight choruses if he tried taking the saxophone out of his mouth, Coltrane's attempt "to explore all the avenues" made him the perfect stylistic complement to Davis, with his cooler style, which featured sustained blue notes and brief cascades of sixteenths almost willfully retreating into silence, and also Monk, with his spare and unpredictable chords and clusters. Davis, characteristically, paid the tersest homage, when, on being told that his music was so complex that it required five saxophonists, he replied that he'd once had Coltrane.
Although in the late fifties Coltrane released a number of sessions for Prestige (and, more notably, Blue Train and Giant Steps for Blue Note and Atlantic respectively) in which he was the nominal bandleader, it was really after leaving Davis for the second time, in 1960, shortly after a European tour, that he came into his own as a creative as well as an interpretive force. His first recording session as leader after the break, on October 21, 1960, produced "My Favorite Things," an astonishing fourteen-minute reinterpretation, or overhaul, of the saccharine show tune, which thrilled jazz fans with its Oriental modalism and Atlantic executives with its unexpected commercial success. In it Coltrane revived the straight soprano sax (whose only previous master in jazz had been Sidney Bechet), and in so doing led a generation of young musicians, from Wayne Shorter to Keith Jarrett to Jon Gibson, to explore the instrument. The work remained Coltrane's signature piece until his death (of liver disease) despite bizarre stylistic metamorphoses in the next five and a half years.
Coltrane signed with Impulse Records in April of 1961 and the next month began rehearsing and playing the long studio sessions for Africa/Brass, a large-band experiment with arrangements by his close friend Eric Dolphy. This was in part an extension of the modal experimentation in which he had been involved with Davis in the late fifties, notably on the landmark Kind of Blue. The modal style replaced chordal progressions as the basis for improvisation, with a slower harmonic rhythm and patterns of intervals corresponding only vaguely to traditional major and minor scales. The modal approach proved to be the modulation from bop to free jazz, as is clear in Coltrane's revolutionary use of a single mode throughout "Africa," the piece that takes up all of side one of the album. Just as his prolonged modal solos were emulated by rock guitarists (the Grateful Dead, the Byrds of "Eight Miles High," the unlamented Iron Butterfly, and others), so the astonishing variety Coltrane superimposed on that single F was, according to the composer Steve Reich, a significant, if ostensibly an unlikely, influence on the development of minimalism. The originator of minimalism, La Monte Young, acknowledges the influence of Coltrane's "My Favorite Things" on his use of rapid permutations and combinations of pitches on sopranino sax to simulate chords as sustained tones.
From the start, and especially from the opening notes of Coltrane's solo, which bursts forth like a tribal summons, "Africa" is the aural equivalent of a journey upriver. The elemental force of this polyrhythmic modalism was unknown in the popular music that came before it. Coltrane experimented with two bassists--a hint of wilder things to come, as he sought progressively to submerge himself in rhythm. He was later to employ congas, bata, various other Latin and African percussion instruments, and, incredibly, two drummers--incredibly insofar as Coltrane already had, in Elvin Jones, the most overpowering drummer in jazz. The addition of Rashied Ali to the drum corps, in November of 1965, made for a short-lived collaboration or, rather, competition between Jones and Ali; a disgruntled Jones left the Coltrane band in March of 1966 to join Duke Ellington's. But it was the culmination of Coltrane's search for the rhythmic equivalent of the oceanic feeling of visionary experience. Having employed the gifted accompanists McCoy Tyner and Jimmy Garrison during the years of the "classic quartet" (late 1961 to mid-1965), Coltrane tended to subordinate them, preferring that his accompanists play spare wide-interval chords and a solid rather than showy bass, which would permit him a maximum of flexibility as a soloist. Coltrane would often take long solos accompanied only by his drummer, and in his penultimate recording session, which produced the posthumous Interstellar Space, he is supported only by Ali. Solo sax against drums (against may be all too accurate a word to describe Coltrane's concert duets with the almost maniacal Jones) was Coltrane's conception of naked music, the lone voice crying not in the wilderness but from some primordial chaos. His music evokes not only the jungle but all that existed before the jungle.
COLTRANE'S spiritual concerns led him to a study of Indian music, some elements of which are present in the album Africa/Brass and more of which are in the cut from the album Impressions titled "India," which was recorded in November of 1961. The same month saw the birth of "Spiritual," featuring exotic and otherworldly solos by Coltrane on soprano sax and Dolphy on bass clarinet. Recorded at the Village Vanguard, the piece made clear, if any doubts remained, that Coltrane was attempting to raise jazz from the saloons to the heavens. No jazzman had attempted so overtly to offer his work as a form of religious expression. If Ornette Coleman was, as some have argued, the seminal stylistic force in sixties avant-garde jazz, Coltrane's Eastern imports were the main influence on the East-West "fusion" in the jazz and rock of the late sixties and afterward. In his use of jazz as prayer and meditation Coltrane was beyond all doubt the principal spiritual force in music.
This is further evident in "Alabama," a riveting elegy for the victims of the infamous Sunday-morning church bombing in Birmingham in 1963. Here, as in the early version of his most famous ballad, "Naima," Coltrane is as spare in phrasing as he is bleak in tone. That tone, criticized by many as hard-edged and emotionally impoverished, is inseparable from Coltrane's achievement, conveying as it does a sense of absolute purity through the abnegation of sentimentality. Sonny Rollins, the contemporary tenor most admired by Coltrane, always had a richer tone, and Coltrane himself said of the mellifluous Stan Getz, "Let's face it--we'd all sound like that if we could." Despite these frequent and generous tributes, Coltrane's aim was different, as is clear in his revival of the soprano sax. Rather than lushness he sought clarity and incisiveness. As with pre-nineteenth-century string players, the rare vibrato was dramatic ornamentation.
Coltrane's religious dedication, which as much as his music made him a role model, especially but by no means exclusively among young blacks, is clearest of all in the album titled A Love Supreme, recorded in late 1964 with Tyner, Jones, and Garrison. The album appeared in early 1965 to great popular and critical acclaim and remains generally acknowledged as Coltrane's masterpiece. In a sense, though, it is stylistically as much a summation as a new direction, for its modalism and incantatory style recall "Spiritual," "India," and the world-weary lyricism of his preceding and still underrated album, Crescent. Within months Coltrane was to shift his emphasis from incantation to the freer-form glossolalia of his last period--a transition evident in a European concert performance of A Love Supreme in mid-1965.
Meditations, recorded a year after A Love Supreme, is the finest creation of the late Coltrane, and possibly of any Coltrane. It may never be as accessible as A Love Supreme, but it is the more revolutionary and compelling work. While some of the creations of Coltrane's last two years are all but amorphous, Meditations succeeds not only for the transcendental force it shares with A Love Supreme but by virtue of the contrasts among the shamanistic frenzy of Coltrane and fellow tenor Pharoah Sanders in the opening movement "The Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost" and elsewhere, the sense of stoic resignation and perseverance in the solos of Garrison and Tyner, and the repeated, spiraling phrases of yearning in Coltrane's "Love" and the concluding "Serenity." This unity, encompassing radical stylistic and affective diversity, is the unique feature of Meditations, even in relation to its Ur-version for quartet, which has an additional and quite obtrusive movement. Nothing that came after Meditations approached it in structural complexity and subtlety.
These may be the missing ingredients in the music of Coltrane's final period. The drummer Elvin Jones said, "Only poets can understand it," though maybe only mystics could, for until his final album Coltrane seemingly forsook lyricism for an unfettered quest for ecstasy. The results remain virtually indescribable, and they forestall criticism with the furious directness of their energy. Yet their effect depends more on the abandonment of rationality, which most listeners achieve only intermittently if at all. In fact, it may be the listener himself who is abandoned, for it seems clear that Coltrane is no longer primarily concerned with a human audience. His final recording of "My Favorite Things" and "Naima," at the Village Vanguard in 1966, uses the musical texts as springboards to visionary rhapsody--almost, in fact, as pretexts. All songs become virtually interchangeable, and there is really no point any longer in requests. The only favorite thing he is playing about now is salvation. Coltrane's second wife, Alice, who had by then replaced Tyner as the group's pianist, has remarked, "Some of his latest works aren't musical compositions." This may be their glory and their limitation, the latter progressively more evident in the uninspired emulation by the so-called "Coltrane machines" who followed the last footsteps of the master, and also in the current dismissal of free jazz as a dead end by both jazz mainstreamers and the experimental composer Anthony Davis (who nonetheless recently used Coltrane as a model in the "Mecca" section of his opera X).
The last album that Coltrane recorded was Expression, in February and March of 1967. The album has an aura of twilight, of limbo, particularly in the piece "To Be," in which Coltrane and Sanders play spectral flute and piccolo respectively. The sixteen ametrical minutes of "To Be," which could readily have added to its title the second part of Hamlet's question, are as eerie as any in music.
The most striking characteristic of the album is its sense of consummation, which is clear in the abandonment of developmental structure and often bar divisions, and in the phantasmal rather than propulsive lines that pervade the work. There had always been in Coltrane a profound tension between the pure virtuosity of his elongated phrases and the high sustained cries or eloquent rests that followed. The cries, wails, and shrieks remain in Expression but they are subsumed by the hard-won simplicity that predominates in the album--the lyricism not of "the one essential" line he had sought seven years earlier and never found but one born of courageous resignation. Pater said that all art aspires to the condition of music. Coltrane seems to suggest here that music in turn aspires to the condition of silence.
Those who criticize Coltrane's virtuosic profusion are of the same party as those who found Van Gogh's canvases "too full of paint"--a criticism Henry Miller once compared to the dismissal of a mystic as "too full of God." In Coltrane, sound--often discordant, chaotic, almost unbearable--became the spiritual form of the man, an identification perhaps possible only with a wind instrument, with which the player is of necessity fused more intimately than with strings or percussion. This physical intimacy was all the more intense for his characteristically tight embouchure, the preternatural duration and complexity of his phrases, and his increasing use of overblowing techniques. The whole spectrum of Coltrane's music--the world-weary melancholy and transcendental yearning that ultimately recall Bach more than Parker, the jungle calls and glossolalic shrieks, the whirlwind runs and spare elegies for murdered children and a murderous planet--is at root merely a suffering man's breath. The quality of that music reminds us that the root of the word inspiration is "breathing upon." This country has not produced a greater musician.
Copyright © 1987 by Edward Strickland. All rights reserved. The Atlantic Monthly; December 1987; "What Coltrane Wanted"; Volume 260, No. 6; pages 100-102.
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/coltranes-free-jazz-awesome
November 10, 2014
Coltrane’s Free Jazz Wasn’t Just “A Lot of Noise”
by Richard Brody
The New Yorker
Photograph by JP Jazz Archive/Redferns via Getty
The discovery and release of a previously unknown recording by the saxophonist John Coltrane, who died at the age of forty in 1967, is cause for rejoicing—and I’m rejoicing in “Offering: Live at Temple University,” the release of a tape, made for the school’s radio station, of a concert that Coltrane and his band gave on November 11, 1966, a mere nine months before his death.
I knew and already loved this concert, on the basis of a bootleg of three of its five numbers. But the legitimate release offers much better sound and contains the pièce de résistance: a climactic performance of “My Favorite Things,” the Richard Rodgers tune that Coltrane turned into a jazz classic in 1960. Yet this 1966 performance of it is very different from that of 1960, and, indeed, even from Coltrane recordings from a year or two before the Temple concert. In the intervening years, Coltrane’s musical conception had shifted toward what can conveniently be called “free jazz.”
The term started as the name of an album by one of the form’s key artists, Ornette Coleman, from 1960, even though that recording only hinted at the further extremes of free jazz, some of which were in evidence in Coltrane’s final two years. The idea, roughly, involves playing without a set harmonic structure (the framework of chords that lasts a pre-set number of bars and gives jazz performances a sense of sentences and paragraphs), without a foot-tapping beat, and sometimes even without the notion of solos, allowing musicians to join in or lay out as the spirit moves them. Lacking beat, harmony, and tonality, free jazz cuts the main connection to show tunes, dance-hall performances, or even background music to which jazz owed much of whatever popularity it enjoyed.
There’s a temptation to consider free jazz as a freedom from: freedom from structures and formats and preëxisting patterns of any sort. But it’s also a freedom to: a freedom to musical disinhibition of tone, a vehemence and fervor, as well as a freedom to invent. The very word “freedom” meant something particular to black Americans in the nineteen-sixties. They didn’t have it, and there’s an implicit, and sometimes explicit, political idea in free jazz: a freedom from European styles, a freedom to seek African and other musical heritages, and, also, a freedom to cross-pollinate jazz with other arts. In the process, jazz musicians developed new forms and new moods that reflected a new generation’s experiences and ideals. The politics of free jazz were inseparable from its aesthetic transformation of jazz into overt and self-conscious modernism.
Coltrane’s turn to free jazz, in his last two years of performance, gave rise to a more overtly transcendent yet frenzied yearning. His playing on “Offering” is even more fervent and, at times, furious than it had been, even two years earlier, on the celebrated album “A Love Supreme.” Yet his heightened, trance-like playing has a core of stillness, of devotional tranquility; his music is like a whirlwind with an eye of serenity.
The difference in Coltrane’s own playing goes hand in hand with that of his group over all. In his last years, he radically changed his very conception of his band, and what resulted was a new musical tone. Coltrane’s former group was a classic quartet (featuring the pianist McCoy Tyner, the bassist Jimmy Garrison, and the drummer Elvin Jones). His new band, heard in “Offering,” was a quintet, augmented by the saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, in which Coltrane’s wife, Alice Coltrane, replaced Tyner and Rashied Ali replaced Jones. (Garrison stayed in the group, though in the “Offering” concert he was replaced by Sonny Johnson.) Also, for the Temple gig, Coltrane supplemented the band with four more percussionists and two guest alto saxophonists, Coltrane’s longtime acquaintance Arnold Joyner and the teen-ager Steve Knoblauch, whom Coltrane invited to solo on “My Favorite Things.” (The liner notes, by Ashley Kahn, feature their accounts of the concert.) The big group, playing free of harmonic structures and foot-tapping rhythm, gives the succession and shift of musical events a tumultuous, organic flow. In the grand scope of its development and in the tumble of its frenetic incidents, the performances make perfect, natural dramatic sense.
Not everyone seems as enamored of this recording—or, for that matter, of Coltrane’s later performances in general. Geoff Dyer, writing at the New York Review of Books site, describes the music as “shrieking, screaming, and wildness.” He loves Coltrane—the works of the classic quartet, featuring Elvin Jones and McCoy Tyner. But Dyer calls late Coltrane “catastrophic”; and Dyer is an honorable fan. He tells the story of Coltrane’s musical transformations around 1965, and, demeaning the recording of “Offering,” cites approvingly Jones’s view of them:
Well, the sleeve notes by Ashley Kahn are extremely informative, but I would question the assumption that there is something “spiritual” about this last phase of Trane’s musical journey. If it’s there I can’t hear it. What I do hear is the momentum of what he’d done before—and a situation he’d helped to create—carrying him towards a terminus, a brick wall, a dead-end or, in the cosmic scheme of things, some kind of interstellar void. Or, to bring things back down to earth with Elvin’s reasons for quitting, “a lot of noise.”Dyer calls Jones “Elvin,” calls Coltrane “Trane”; this sense of false intimacy is significant. Dyer is the author of “But Beautiful,” from 1991, a fictional gaze at classic-era jazz greats, in which he writes about “Lester,” “Bud,” “Chet,” “Ben,” and, for that matter, “Hawk” and “Trane.” He writes like a club patron who insinuates himself into the company of the musicians between sets, extracts their confidences, observes scenes of intimate horror, and then passes them along—using first names and nicknames—as if to flaunt his faux-insider status. But, when the musicians are back on the bandstand, he never lets them forget that they’re there to entertain him.
The epilogue of “But Beautiful” is an essay in which Dyer makes clear that free jazz altogether was already his bête noire—pun entirely intended. He asserts the centrality of “tradition” in jazz—as if it needed his defense—and relies on this principle to justify the limits of his taste. In this essay, too, he writes in veneration of Coltrane’s classic quartet, only to assert that, in Coltrane’s later performances, “there is little beauty but much that is terrible.” Dyer is so bound to his own idea of what jazz is, and to its popular and classical roots, that he can’t hear the ideas of one of its greatest creators. He listens to jazz like a consumer or a patron rather than like an artist; he doesn’t enter into imaginative sympathy with the musicians, and he can’t conceive or, for that matter, feel what the creator of “Spiritual” or “Dearly Beloved” finds necessary in “Interstellar Space” or “Offering.”
In “Offering,” there are astonishing, deeply moving moments in which Coltrane uses his voice—he cries out during a solo by Sanders, and twice sings in a sort of vocalise, pounding his chest to make his voice warble. Dyer writes condescendingly in his review that “these eagerly anticipated moments actually sound a bit daft—which is not to say that they were without value.” They don’t sound “daft” at all; they sound like spontaneous and ingenuous expressions of rapturous joy. But they are gestures that would have had little place amid the prodigious musical strength of Coltrane’s classic quartet. On the other hand, they’re right at home in Coltrane’s open-ended quasi-hangout band, in the familial intimacy that gives rise to its vulnerable furies.
'A LOVE SUPREME' ON IMPULSE RECORDS
(1964)
http://panopticonreview.blogspot.com/2008/08/john-coltrane-vs-philosophical.html
FROM THE PANOPTICON REVIEW ARCHIVES
(Originally posted on August 4, 2008):
Monday, August 4, 2008
The Art of John Coltrane vs. The Philosophical Limitations of Jazz Criticism
Book Review
by Kofi Natambu
Coltrane: The story of a sound. By Ben Ratliff.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2007
John Coltrane (1926-1967)
"We take for granted the social and cultural milieu and philosophy that produced Mozart. As Western people the socio-cultural thinking of eighteenth-century Europe comes to us as a historical legacy that is a continuous and organic part of the twentieth-century West. The socio-cultural philosophy of the Negro in America (as a continuous historical phenomenon) is no less specific and no less important for any critical speculation about the music that came out of it...this is not a plea for narrow sociological analysis of Jazz, but rather that this music cannot be completely understood (in critical terms) without some attention to the attitudes which produced it. It is the philosophy of Negro music that is most important, and this philosophy is only partially the result of the sociological disposition of Negroes in America. There is, of course, much more to it than that...”
---Amiri Baraka, "Jazz and the White Critic" (1963)
“I am not playing “Jazz.” I am trying to play the natural feelings of a people…”
--Duke Ellington (1930)
“I recognize an individual when I see his contribution; and when I know a man’s sound, well, to me that’s him, that’s the man. That’s the way I look at it. Labels I don’t bother with.”
--John Coltrane (1966)
This is a curiously schizophrenic, self-serving, and ultimately shallow book. On the one hand it proposes to provide readers with a broad general outline of the ‘artistic history’ of John Coltrane’s career and on the other critically examine his ongoing impact and influence, musical and extramusical, on both his contemporaries and subsequent generations of musicians since his early death at the age of forty in 1967.
Throughout, the author--Ben Ratliff, Jazz critic for the New York Times—engages in a highly digressive commentary on what he thinks Coltrane’s career as player, composer, and cultural avatar means to the history of Jazz and to our understanding and appreciation of an individual American aesthetic and cultural icon.
However, these otherwise laudable, useful, and intriguing ambitions are seriously marred by Ratliff’s intellectually reductive presumptions about both the music he proposes to critique and examine and the cultural philosophy of the individual creative personality he wants to portray. The major source of Ratliff’s analytical flaws and blind spots (which are considerable) lies with his studied quasi-philosophical over-reliance and even lazy intellectual dependency on an empirical framework that consistently reduces profound and unsettling questions of aesthetic, cultural and expressive identity and philosophy to almost rudimentary descriptions and examinations of the largely academic categories of style, formal structure, method, and technique(s). Thus we are treated to quite a bit of admittedly lucid but predominately expository writing about how and why Coltrane’s music differs in cosmetic terms from that of other musical styles, traditions, forms, and genres in Western music particularly of the United States and Europe. However, the much broader and more specific historical, social, cultural, ideological, economic, and political contexts of Coltrane’s music (and persona) as it was actually created, produced, marketed, distributed and consumed in the society he and his music lived/lives in is either ignored or given very short shrift in Ratliff’s analysis.
Ratliff’s annoying and often condescending tendency to churlishly dismiss or discount the significance of the central historical roles that political economy, racism, and most importantly, competing cultural and aesthetic philosophies have played and continue to play in both the creative and social ecosphere of Jazz is a major weakness in a book that almost coyly demands that we accept, if not embrace, its highly problematic fundamental premises. These premises are the following: That Coltrane was not primarily interested in expressing and supporting creatively provocative ideas and values per se but in obsessively pursuing matters of craft, stylistic expression, and technical prowess; that Coltrane was not really interested in the social, cultural, and political implications of what he was playing or the form and content of the highly varied reactions of audiences to what he was playing and why; that the 1960s ‘black power’ movement had a negative or distorting effect on the study, appreciation, and understanding of what the complex musical evolution known as “late Coltrane” (1965-1967) meant to the artist and black and white American audiences alike. And that to fully grasp what Coltrane finally accomplished or was trying to do in his work one had to surrender to a romantic aesthetic notion rooted in the 19th century and later promulgated in the 20th century by the late modernist poet Robert Lowell (an aesthetic theory Ratliff suggestively paraphrases and appropriates for a historically different artistic and cultural context) that Coltrane and his music represented and embodied the “monotony of the sublime” found in other radical forms of American art making. Further Ratliff asserts that Coltrane was making a music of “his interior cosmos” and was finally consumed by a music of “meditation and chant” in the last years after December 1964 (and the pivotal appearance of Coltrane’s magnum opus composition suite ‘A Love Supreme’) until his death in July, 1967.
What Ratliff also fails to address and seriously investigate is the complex and varied receptions of, and responses to, this music by other musicians and the larger listening audience meant in terms of the history of Jazz up until the late 1960s (and by implication ever afterward). While Ratliff readily acknowledges and broadly surveys the intense chaotic volatility of art, society, and culture of that era (and Coltrane’s important, even mythic, participation in it) what he fails to provide is an informed analytical and theoretical critique of precisely why Coltrane, Jazz in general, and the larger society remained in a dire and fundamental conflict over what role the concept of “art” and its various uses and identities should or could be in the music. At one point Ratliff even mentions that as far as he knew Coltrane had never publicly used or uttered the word ‘art’ to describe what his music was about. I was hoping that Ratliff would subsequently examine what he thought this fact meant to his general analysis of Jazz as a musical aesthetic in the post-WWII period, but he simply chalked it up to Coltrane’s tendency toward verbal reticence in publicly talking about his music in openly intellectual terms and his personal indifference to categorical labeling. The result is a book that manages to raise important and previously neglected questions about the specific nature and identity of Coltrane’s work and his profound contributions to American music, while at the same time almost willfully refusing to take any discernible theoretical or ideological position(s) on what Ratliff himself as critic and historian thought Coltrane’s music and reputation represents.
It is Ratliff’s failure to seriously confront and intellectually engage the previously published critical literature on both Coltrane and Jazz of the 1955-1970 era that is most disapointing. Among this rather extensive body of texts is very important work by a number of African American intellectuals, historians, and critics like Dr. C.O. Simpkins (who wrote a major book on Coltrane as early as 1975—which Ratliff himself even curiously acknowledges as “one of the best Coltrane biographies” and then proceeds to say not one more word about), the late James Stewart who wrote a number of powerful and influential essays on Jazz of the 1960s and ‘70s, Bill Cole, prominent ethnomusicologist and former Professor of Music at Dartmouth College who wrote a seminal musical biography on Coltrane in 1976, the extraordinary poet and cultural historian A.B. Spellman, author of one of the most prescient books ever published on black avant-garde music ‘Four Lives in the BeBop Business’ (later titled ‘Black Music: Four Lives) in 1966, and finally one of the leading Jazz critics and historians in the entire modern canon of 20th century Jazz literature, the legendary poet, playwright, essayist, novelist, and activist Amiri Baraka (formerly Leroi Jones). It is especially revealing that when Ratliff does briefly mention Baraka’s work (he quotes part of a poem by him on Coltrane and also a small segment from an essay on Black nationalism in his art) he doesn’t really focus on Baraka as a music critic; rather he summarizes in a couple sentences what Baraka’s fundamental stance was in the late 1960s on the cultural and social uses and function of what black art is or could be. But tellingly Ratliff does not talk about or examine Baraka’s major Jazz criticism of this period (1964-1967) qua criticism. This omission is not merely incidental but goes to the heart of what Ratliff refuses to deal with generally in his text: the larger meaning of the contentious discourse raging then and now over what Coltrane and the so-called ‘Free-Jazz’ players and composers of the 1960s and ‘70s represented (and currently represents) to an understanding of the Jazz tradition and U.S. culture generally over the past century.
This is especially significant with respect to the philosophical acuity and depth of the major book of Jazz criticism that Baraka published in 1967 entitled ‘Black Music.’ Dedicated to ‘John Coltrane, the heaviest spirit’ this book, made up of formerly published magazine essays and articles comprises one of the most important statements ever conceived and written about the specific dynamics, formal and stylistic challenges, cultural theory, and ideological identity of the so-called black musical “avant garde” of the 1959-1967 era. Pivotal to this text’s visionary stance is the first essay from the book, which is quoted at the beginning of this review. “Jazz and the White Critic” published in 1963 and which initially appeared in Down Beat magazine, was a major advance in the history of Jazz criticism because it openly and courageously addressed one of the most important but largely ignored issues in the canonical history of Jazz writing—the contradiction and separation between the major black players of the music and the almost completely exclusive white writers and critics of the music. By raising questions about what this contradiction said and implied about Jazz music and its history as art, science, history, sociology, ideology, and political economy, Baraka revealed that what white critics said about the music, reflected intellectual, cultural, and personal biases that had to be acknowledged and taken serious account of.
Ironically, Ratliff as critic and historian ultimately avoids these and other related issues by insisting that the individual icon in Jazz (like Coltrane) is not only an indispensable touchstone in the music’s evolution but that even more importantly the bands that they and others lead are even more significant. As Ratliff puts it at the end of his study “The truth of Jazz is in its bands.” While this statement seems accurate enough on its surface with its philosophical emphasis on the time honored Western notion of the “artist” as being central to an understanding and appreciation of any cultural or aesthetic expression, it appears that Ratliff winds up failing to notice that Jazz is first and foremost a public, collective, collaborative, and thus social expression whose major focus is not merely on the players and composers involved but on the communities that it engages in any given cultural environment. Thus the role of the individual “genius” in the music’s identity and evolution is not the dominant one. Of course, the marketing and processed packaging of the individual musician (or ensemble) as readily available commodity in the economic context of the capitalist marketplace where commodities are routinely promoted, bought, and sold may give the distinct impression that the individual “great man or woman” is the most important driving force behind the music but that would be an ultimately false and greatly mistaken notion. Even with such astonishingly advanced and gifted players and composers as the late, great John Coltrane it would be far more accurate to suggest that actually “the truth of Jazz lies in its music.” As critic and historian Ratliff misses, neglects, or ignores this crucial point and his book (and his analysis of Coltrane) greatly suffers for it.
http://www.jerryjazzmusician.com/2014/01/liner-notes-live-birdland-leroi-jones/
Liner Notes: LeRoi Jones on John Coltrane’s Live at Birdland
January 31, 2014
LeRoi Jones, 1964
JOHN COLTRANE LIVE AT BIRDLAND, IMPULSE RECORDS, 1963
Political, fiery, critical, poetic, inspirational…All of this shows up in Amiri Baraka’s brilliant liner notes to the 1963 recording of John Coltrane’s Live at Birdland. At the time known as LeRoi Jones, Baraka’s liner notes to this album were the first time the jazz writer Stanley Crouch “had seen that kind of poetic sensibility brought to the discussion of jazz. It was as new to me as the way Coltrane and his band were reinventing the 4/4 swing, blues, ballads, and Afro-Hispanic rhythms that are the four elements essential to jazz…His was the first Negro voice that sailed to the center of my taste by combining the spunk and the raw horrors of the sidewalk with the library, for an elegant manhandling of the form.”
These notes were written at the time of Jones’ 1963 Down Beat essay “Jazz and the White Critic,” which, in the words of Blowin’ Hot and Cool: Jazz and its Critics author John Gennari, was a “challenge to jazz writers of all backgrounds to reckon with the lived experience of black Americans and to consider how this experience had been embedded in the notes, tones, and rhythms of the music.” Keep that in mind when reading these notes…
One of the most baffling things about America is that despite its essentially vile profile, so much beauty continues to exist here. Perhaps it’s as so many thinkers have said, that it is because of the vileness, or call it adversity, that such beauty does exist. (As balance?).
Thinking along these lines, even the title of this album can be rendered “symbolic” and more directly meaningful. John Coltrane Live At Birdland. To me, Birdland is only America in microcosm, and we know how high the mortality rate is for artists in this instant tomb. Yet, the title tells us that John Coltrane is there live. In this tiny America where the most delirious happiness can only be caused by the dollar, a man continues to make daring reference to some other kind of thought. Impossible? Listen to I Want To Talk About You.
Coltrane apparently doesn’t need an ivory tower. Now that he is a master, and the slightest sound from his instrument is valuable, he is able, literally, to make his statements anywhere. Birdland included. It does not seem to matter to him (nor should it) that hovering in the background are people and artifacts that have no more to do with his music than silence.
But now I forget why I went off into this direction. Nightclubs are, finally, nightclubs. And their value is that even though they are raised or opened strictly for gain (and not the musician’s) if we go to them and are able to sit, as I was for this session, and hold on, if it is a master we are listening to, we are very likely to be moved beyond the pettiness and stupidity of our beautiful enemies. John Coltrane can do this for us. He has done it for me many times, and his music is one of the reasons suicide seems so boring.
There are three numbers on the album that were recorded Live at Birdland, Afro-Blue, I Want To Talk About You, and The Promise. And while some of the non-musical hysteria has vanished from the recording, that is, after riding a subway through New York’s bowels, and that subway full of all the things any man should expect to find in some thing’s bowels, and then coming up stairs, to the street, and walking slowly, head down, through the traffic and failure that does shape the area, and then entering “The Jazz Corner Of The World” (a temple erected in praise of what God?), and then finally amidst that noise and glare to hear a man destroy all of it, completely, like Sodom, with just the first few notes from his horn, your “critical” sense can be erased completely, and that experience can place you somewhere a long way off from anything ugly. Still, what was of musical value that I heard that night does remain, and the emotions … some of them completely new … that I experience at each “objective” rehearing of this music are as valuable as anything else I know about. And all of this is on this record, and the studio pieces, Alabama and Your Lady, are among the strongest efforts on the album.
But since records, recorded “Live” or otherwise, are artifacts, that is the way they should be talked about. The few people who were at Birdland the night of October 8 who really beard what Coltrane, Jones, Tyner and Garrison were doing will probably tell you, if you ever run into them, just “exactly” what went on, and how we all reacted. I wish I had a list of all those people so that interested parties could call them and get the whole story, but then, almost anyone who’s heard John and the others at a nightclub or some kind of live performance has got stories of their own. I know I’ve got a lot of them.
But in terms of the artifact, what you’re holding in your hand now, I would say first of all, if you can hear, you’re going to be moved. Afro-Blue, the long tune of the album, is in the tradition of all the African-Indian-Latin flavored pieces Trane has done on soprano, since picking up that horn and reclaiming it as a jazz instrument. (In this sense The Promise is in that same genre.) Even though the head-melody is simple and song-like, it is a song given by making what feels to me like an almost unintelligible lyricism suddenly marvelously intelligible. McCoy Tyner too, who is the polished formalist of the group, makes his less cautious lyrical statements on this, but driven, almost harassed, as Trane is too, by the mad ritual drama that Elvin Jones taunts them with. There is no way to “describe” Elvin’s playing, or, I would suppose, Elvin himself. The long tag of Afro-Blue, with Elvin thrashing and cursing beneath Trane’s line, is unbelievable. Beautiful has nothing to do with it, but it is. (I got up and danced while writing these notes, screaming at Elvin to cool it.) You feel when this is finished, amidst the crashing cymbals, bombarded tomtoms, and above it all Coltrane’s soprano singing like any song you can remember, that it really did not have to end at all, that this music could have gone on and on like the wild pulse of all living.
Trane did Billy Eckstine’s I Want To Talk About You some years ago, but I don’t think it’s any news that his style has changed a great deal since then, and so this Talk is something completely different. It is now a virtuoso tenor piece (and the tenor is still Trane’s “real” instrument) and instead of the simplistic though touching note-for-note replay of the ballad’s line, on this performance each note is tested given a slight tremolo or emotional vibrato (note to chord to scale reference), which makes it seem as if each one of the notes is given the possibility of “infinite” qualification, i.e., scalar or chordal, expansion, “threatening” us with those “sheets of sound,” but also proving that the ballad as it was written was only the beginning of the story. The tag on this is an unaccompanied solo of Trane’s that is a tenor lesson-performance that seems to get more precisely stated with each rehearing.
If you have heard Slow Dance or After The Rain, then you might be prepared for the kind of feeling that Alabama carries. I didn’t realize until now what a beautiful word Alabama is. That is one function of art, to reveal beauty, common or uncommon, uncommonly. And that’s what Trane does. Bob Thiele asked Trane if the title “had any significance to today’s problems.” I suppose he meant literally. Coltrane answered, “It represents, musically, something that I saw down there translated into music from inside me.” Which is to say, Listen. And what we’re given is a slow delicate introspective sadness, almost hopelessness, except for Elvin, rising in the background like something out of nature … a fattening thunder, storm clouds or jungle war clouds. The whole is a frightening emotional portrait of some place, in these musicians’ feelings. If that “real” Alabama was the catalyst, more power to it, and may it be this beautiful, even in its destruction.
Your Lady is the sweetest song in the album. And it is pure song, say, as an accompaniment for some very elegant uptown song and dance man. Elvin Jones’ heavy tingling parallel counterpoint sweeps the line along, and the way he is able to solo constantly beneath Trane’s flights, commenting, extending, or just going off on his own, is a very important part of the total sound and effect of this Coltrane group. Jimmy Garrison’s constancy and power, which must be fantastic to support, stimulate and push this group of powerful (and diverse) personalities, is already almost legendary. On tunes like Lady or Afro-Blue Garrison’s bass booms so symmetrically and steadily and emotionally, and again, with such strength, that one wild guess that he must be able to tear safes open with his fingers. All the music on this album is Live, whether it was recorded above drinking and talk at Birdland, in the studio. There is a daringly human quality to John Coltrane’s music that makes itself felt, wherever he records. If you can hear, this music will make you think of a lot of weird and wonderful things. You might even become one of them.
http://decanting-cerebral.tumblr.com/post/72872532210/amiri-baraka-speaks-of-john-coltrane
10th Jan 2014 | 7 notes
Amiri Baraka Speaks Of John Coltrane
1. Trane emerged as the process of historical clarification itself, of a particular social/aesthetic development. When we see him standing next to Bird and Diz, an excited young inlooker inside the torrent of the rising bop statement, right next to the chief creators of that fervent expression of new black life, we are seeing actually point and line, note and phrase of the continuum. As if we could also see Louis and Bechet hovering over them, with Pres hovering just to the side awaiting his entrance, and then beyond, in a deeper, yet-to-be-revealed hover, Pharoah and Albert and David and Wynton or Olu in the mist, there about to be, when called by the notes of what had struck yet before all mentioned.
2. Trane carried the deepness in as thru Bird and Diz, and back to us. He reclaimed the bop fire, the Africa, polyrythmic, improvisational, blue, spirituality of us. The starter of one thing yet the anchor of something before. In the relay of our constant rise and rerise, phoenix describing its birth as a description of yet another (though there is not another) process. Trane carrying Bird-Diz bop revolution and its opposing force to the death force of slavery and corporate co-optation, went through various changes in life, in music. He carried the Southern black church music, and blues and rhythm & blues, as way stations of his personal development, not just theory or abstract history. He played in all these musics and was all these persons. His apprenticeship was extensive and deep; the changes a revealed continuity.
3. The point of demarcation was Miles’ classic quintet, with Cannonball the other up-front stylistic vector. Style and philosophy confirmed each other. As I have said before, Cannonball was Miles’ confection of blues that would later be called fusion. Simple and charming in that context, but very soon commercial on the way to not. Trane, on the other side, was the way of expressionism. Nuclear and carrying the rush of birth and death and rebirth and redeath and new life and yet again forever, what is, as the Africans said, Is Is. Ja Is (Jazz) The Come Music.
4. The ‘60s, when he appeared full-up, was a period, a rhythm of intensity, the giant steps of revolution. This is why we always associate him with Malcom X, as a parallel of that turbulence. Trane’s annihilation of the popular song, so-called, was its restatement as a broader, more universal popular. His “My Favorite Things” could not be Hollywood’s. Hollywood is to make animalism and exploitation glamorous, and Trane was trying to speak of what will exist beyond animals, what had created them, and what will carry them away as waste. What is disposed.
5. Trane’s constant assaults on the given, the status quo, the Tin Pan Alley of the soul, was what Malcolm attempted in our social life. And both African Americans, they carried that reference, Black Life, as their starting point and historical confirmation. The Truth sounds bland only if we don’t understand what it is said in opposition to. Since it is transcendent, invincible, existent even past whatever else we claim exists. Even the lie must use real life as a reference to trick us, as it claims to be truth. But Trane made no claims, either in his life or his work - what he did, he got from life, and we either recognize it with our selves or risk being wasted. Like Malcolm, what he was was reality; not to grasp it defines the quality of our consciousness, our closeness to what cannot finally be denied.
–- Amiri Baraka, “The Coltrane Legacy,” from liner notes included with “The Last Giant: The John Coltrane Anthology,” Rhino Records, 1993
http://edwardbyrne.blogspot.com/2008/09/john-coltrane-michael-s-harper-and.html
Monday, September 22, 2008
John Coltrane, Michael S. Harper, and Amiri Baraka: Jazz Music and Poetry
In Jazz Is, his collection of reflections on jazz musicians, Nat Hentoff describes John Coltrane: “Coltrane, a man of almost unbelievable gentleness made human to us lesser mortals by his very occasional rages. Coltrane, an authentically spiritual man, but not innocent of carnal imperatives. Or perhaps more accurately, a man, in his last years, especially but not exclusively consumed by affairs of the spirit. That is, having constructed a personal world view (or view of the cosmos) on a residue of Christianity and an infusion of Eastern meditative practices and concerns, Coltrane became a theosophist of jazz. The music was a way of self-purgation so that he could learn more about himself to the end of making himself and his music part of the unity of all being. He truly believed this, and in this respect, as well as musically, he has been a powerful influence on many musicians since.”
As we approach John Coltrane’s birthday tomorrow (born September 23, 1926), this occasion offers another opportunity to recognize the close associations between jazz and poetry during the last half-century. Perhaps no example displays the merging of these two art forms better than Michael S, Harper’s “Dear John, Dear Coltrane,” the title poem from his 1970 collection that responds to Coltrane’s music, particularly his magnificent 1965 recording, A Love Supreme. (A rare film clip of Coltrane performing an excerpt of “A Love Supreme” appears above.) Harper explains his poem actually was written just before Coltrane’s death in 1967, yet the poem’s later publication and its content certainly lend a sense of elegy to the work.
DEAR JOHN, DEAR COLTRANE
by Michael S. Harper
a love supreme, a love supreme
a love supreme, a love supreme
Sex fingers toes
in the marketplace
near your father's church
in Hamlet, North Carolina—
witness to this love
in this calm fallow
of these minds,
there is no substitute for pain:
genitals gone or going,
seed burned out,
you tuck the roots in the earth,
turn back, and move
by river through the swamps,
singing: a love supreme, a love supreme;
what does it all mean?
Loss, so great each black
woman expects your failure
in mute change, the seed gone.
You plod up into the electric city—
your song now crystal and
the blues. You pick up the horn
with some will and blow
into the freezing night:
a love supreme, a love supreme—
Dawn comes and you cook
up the thick sin 'tween
impotence and death, fuel
the tenor sax cannibal
heart, genitals, and sweat
that makes you clean—
a love supreme, a love supreme—
Why you so black?
cause I am
why you so funky?
cause I am
why you so black?
cause I am
why you so sweet?
cause I am
why you so black?
cause I am
a love supreme, a love supreme:
So sick
you couldn't play Naima,
so flat we ached
for song you'd concealed
with your own blood,
your diseased liver gave
out its purity,
the inflated heart
pumps out, the tenor kiss,
tenor love:
a love supreme, a love supreme—
a love supreme, a love supreme—
Some of Harper’s own comments on John Coltrane, jazz, spirituality, and this poem inspired by Coltrane’s music or biographical details are engaging and enlightening:
Black musicians have always melded the private and the historical into the aesthetics of human speech and music, the blues and jazz. The blues and jazz are the finest extensions of a bedrock of the testamental process. Blacks have been witnesses victims; they have paid their dues. “Dear John, Dear Coltrane” was written before John Coltrane died; its aim is the redemptive nature of black experience in terms of the private life of a black musician. Coltrane’s music should be seen as a progression from the personal to incantation and prophesy. It is a fusing of tenderness, pain, and power in their melding, and the [furbishing] is at once an internal and external journey or passage: to live with integrity means “to live”—“to create”; its anthem—“there is no substitute for pain”—The poem is a declaration of tenderness, and a reminder to the reader of a suffering beyond the personal and historical to the cultural, that there can be no reservations fixed to sensibility, that personality gives power through the synthesis of personal history and the overtones of America in and by contact. The poem begins with a catalog of sexual trophies, for whites, a lesson to blacks not to assert their manhood, and that black men are suspect because they are potent. The mingling of trophy and Christian vision, Coltrane’s minister-father, indicates an emphasis on physical facts—that there is no refinement beyond the body. The antiphonal, call-response/retort stanza simulates the black church, and gives the answer of renewal to any question raised—“cause I am.” It is Coltrane himself who chants, in life, “a love supreme”; jazz and the blues, as open-ended forms, cannot be programmatic or abstract, but modal . . .. Coltrane’s music is the recognition and embodiment of life-force; his music is testament in modal forms of expression that unfold in their many modal aspects. His music testifies to life; one is witness to the spirit and power of life; and one is rejuvenated and renewed in a living experience, the music that provides images strong enough to give back that power that renews. . ..
Len Lyons, in The 101 Best Jazz Albums: A History of Jazz on Records, has written about Coltrane’s music: “A Love Supreme, recorded in December, is a remarkably warm, hopeful, and energetic outpouring. Coltrane was explicit about the religious inspiration of the music in his poem which serves as the album’s liner notes. John once told his mother that he had experienced visions of God while preparing the music, which was ominous to her because she felt that ‘when someone is seeing God, that means he is going to die.’”
Although obviously not demonstrating the quality of Harper’s poetry, John Coltrane explicitly indicated his own understanding of the interaction between poetry and music with the inclusion of his poem as guidance to listeners in the liner notes for A Love Supreme:
A LOVE SUPREME
by John Coltrane
I will do all I can to be worthy of Thee O Lord.
It all has to do with it.
Thank you God.
Peace.
There is none other.
God is. It is so beautiful. Thank you God. God is all.
Help us to resolve our fears and weaknesses.
Thank you God.
In You all things are possible.
We know. God made us so.
Keep your eye on God.
God is. he always was. he always will be.
No Matter what . . . it is God.
He is gracious and merciful.
It is most important that I know Thee.
Words, sounds, speech, men, memory, thoughts,
fears and emotions—time—all related . . .
all made from one . . . all made in one.
Blessed be His name.
Thought waves—heat waves—all vibrations—
all paths lead to God. Thank you God.
His way . . . it is so lovely . . . it is gracious.
it is merciful — Thank you God.
One thought can produce millions of vibrations
and they all go back to God . . . everything does.
Thank you God.
Have no fear . . . believe . . . Thank you God.
The universe has many wonders. God is all.
His way . . . it is so wonderful.
Thoughts—deeds—vibrations, etc.
They all go back to God and He cleanses all.
He is gracious and merciful . . .
Thank you God.
Glory to God . . . God is so alive.
God is.
God loves.
May I be acceptable in thy sight.
We are all one in His grace.
The fact that we do exist is acknowledgement
of Thee O Lord.
Thank you God.
God will wash away all our tears . . .
He always has . . .
He always will.
Seek Him everyday. In all ways seek God everyday.
Let us sing all songs to God
To whom all praise is due . . . praise God.
No road is an easy one, but they all go back to God.
With all we share God.
It is all with god.
It is all with Thee.
Obey the Lord
Blessed is He.
We are all from one thing . . . the will of God . . .
thank you God
I have seen God—I have seen ungodly—
none can be greater—none can compare to God.
Thank you God.
He will remake us . . . He always has and he
always will.
It is true—blessed be His name—thank you God.
God breathes through us so completely . . .
so gently we hardly feel it . . . yet,
it is everything.
Thank you God.
ELATIONS—ELEGANCE—EXALTATION—
All from God.
Thank you God. Amen.
In the liner notes to the Coltrane retrospective album released by Rhino Records in 1993, The Last Giant: The John Coltrane Anthology, poet Amiri Baraka reported on the inspiration for his poem dedicated to Coltrane and imitative of Coltrane’s music: “The poem ‘I Love Music’ was written to recall when I was locked up in solitary confinement after the Newark rebellions in 1967. I sat one afternoon and whistled all the Trane I remembered. And then later that afternoon they told me he had died. But I knew even then that that was impossible.” (A recording of Amiri Baraka performing “I Love Music” is available as an mp3 at the University of Pennsylvania archives.) As Baraka suggested then, and now as we remember this significant musician on his birthday, John Coltrane’s spirit remains alive in his recordings, as well as in the music and the poetry later composed by the many he influenced or inspired.
http://www.njarts.net/350-jersey-songs/i-love-music-for-john-coltrane-amiri-baraka/
‘I Love Music (For John Coltrane),’ Amiri Baraka
by Jay Lustig | March 16, 2015
New Jersey Arts
The cover of an Amiri Baraka album, “Real Song.”
New Jersey poet and activist Amiri Baraka was inspired by music, wrote about music, and collaborated with musicians throughout his entire career. The Newark native — who died last year at the age of 79, and was the father of current Newark mayor Ras Baraka — audaciously tried to summon the wild, liberating spirit of John Coltrane with his words in the 1982 live version of “I Love Music (For John Coltrane)” that can be heard in the YouTube video below. He is backed on the recording by the free jazz group Air (saxophonist Henry Threadgill, bassist Fred Hopkins and drummer Steve McCall).
“The poem ‘I Love Music’ was written to recall when I was locked up in solitary confinement after the Newark rebellions in 1967,” Baraka once said.”I sat one afternoon and whistled all the Trane I remembered. And then later that afternoon they told me he had died. But I knew even then that that was impossible.”
Coltrane did in fact die on July 17, 1967, the last day of the Newark riots. What Baraka meant, I’m sure, was that the spirit of his music would never die.
New Jersey celebrated its 350th birthday last year. And in the 350 Jersey Songs series, we are marking the occasion by posting 350 songs — one a day, for almost a year — that have something to do with the state, its musical history, or both. We started in September 2014, and will keep going until late in the summer.
http://www.npr.org/2000/10/23/148148986/a-love-supreme
The Story Of 'A Love Supreme'
March 07, 2012
by Eric Westervelt
Listen To The Story
All Things Considered
National Public Radiio (NPR)
AUDIO: 12:56: <iframe src="http://www.npr.org/player/embed/148148986/147872677" width="100%" height="290" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe>
John Coltrane.
Evening Standard/Getty Images
From the opening gong and tenor saxophone flutter, a four-note bass line builds under the sound. This simple riff becomes the musical framework for the rich improvisations that comprise John Coltrane's 33-minute musical journey.
"I remember they cut the lights down kind of," says McCoy Tyner, who played piano on A Love Supreme as a member of Coltrane's band in the early and mid-'60s. "The lights were dimmed in the studio. I guess they were trying to get a nightclub effect or whatever. I don't know if it was John's suggestion or whatever. I remember the lights being dimmed."
It made sense to try to imitate the dim-lighted intimacy of a club during the studio recordings, he says, because it was on stage during live shows where the quartet would explore, practice and rehearse new material. He says there was an amazing unspoken communication during the "Love Supreme" sessions. In fact, he says, Coltrane gave very few verbal directions. Tyner calls the album a culmination and natural extension of chemistry honed through years of playing together live.
"You see, one thing about that music is that it showed you that we had reached a level where you could move the music around. John had a very wonderful way of being flexible with the music, flexing it, stretching it. You know, we reflected that kind of thing. He gave us the freedom to do that. We thought of something, 'Oh, then we'll play it,' you know? And he said, 'Yeah, I have a feeling'—you know? And all that freedom just came together when we did that record."
It was that free-wheeling openness which allowed the musicians—Coltrane, Tyner, along with drummer Elvin Jones and bassist Jimmy Garrison—to build a complex four-part suite around a relatively basic musical idea.
Lewis Porter heads the masters program in jazz history and research at Rutgers University-Newark. He's the author of John Coltrane: His Life and Music. Porter says that simple idea culminating in the first movement with an unprecedented verbal chant by Coltrane forms the foundation of the entire suite. It's a theme Coltrane consciously uses in subtle and careful ways throughout A Love Supreme. For example, toward the end of part one, "Acknowledgement," Coltrane plays the riff in every key.
"Coltrane's more or less finished his improvisation, and he just starts playing the 'Love Supreme' motif, but he changes the key another time, another time, another time. This is something very unusual. It's not the way he usually improvises. It's not really improvised. It's something that he's doing. And if you actually follow it through, he ends up playing this little 'Love Supreme' theme in all 12 possible keys," says Porter. "To me, he's giving you a message here. First of all, he's introduced the idea. He's experimented with it. He's improvised with it with great intensity. Now he's saying it's everywhere. It's in all 12 keys. Anywhere you look, you're going to find this 'Love Supreme.' He's showing you that in a very conscious way on his saxophone. So to me, he's really very carefully thought about how he wants to present the idea."
http://radioopensource.org/speaking-of-coltrane-five-conversations-2/
October 8, 2007
Speaking of Coltrane: Five Conversations (2)
Speaking of Coltrane: Five Conversations (2)
Amiri BarakaClick to listen to Chris’s conversation with Amiri Baraka(19 MB MP3)
The conversation continues… If you feel a Coltrane sermon coming on, we want to hear it.Related Content
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Amiri Baraka‘s death prompts me to repost a conversation we had about
the music of John Coltrane, which inspired Baraka and ennobled the
ambitions of his Black Arts movement. “Trane was our flag,” Baraka
remembered back...
Speaking of Coltrane: Five Conversations (4)
Bill Pierce
Bill Pierce played tenor saxophone for three years in into the early 80s
with Art Blakey — before that with Stevie Wonder, and with the drummer
Tony Williams into the early 90s. He has...
Hear John Coltrane's Story
Soon after, Coltrane resolved to clean up his act. He would later write, in the 1964 liner notes to A Love Supreme, "In the year of 1957, I experienced, by the grace of God, a spiritual awakening, which was to lead me to a richer, fuller, more productive life."
But Coltrane didn't always stay the clean course. As he also wrote in the album's notes, "As time and events moved on, I entered into a phase which is contradictory to the pledge and away from the esteemed path. But thankfully now, through the merciful hand of God, I do perceive and have been fully reinformed of his omnipotence. It is truly a love supreme."
The album is, in many ways, a reaffirmation of faith. And the suite lays out what you might call its four phases: "Acknowledgement," "Resolution," "Pursuance" and "Psalms." A Love Supreme has even spawned something of a religious sect. Reverend Franzo Wayne King is pastor of the Saint John Coltrane African Orthodox Church in San Francisco. The congregation mixes African Orthodox liturgy with Coltrane's quotes and a heavy dose of his music. Pastor King calls the album the cornerstone of his 200-member church.
"When you look at the composition of titles and the sequence in which John has them laid out, we say that there's formula in that album. When he says, 'Acknowledgements, resolutions and pursuance,' it's like saying, 'Father, Son and Holy Ghost.' It's like saying, 'Melody, harmony and rhythm.' In other words, you have to acknowledge and then you resolve and then you pursue, and the manifestation of it is a love supreme."
While it's unknown whether Coltrane would have wanted to be worshiped or have his art deified, it's clear in every way that he saw A Love Supreme as much more than just another recording. Coltrane took control of every detail of the album, unlike any of his other works, including writing the liner notes and an accompanying poem. The poem, it's been discovered, is written to match the slow music of the fourth movement, "Psalms." It's a connection Coltrane hints at cryptically in the liner notes.
Pastor King remembers the day his congregation made the discovery. "It was so funny. We were here. We had been collected as a community, and we used to just read it and try to put some passion in it, you know. And then one day, we were reading the album, because he said the last part is 'Psalms,' which is in context, written context. And we said, 'Well, what is he trying to say here?' And then we put it on and sang, 'A love supreme. I would do all I can to be worthy of you, oh, Lord.' It's kind of like Pentecostal preaching, you know," Pastor King says. "We had a great day. We woke up and found out that the music and the words went together, and that was like a further encouragement that John Coltrane was, indeed, you know, sent by God and that that sound had really jumped down from the throne of heaven, so to speak."
While Pastor King sees explicit Christian symbolism in A Love Supreme, others point out that Coltrane took a much more general view. Coltrane was careful to say that while he was raised Christian, his searchings had led him to realize that all religions had a piece of the truth.
Only once did Coltrane perform the entire "Love Supreme" suite live, and there are no recorded interviews in which he talks about the album's personal significance. In fact, Coltrane didn't even talk about it with his band mates. "We didn't talk about a lot of things," says Tyner. But he does say the band knew that A Love Supreme had unique chemistry.
"He told me, he says, 'I respond to what's around me,'" remembers Tyner. "That's the way it should be, you know? And it was just—I couldn't wait to go to work at night. It was just such a wonderful experience. I mean, I didn't know what we were going to do. We couldn't really explain why things came together so well, you know, and why it was, you know, meant to be. I mean, it's hard to explain things like that."
http://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Coltrane-at-80-a-talent-supreme-2469266.php
Coltrane at 80 -- A talent supreme
by Greg Tate
Special to The San Francisco Chronicle
September 22, 2006
Jazz great John Coltrane plays in this undated photo. (AP Photo/August Leger Meyland III)
In an art form more celebrated for its sinners, John Coltrane,
who somewhere over the rainbow will turn 80 on Saturday, held the honor
of being the music's first saint.
There have been three figures
in jazz history who have changed not only the artistic rules of the game
but the social field on which it has been played, as well -- Louis
Armstrong, Charlie Parker and Coltrane, who died in 1967. The mythic
status of each remains in dialogue with the others. Armstrong's
entertainment ethic stands in marked contrast to Parker's aloof and
self-destructive genius profile, and Coltrane's search for God,
redemption and goodness offers a reconciliation and a gentle rebuke to
them.
[Download/Listen to Mp3s by John Coltrane:
By
the time I began listening to jazz in the early '70s, you felt
Coltrane's influence everywhere in African American culture -- in the
music, the politics, religion, literature, visual arts, even food.
(Trane's natural diet probably drew as many young players to carrot
juice as Parker's habits drew to drugs).
But
especially in music, unless your name was Ornette Coleman, Cecil
Taylor, Albert Ayler or Sun Ra, you had to labor under the long shadow
of Coltrane. This was true to such a pervasive degree that not until
recently have I been able to truly hear Coltrane's music as a sui
generis thing. When an artist is so surrounded by admirers, flatterers
and copycats, the originality of what he or she proposes can be lost and
even trivialized through the rabid impersonations of their style. If
artists live long enough, rest on their laurels often enough, that style
can become a trap and a parody of itself.
With Coltrane, though,
we have the rare fortune to witness, even in retrospect, an artist of
promethean will, talent and force create a means of expression that
wasn't bent so much toward perfecting a style as it was toward the
calibre of the man himself.
Coltrane brought a self-improvement
ethic front and center into jazz, and in a way that couldn't allow the
man being less evolved than his art. He once said he wanted to be a
force for real good in the world, poised against the opposing forces. He
also espoused the belief that the pursuit of art required what he
described as a "constant polishing of the mirror."
Coltrane's
recording career spans 1955 to 1967, during which time he participated
in several groundbreaking albums with Miles Davis, two (posthumously
released) live recordings from his time with Thelonious Monk, and a
formidable resume of albums under his own leadership. What you can't
help but hear across the span of all those tracks is a man chasing
perfection, or at least his own perfectibility and capacity for
profundity.
If we all live long, the artists we love get more
intriguing to us in different ways -- some by merely surviving, some by
becoming more visibly, audibly vulnerable and even broken (like the
Billie Holiday of her swan song "Lady in Satin"), others, like
Armstrong, by sustaining their great generosity of spirit into their
golden years.
What makes Coltrane unique is that his artistic
pursuit was ultimately of things that art can at best only poetically
suggest, a breech-birthed unity between humanity and cosmological
creation itself. He's also rare in this most improvisational of music --
where the notion of "destination point" is anathema -- of producing one
work that looms as his centerpiece, namely, "A Love Supreme," quite
possibly the most cherished jazz recording of all time (though Miles'
"Kind of Blue," which Trane and Cannonball Adderley performed such
saxophone miracles upon, is more often played).
But "A Love
Supreme" is the frame through which we have come to view Trane's entire
career, and life even, before and after. (Perversely, it's not my
personal favorite, a ranking occupied by the little discussed and
posthumously released "Sun Ship," "one of the last studio recordings of
the same quartet that erected "A Love Supreme," and certainly the most
free of the group's free-jazz forays.)
"A Love Supreme" is also,
as Ashley Kahn has pointed out, a genuine singularity in that it is a
completely secular work about things spiritual and religious, and
anything but academic or exhortatory. "A Love Supreme" is as flesh and
blood, as animal and erotic even, as a piece of music can get and, at
the same time, as philosophical, conceptual, thoughtful and rigorously
mysterious.
By the time the Coltrane quartet made it, Coltrane
was already the artist to watch in jazz for a host of reasons -- his own
mercurial development had garnered the respect of longtime jazz
devotees who'd followed him beyond Miles and Monk to his first
recordings with Atlantic, especially "Giant Steps." For those jazz
listeners impressed with technical legerdemain in jazz, Trane made them
sit up and take notice in a way no one since Parker had, and with a
voice as personal, as pulsating with life and as mesmerizing.
Trane
produced a bona fide hit with his version of "My Favorite Things," and
in doing so he found the wherewithal to form a bridge between the new
and the old and to openly endorse and even financially support the
younger avant garde musicians like Coleman, Archie Shepp and Taylor.
This was at a time when members of Coltrane's own generation like Miles
and Mingus openly criticized these players and, bizarrely (given who was
signifying), even questioned their mental stability.
Coltrane
was the kind of artist whose jug could contain worlds, peoples and
multitudes and still not compromise or corrupt his own path or plans.
The paradox of the free-jazz movement, and what made it so vulnerable to
charges of charlatanism, was that it simplified and complicated the
jazz experience at the same time. For better or worse, the movement made
jazz a more self-consciously, more self-avowedly intellectual,
experimental, mystical and political music -- more science fictional (in
keeping with the Cold War's space race) and more vocally Afrocentric.
It
was also a movement that demanded the audience get with the program or
get out, with few concessions to entertainment. This made for a host of
real starving artists (Coltrane compatriot Pharoah Sanders lived off
wheat germ and peanut butter). The numerous kindnesses the already quite
financially secure Trane showed his hungry young lions -- from actual
cash loans to buying cats groceries to obtaining record deals -- are now
part of jazz legend and further support the claims made for Trane's
sainthood.
What has continually surprised me in coming back to
Coltrane's oeuvre in recent years is how time has made his music sound
even more original and exciting, less definitive of the period than of
one man's transcendence of temporality.
Some of this is bluntly
because where he was once the dominant voice of a radical Black jazz
culture, jazz today is anything but Black and radical in its rhetoric
and expression, and there are no dominant figures or dominant ideas. The
upshot of this, where Coltrane is concerned, is that where you once
couldn't avoid referencing him, today there's little that even remotely
comes close to the music he made with McCoy Tyner, Elvin Jones and Jimmy
Garrison -- unless you count the duo of Trane's wife Alice and son
Ravi, who, in their homegrown context, channel Coltrane's widely
imitated never-duplicated sound, ideas and depth of feeling in ways more
eerie, throat-catching and majestic than one would have ever thought
humanly possible.
Honorable mention should also be made of the
daring and undaunted Branford Marsalis Quartet, which occasionally
performs "A Love Supreme" in its entirety.
What the Coltrane
quartet had was two of music's more elusive qualities in combination --
namely, melody and gravitas. You can hear them in certain Black voices
that came to fore in the '60s -- Otis Redding, Nina Simone, Martin
Luther King, Malcolm X -- and in certain rappers today like Rakim, Nas,
GZA. But the Coltrane Quartet, like King, also gave voice and timbre to
their heaviest burden, a swollen, implacable compassion for the human
condition that required that everything they had be laid on the line.
You can't buy that level of commitment off a rack, download it from the
Net neither, and you damn sure can't fake it.
You can only
deliver it from evil and maybe even bleed for it: Tyner has said he knew
it was time for him to leave the band when he saw Trane bleeding from
the mouth while blowing and not even seeming to care. That degree of
indefatigable discipline and unbridled passion can still render so many
fans of the quartet speechless, enchanted, focused, uplifted. An avowed
atheist and libertine friend once told me that when he wanted to hear
God, he listened to Coltrane. He was hedging his bets that the religious
ardor Trane's music invoked in him would be deliverance enough for his
sins.
To hear selections of John Coltrane’s music, go to www.sfgate.com/eguide.
THE MUSIC OF JOHN COLTRANE: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH MR. COLTRANE:
John Coltrane - "A Love Supreme"-1964:
John Coltrane - "Giant Steps" (1959) full jazz album:
John Coltrane- "My Favorite Things" (1961)- [Full album]:
My Favorite Things is the seventh album by jazz musician John Coltrane, released in 1961 on Atlantic Records, catalogue SD-1361. It was the first album to feature Coltrane playing soprano saxophone, and yielded a commercial breakthrough in the form of a hit single that gained popularity in 1961 on radio, an edited version of the title song, "My Favorite Things." In 1998, the album was a recipient of the Grammy Hall of Fame award.
John Coltrane playing "A Love Supreme" Live (1965):
John
Coltrane's masterwork, A Love Supreme, was only played once in live
concert. This portion is the only surviving film of that 1965
performance.
John Coltrane - "Blue Train"-- full jazz album (1957):
John Coltrane "My Favorite Things" 1961 (Reelin' In The Years Archives):
Here's
Jazz Icon John Coltrane with his legendary Quintet featuring Eric
Dolphy on flute, Elvin Jones on drums, McCoy Tyner on piano and Reggie
Workman on bass, performing one of Coltrane's most beloved
interpretations.
This song as well as many other classic Coltrane performances can be found on this DVD-http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000..
John Coltrane - "Equinox"--1961-- (Original):
John Coltrane Quartet - "Impressions" (1963):
John Coltrane: Tenor Saxophone
McCoy Tyner: Piano
Jimmy Garrison: Bass
Elvin Jones: Drums
The John Coltrane Quartet--"My Favorite Things"-- Belgium, 1965:
John Coltrane- "Lush Life"--(FULL ALBUM):
John Coltrane - 'Soultrane'- (1958) [Full album]
Track listing:
1"Good Bait"
2."I Want to Talk About You"
3 "You Say You Care"
4 "Theme for Ernie"
5 "Russian Lullaby"
Personnel:
John Coltrane - tenor saxophone
Red Garland - piano
Paul Chambers - bass
Art Taylor - drums
John Coltrane - "In A Sentimental Mood" (1961):
"In A Sentimental Mood" by Duke Ellington & John Coltrane
JOHN COLTRANE--"Alabama"(1963):
On the 15th September 1963 the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama was bombed as an act of white supremacist terrorism by the Ku Klux Klan. The explosion at the African-American church, which killed four little black girls ages 11-14, marked a turning point in the United States 1960s Civil Rights Movement and contributed to support for passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. “Alabama” is a tribute to the four girls killed in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing. The melody is thought to be based on the speech patterns of Martin Luther King, Jr’s eulogy:
Miles Davis and John Coltrane -Konserthuset Stockholm (March 2, 1960)--FULL CONCERT:
John Coltrane--"Coltrane Plays The Blues" 1962:
'Coltrane' (1962)--Impulse AS-21
John Coltrane plays:
Out of This World
Soul Eyes
The Inch
Worm
Tunji
Miles Mode.
John Coltrane--Tenor and soprano saxophone
Elvin Jones--Drums
Jimmy Garrison--Bass
McCoy
Tyner--Piano
John Coltrane - 'Live! at the Village Vanguard' (1962) [FULL ALBUM]
Live
at the Village Vanguard is the tenth album by jazz musician John
Coltrane and his first live album, released in 1962 on Impulse Records,
catalogue A-10. It is the first album to feature the members of the
classic quartet of himself with McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, and Elvin
Jones. In contrast to his previous album for Impulse!, this one
generated much turmoil among both critics and audience alike with its
challenging music. In 1961, Coltrane created controversy both with the
hiring of Eric Dolphy and with the kind of music his band was playing.
In reaction to the Quintet's residency at the Village Vanguard in New
York City starting in late October 1961.
Recorded: November 2–3, 1961 / Village Vanguard, New York City.
Recorded: November 2–3, 1961 / Village Vanguard, New York City.
'Interstellar Space'--John Coltrane and Rashied Ali Duo
Video of the 6 compositions from the album. 1967
"Mars":
"After the rain" - John Coltrane:
https://vimeo.com/12821965
| Interview in Japan recorded by Kaname Kawachi July 9, 1966 |
||
| Interview with Michiel de Ruyter November 19, 1961 (courtesy of the Dutch jazz archives) |
||
| Interview with Michiel de Ruyter December 1, 1962 (courtesy of the Dutch jazz archives) |
||
| Interview with Michiel
de Ruyter October 26, 1963 (courtesy of the Dutch jazz archives) |
||
| Interview with Michiel
de Ruyter July 27, 1965 (courtesy of the Dutch jazz archives) |
||
| Interview with August
Blume June 15, 1958 (courtesy of the Slought Foundation) |
||
| Interview with Frank
Kofski August 18, 1966 (courtesy of Pacifica Radio Archives) |
Artist Biography by William Ruhlmann
Despite a relatively brief career (he first came to notice as a sideman at age 29 in 1955, formally launched a solo career at 33 in 1960, and was dead at 40 in 1967), saxophonist John Coltrane was among the most important, and most controversial, figures in jazz. It seems amazing that his period of greatest activity was so short, not only because he recorded prolifically, but also because, taking advantage of his fame, the record companies that recorded him as a sideman in the 1950s frequently reissued those recordings under his name and there has been a wealth of posthumously released material as well. Since Coltrane was a protean player who changed his style radically over the course of his career, this has made for much confusion in his discography and in appreciations of his playing. There remains a critical divide between the adherents of his earlier, more conventional (if still highly imaginative) work and his later, more experimental work. No one, however, questions Coltrane's almost religious commitment to jazz or doubts his significance in the history of the music.
Coltrane was the son of John R. Coltrane, a tailor and amateur musician, and Alice (Blair) Coltrane. Two months after his birth, his maternal grandfather, the Reverend William Blair, was promoted to presiding elder in the A.M.E. Zion Church and moved his family, including his infant grandson, to High Point, NC, where Coltrane grew up. Shortly after he graduated from grammar school in 1939, his father, his grandparents, and his uncle died, leaving him to be raised in a family consisting of his mother, his aunt, and his cousin. His mother worked as a domestic to support the family. The same year, he joined a community band in which he played clarinet and E flat alto horn; he took up the alto saxophone in his high school band. During World War II, his mother, aunt, and cousin moved north to New Jersey to seek work, leaving him with family friends; in 1943, when he graduated from high school, he too headed north, settling in Philadelphia. Eventually, the family was reunited there.
While taking jobs outside music, Coltrane
briefly attended the Ornstein School of Music and studied at Granoff
Studios. He also began playing in local clubs. In 1945, he was drafted
into the navy and stationed in Hawaii. He never saw combat, but he
continued to play music and, in fact, made his first recording with a
quartet of other sailors on July 13, 1946. A performance of Tadd Dameron's "Hot House," it was released in 1993 on the Rhino Records anthology The Last Giant. Coltrane
was discharged in the summer of 1946 and returned to Philadelphia. That
fall, he began playing in the Joe Webb Band. In early 1947, he switched
to the King Kolax Band.
During the year, he switched from alto to tenor saxophone. One account
claims that this was as the result of encountering alto saxophonist Charlie Parker
and feeling the better-known musician had exhausted the possibilities
on the instrument; another says that the switch occurred simply because Coltrane next joined a band led by Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson, who was an alto player, forcing Coltrane to play tenor. He moved on to Jimmy Heath's
band in mid-1948, staying with the band, which evolved into the Howard
McGhee All Stars until early 1949, when he returned to Philadelphia.
That fall, he joined a big band led by Dizzy Gillespie,
remaining until the spring of 1951, by which time the band had been
trimmed to a septet. On March 1, 1951, he took his first solo on record
during a performance of "We Love to Boogie" with Gillespie.
At some point during this period, Coltrane
became a heroin addict, which made him more difficult to employ. He
played with various bands, mostly around Philadelphia, during the early
'50s, his next important job coming in the spring of 1954, when Johnny Hodges, temporarily out of the Duke Ellington
band, hired him. But he was fired because of his addiction in September
1954. He returned to Philadelphia, where he was playing, when he was
hired by Miles Davis a year later. His association with Davis was the big break that finally established him as an important jazz musician. Davis,
a former drug addict himself, had kicked his habit and gained
recognition at the Newport Jazz Festival in July 1955, resulting in a
contract with Columbia Records and the opportunity to organize a
permanent band, which, in addition to him and Coltrane, consisted of pianist Red Garland, bassist Paul Chambers, and drummer "Philly" Joe Jones. This unit immediately began to record extensively, not only because of the Columbia contract, but also because Davis
had signed with the major label before fulfilling a deal with jazz
independent Prestige Records that still had five albums to run. The
trumpeter's Columbia debut, 'Round About Midnight, which he immediately commenced recording, did not appear until March 1957. The first fruits of his association with Coltrane came in April 1956 with the release of The New Miles Davis Quintet (aka Miles), recorded for Prestige on November 16, 1955. During 1956, in addition to his recordings for Columbia, Davis
held two marathon sessions for Prestige to fulfill his obligation to
the label, which released the material over a period of time under the
titles Cookin' (1957), Relaxin' (1957), Workin' (1958), and Steamin' (1961).
Coltrane's association with Davis inaugurated a period when he began to frequently record as a sideman. Davis may have been trying to end his association Prestige, but Coltrane began appearing on many of the label's sessions. After he became better known in the 1960s, Prestige and other labels began to repackage this work under his name, as if he had been the leader, a process that has continued to the present day. (Prestige was acquired by Fantasy Records in 1972, and many of the recordings in which Coltrane participated have been reissued on Fantasy's Original Jazz Classics [OJC] imprint.)
Coltrane tried and failed to kick heroin in the summer of 1956, and in October, Davis fired him, though the trumpeter had relented and taken him back by the end of November. Early in 1957, Coltrane formally signed with Prestige as a solo artist, though he remained in the Davis band and also continued to record as a sideman for other labels. In April, Davis
fired him again. This may have given him the impetus finally to kick
his drug habit, and freed of the necessity of playing gigs with Davis,
he began to record even more frequently. On May 31, 1957, he finally
made his recording debut as a leader, putting together a pickup band
consisting of trumpeter Johnny Splawn, baritone saxophonist Sahib Shihab, pianists Mal Waldron and Red Garland (on different tracks), bassist Paul Chambers, and drummer Al "Tootie" Heath. They cut an album Prestige titled simply Coltrane upon release in September 1957. (It has since been reissued under the title First Trane.)
In June 1957, Coltrane joined the Thelonious Monk Quartet, consisting of Monk on piano, Wilbur Ware on bass, and Shadow Wilson
on drums. During this period, he developed a technique of playing
several notes at once, and his solos began to go on longer. In August,
he recorded material belatedly released on the Prestige albums Lush Life (1960) and The Last Trane
(1965), as well as the material for John Coltrane With the Red Garland
Trio, released later in the year. (It was later reissued under the title
Traneing In.) But Coltrane's
second album to be recorded and released contemporaneously under his
name alone was cut in September for Blue Note Records. This was Blue Train, featuring trumpeter Lee Morgan, trombonist Curtis Fuller, pianist Kenny Drew, and the Miles Davis rhythm section of Chambers and "Philly" Joe Jones; it was released in December 1957. That month, Coltrane rejoined Davis, playing in what was now a sextet that also featured Cannonball Adderley. In January 1958, he led a recording session for Prestige that produced tracks later released on Lush Life, The Last Trane, and The Believer (1964). In February and March, he recorded Davis'
album Milestones..., released later in 1958. In between the sessions,
he cut his third album to be released under his name alone, Soultrane,
issued in September by Prestige. Also in March 1958, he cut tracks as a
leader that would be released later on the Prestige collection Settin' the Pace (1961). In May, he again recorded for Prestige as a leader, though the results would not be heard until the release of Black Pearls in 1964.
Coltrane appeared as part of the Miles Davis
group at the Newport Jazz Festival in July 1958. The band's set was
recorded and released in 1964 on an LP also featuring a performance by Thelonious Monk as Miles & Monk at Newport. In 1988, Columbia reissued the material on an album called Miles & Coltrane.
The performance inspired a review in Down Beat, the leading jazz
magazine, that was an early indication of the differing opinions on Coltrane
that would be expressed throughout the rest of his career and long
after his death. The review referred to his "angry tenor," which, it
said, hampered the solidarity of the Davis band. The review led directly to an article published in the magazine on October 16, 1958, in which critic Ira Gitler defended the saxophonist and coined the much-repeated phrase "sheets of sound" to describe his playing.
Coltrane's next Prestige session as a leader occurred later in July 1958 and resulted in tracks later released on the albums Standard Coltrane (1962), Stardust (1963), and Bahia (1965). All of these tracks were later compiled on a reissue called The Stardust Session. He did a final session for Prestige in December 1958, recording tracks later released on The Believer, Stardust, and Bahia.
This completed his commitment to the label, and he signed to Atlantic
Records, doing his first recording for his new employers on January 15,
1959, with a session on which he was co-billed with vibes player Milt Jackson, though it did not appear until 1961 with the LP Bags and Trane. In March and April 1959, Coltrane participated with the Davis group on the album Kind of Blue.
Released on August 17, 1959, this landmark album known for its "modal"
playing (improvisations based on scales or "modes," rather than chords)
became one of the best-selling and most-acclaimed recordings in the
history of jazz.
By the end of 1959, Coltrane had recorded what would be his Atlantic Records debut, Giant Steps, released in early 1960. The album, consisting entirely of Coltrane
compositions, in a sense marked his real debut as a leading jazz
performer, even though the 33-year-old musician had released three
previous solo albums and made numerous other recordings. His next
Atlantic album, Coltrane Jazz, was mostly recorded in November and December 1959 and released in February 1961. In April 1960, he finally left the Davis band and formally launched his solo career, beginning an engagement at the Jazz Gallery in New York, accompanied by pianist Steve Kuhn (soon replaced by McCoy Tyner), bassist Steve Davis, and drummer Pete La Roca (later replaced by Billy Higgins and then Elvin Jones). During this period, he increasingly played soprano saxophone as well as tenor.
In October 1960, Coltrane recorded a series of sessions for Atlantic that would produce material for several albums, including a final track used on Coltrane Jazz and tunes used on My Favorite Things (March 1961), Coltrane Plays the Blues (July 1962), and Coltrane's Sound (June 1964). His soprano version of "My Favorite Things," from the Richard Rodgers/Oscar Hammerstein II musical The Sound of Music, would become a signature song for him. During the winter of 1960-1961, bassist Reggie Workman replaced Steve Davis in his band and saxophone and flute player Eric Dolphy, gradually became a member of the group.
In the wake of the commercial success of "My Favorite Things," Coltrane's
star rose, and he was signed away from Atlantic as the flagship artist
of the newly formed Impulse! Records label, an imprint of ABC-Paramount,
though in May he cut a final album for Atlantic, Olé (February 1962). The following month, he completed his Impulse! debut, Africa/Brass. By this time, his playing was frequently in a style alternately dubbed "avant-garde," "free," or "The New Thing." Like Ornette Coleman,
he played seemingly formless, extended solos that some listeners found
tremendously impressive, and others decried as noise. In November 1961,
John Tynan, writing in Down Beat, referred to Coltrane's playing as "anti-jazz." That month, however, Coltrane recorded one of his most celebrated albums, Live at the Village Vanguard, an LP paced by the 16-minute improvisation "Chasin' the Trane."
Between April and June 1962, Coltrane cut his next Impulse! studio album, another release called simply Coltrane when it appeared later in the year. Working with producer Bob Thiele,
he began to do extensive studio sessions, far more than Impulse! could
profitably release at the time, especially with Prestige and Atlantic
still putting out their own archival albums. But the material would
serve the label well after the saxophonist's untimely death. Thiele acknowledged that Coltrane's next three Impulse! albums to be released, Ballads, Duke Ellington and John Coltrane, and John Coltrane with Johnny Hartman (all 1963), were recorded at his behest to quiet the critics of Coltrane's more extreme playing. Impressions (1963), drawn from live and studio recordings made in 1962 and 1963, was a more representative effort, as was 1964's Live at Birdland, also a combination of live and studio tracks, despite its title. But Crescent,
also released in 1964, seemed to find a middle ground between
traditional and free playing, and was welcomed by critics. This trend
was continued with 1965's A Love Supreme, one of Coltrane's
best-loved albums, which earned him two Grammy nominations, for jazz
composition and performance, and became his biggest-selling record. Also
during the year, Impulse! released the standards collection The John Coltrane Quartet Plays... and another album of "free" playing, Ascension, as well as New Thing at Newport, a live album consisting of one side by Coltrane and the other by Archie Shepp.
1966 saw the release of the albums Kulu Se Mama and Meditations, Coltrane's last recordings to appear during his lifetime, though he had finished and approved release for his next album, Expression,
the Friday before his death in July 1967. He died suddenly of liver
cancer, entering the hospital on a Sunday and expiring in the early
morning hours of the next day. He had left behind a considerable body of
unreleased work that came out in subsequent years, including "Live" at the Village Vanguard Again! (1967), Om (1967), Cosmic Music (1968), Selflessness (1969), Transition (1969), Sun Ship (1971), Africa/Brass, Vol. 2 (1974), Interstellar Space (1974), and First Meditations (For Quartet)
(1977), all on Impulse! Compilations and releases of archival live
recordings brought him a series of Grammy nominations, including Best
Jazz Performance for the Atlantic album The Coltrane Legacy in 1970; Best Jazz Performance, Group, and Best Jazz Performance, Soloist, for "Giant Steps" from the Atlantic album Alternate Takes in 1974; and Best Jazz Performance, Group, and Best Jazz Performance, Soloist, for Afro Blue Impressions in 1977. He won the 1981 Grammy for Best Jazz Performance, Soloist, for Bye Bye Blackbird,
an album of recordings made live in Europe in 1962, and he was given
the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1992, 25 years after his death.
John Coltrane
is sometimes described as one of jazz's most influential musicians, but
one is hard put to find followers who actually play in his style.
Rather, he is influential by example, inspiring musicians to experiment,
take chances, and devote themselves to their craft. The controversy
about his work has never died down, but partially as a result, his name
lives on and his recordings continue to remain available and to be
reissued frequently.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Coltrane
John Coltrane
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| John Coltrane | |||
|---|---|---|---|
Coltrane in 1963
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| Background information | |||
| Birth name | John William Coltrane | ||
| Also known as | "Trane" | ||
| Born | September 23, 1926 Hamlet, North Carolina, USA |
||
| Died | July 17, 1967 (aged 40) Huntington, New York |
||
| Genres | Avant-garde jazz, hard bop, post-bop, modal jazz, free jazz | ||
| Occupation(s) | Musician, composer, bandleader | ||
| Instruments | Tenor, soprano and alto saxophone | ||
| Years active | 1946–1967 | ||
| Labels | Prestige, Blue Note, Atlantic, Impulse! | ||
| Associated acts | Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis Quintet, Eric Dolphy, Thelonious Monk, Pharoah Sanders, Alice Coltrane | ||
| Website | johncoltrane.com | ||
John William Coltrane, also known as "Trane" (September 23, 1926 – July 17, 1967),[1] was an American jazz saxophonist and composer. Working in the bebop and hard bop idioms early in his career, Coltrane helped pioneer the use of modes in jazz and was later at the forefront of free jazz. He led at least fifty recording sessions during his career, and appeared as a sideman on many albums by other musicians, including trumpeter Miles Davis and pianist Thelonious Monk.
As his career progressed, Coltrane and his music took on an increasingly spiritual dimension. Coltrane influenced innumerable musicians, and remains one of the most significant saxophonists in music history. He received many posthumous awards and recognitions, including canonization by the African Orthodox Church as Saint John William Coltrane and a special Pulitzer Prize in 2007.[2] His second wife was pianist Alice Coltrane and their son Ravi Coltrane is also a saxophonist.
Contents
- 1 Biography
- 1.1 Early life and career (1926–1954)
- 1.2 Miles and Monk period (1955–1957)
- 1.3 Davis and Coltrane
- 1.4 Period with Atlantic Records (1959–1961)
- 1.5 First years with Impulse Records (1961–1962)
- 1.6 Classic Quartet period (1962–1965)
- 1.7 Avant-garde jazz and the second quartet (1965–1967)
- 1.8 Adding to the quartet
- 1.9 Death and funeral
- 2 Personal life and religious beliefs
- 3 Religious figure
- 4 Instruments
- 5 Legacy
- 6 Discography
- 7 References
- 8 Further reading
- 9 External links
Biography
Coltrane's first recordings were made when he was a sailor.
| Saint John William Coltrane | |
|---|---|
| Born | September 23, 1926 Hamlet, North Carolina, US |
| Died | July 17, 1967 (aged 40) Huntington, New York, US |
| Venerated in | African Orthodox Church |
| Patronage | All Artists Information about Coltrane's canonization |
Early life and career (1926–1954)
Coltrane was born in his parents' apartment at 200 Hamlet Avenue, Hamlet, North Carolina on September 23, 1926.[3] His father was John R. Coltrane[4] and his mother was Alice Blair.[5] He grew up in High Point, North Carolina, attending William Penn High School (now Penn-Griffin School for the Arts). Beginning in December 1938 Coltrane's aunt, grandparents, and father all died within a few months of one another, leaving John to be raised by his mother and a close cousin.[6] In June 1943 he moved to Philadelphia. In September of that year his mother bought him his first saxophone, an alto.[5] Coltrane played the clarinet and the alto horn in a community band before taking up the alto saxophone during high school. He had his first professional gigs in early to mid-1945 – a "cocktail lounge trio", with piano and guitar.[7]To avoid being drafted by the Army, Coltrane enlisted in the Navy on August 6, 1945, the day the first U.S. atomic bomb was dropped on Japan. He was trained as an apprentice seaman at Sampson Naval Training Station in upstate New York before he was shipped to Pearl Harbor, where he was stationed at Manana Barracks, the largest posting of African-American servicemen in the world. By the time he got to Hawaii, in late 1945, the Navy was already rapidly downsizing. Coltrane's musical talent was quickly recognized, though, and he became one of the few Navy men to serve as a musician without having been granted musicians rating when he joined the Melody Masters, the base swing band. He continued to perform other duties when not playing with the band, including kitchen and security details. By the end of his service, he had assumed a leadership role in the band. His first recordings, an informal session in Hawaii with navy musicians, occurred on July 13, 1946.[8] Coltrane played alto saxophone on a selection of jazz standards and bebop tunes.[9]
After being discharged from his duties in the navy, as a seaman first class in August 1946, Coltrane returned to Philadelphia, where he "plunged into the heady excitement of the new music and the blossoming bebop scene."[10] After touring with King Kolax, he joined a Philly-based band led by Jimmy Heath, who was introduced to Coltrane's playing by his former Navy buddy, the trumpeter William Massey, who had played with Coltrane in the Melody Masters [11] In Philadelphia after the war, he studied jazz theory with guitarist and composer Dennis Sandole and continued under Sandole's tutelage through the early 1950s. Originally an altoist,[12] during this time Coltrane also began playing tenor saxophone with the Eddie Vinson Band. Coltrane later referred to this point in his life as a time when "a wider area of listening opened up for me. There were many things that people like Hawk [Coleman Hawkins], and Ben [Webster] , and Tab Smith were doing in the '40s that I didn't understand, but that I felt emotionally."[13] A significant influence, according to tenor saxophonist Odean Pope, was the Philadelphia pianist, composer, and theorist Hasaan Ibn Ali. "Hasaan was the clue to ... the system that Trane uses. Hasaan was the great influence on Trane’s melodic concept." [14]
An important moment in the progression of Coltrane's musical development occurred on June 5, 1945, when he saw Charlie Parker perform for the first time. In a DownBeat article in 1960 he recalled: "the first time I heard Bird play, it hit me right between the eyes."[12] Parker became an early idol, and they played together on occasion in the late 1940s.
Contemporary correspondence shows that Coltrane was already known as "Trane" by this point, and that the music from some 1946 recording sessions had been played for trumpeter Miles Davis—possibly impressing him.[1]
Coltrane was a member of groups led by Dizzy Gillespie, Earl Bostic and Johnny Hodges in the early to mid-1950s.
Miles and Monk period (1955–1957)
The rivalry, tension, and mutual respect between Coltrane and bandleader Miles Davis was formative for both of their careers.
Coltrane was freelancing in Philadelphia in the summer of 1955 while studying with guitarist Dennis Sandole when he received a call from Davis. The trumpeter, whose success during the late forties had been followed by several years of decline in activity and reputation, due in part to his struggles with heroin, was again active and about to form a quintet. Coltrane was with this edition of the Davis band (known as the "First Great Quintet"—along with Red Garland on piano, Paul Chambers on bass, and Philly Joe Jones on drums) from October 1955 to April 1957 (with a few absences), a period during which Davis released several influential recordings which revealed the first signs of Coltrane's growing ability. This quintet, represented by two marathon recording sessions for Prestige in 1956 that resulted in the albums Cookin', Relaxin', Workin', and Steamin', disbanded due in part to Coltrane's heroin addiction.[1]
During the later part of 1957 Coltrane worked with Thelonious Monk at New York’s Five Spot, and played in Monk's quartet (July–December 1957), but, owing to contractual conflicts, took part in only one official studio recording session with this group. Coltrane recorded many albums for Prestige under his own name at this time, but Monk refused to record for his old label. A private recording made by Juanita Naima Coltrane of a 1958 reunion of the group was issued by Blue Note Records as Live at the Five Spot—Discovery! in 1993. A high quality tape of a concert given by this quartet in November 1957 was also found later, and was released by Blue Note in 2005. Recorded by Voice of America, the performances confirm the group's reputation, and the resulting album, Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall, is widely acclaimed.[citation needed]
Blue Train, Coltrane's sole date as leader for Blue Note, featuring trumpeter Lee Morgan, bassist Paul Chambers, and trombonist Curtis Fuller, is often considered his best album from this period. Four of its five tracks are original Coltrane compositions, and the title track, "Moment's Notice", and "Lazy Bird", have become standards. Both tunes employed the first examples of his chord substitution cycles known as Coltrane changes.[1]
Davis and Coltrane
Coltrane rejoined Davis in January 1958. In October of that year, jazz critic Ira Gitler coined the term "sheets of sound" to describe the style Coltrane developed during his stint with Monk and was perfecting in Davis' group, now a sextet. His playing was compressed, with rapid runs cascading in hundreds of notes per minute. He stayed with Davis until April 1960, working with alto saxophonist Cannonball Adderley; pianists Red Garland, Bill Evans, and Wynton Kelly; bassist Paul Chambers; and drummers Philly Joe Jones and Jimmy Cobb. During this time he participated in the Davis sessions Milestones and Kind of Blue, and the concert recordings Miles & Monk at Newport and Jazz at the Plaza.[1]Period with Atlantic Records (1959–1961)
At the end of this period Coltrane recorded his first album as leader for Atlantic Records, Giant Steps (1959), which contained only his compositions. The album's title track is generally considered to have the most complex and difficult chord progression of any widely-played jazz composition. Giant Steps utilizes Coltrane changes. His development of these altered chord progression cycles led to further experimentation with improvised melody and harmony that he would continue throughout his career.[1]
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Coltrane's first record with his new group was also his debut playing the soprano saxophone, the hugely successful My Favorite Things (1960). Around the end of his tenure with Davis, Coltrane had begun playing soprano, an unconventional move considering the instrument's neglect in jazz at the time. His interest in the straight saxophone most likely arose from his admiration for Sidney Bechet and the work of his contemporary, Steve Lacy, even though Davis claimed to have given Coltrane his first soprano saxophone. The new soprano sound was coupled with further exploration. For example, on the Gershwin tune "But Not for Me", Coltrane employs the kinds of restless harmonic movement (Coltrane changes) used on Giant Steps (movement in major thirds rather than conventional perfect fourths) over the A sections instead of a conventional turnaround progression. Several other tracks recorded in the session utilized this harmonic device, including "26–2", "Satellite", "Body and Soul", and "The Night Has a Thousand Eyes".
First years with Impulse Records (1961–1962)
Coltrane (Amsterdam, 1961)
In May 1961, Coltrane's contract with Atlantic was bought out by the newly formed Impulse! Records label.[15] An advantage to Coltrane recording with Impulse! was that it would enable him to work again with engineer Rudy Van Gelder, who had taped both his and Davis' Prestige sessions, as well as Blue Train. It was at Van Gelder's new studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey that Coltrane would record most of his records for the label.
By early 1961, bassist Davis had been replaced by Reggie Workman, while Eric Dolphy joined the group as a second horn around the same time. The quintet had a celebrated (and extensively recorded) residency in November 1961 at the Village Vanguard, which demonstrated Coltrane's new direction. It featured the most experimental music he had played up to this point, influenced by Indian ragas, the recent developments in modal jazz, and the burgeoning free jazz movement. John Gilmore, a longtime saxophonist with musician Sun Ra, was particularly influential; after hearing a Gilmore performance, Coltrane is reported to have said "He's got it! Gilmore's got the concept!"[16] The most celebrated of the Vanguard tunes, the 15-minute blues, "Chasin' the 'Trane", was strongly inspired by Gilmore's music.[17]
During this period, critics were fiercely divided in their estimation of Coltrane, who had radically altered his style. Audiences, too, were perplexed; in France he was booed during his final tour with Davis. In 1961, Down Beat magazine indicted Coltrane and Dolphy as players of "Anti-Jazz", in an article that bewildered and upset the musicians.[17] Coltrane admitted some of his early solos were based mostly on technical ideas. Furthermore, Dolphy's angular, voice-like playing earned him a reputation as a figurehead of the "New Thing" (also known as "Free Jazz" and "Avant-Garde") movement led by Ornette Coleman, which was also denigrated by some jazz musicians (including Davis) and critics. But as Coltrane's style further developed, he was determined to make each performance "a whole expression of one's being".[18]
Classic Quartet period (1962–1965)
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The criticism of the quintet with Dolphy may have had an impact on Coltrane. In contrast to the radicalism of his 1961 recordings at the Village Vanguard, his studio albums in the following two years (with the exception of Coltrane, 1962, which featured a blistering version of Harold Arlen's "Out of This World") were much more conservative. He recorded an album of ballads and participated in collaborations with Duke Ellington on the album Duke Ellington and John Coltrane and with deep-voiced ballad singer Johnny Hartman on an eponymous co-credited album. The album Ballads (recorded 1961–62) is emblematic of Coltrane's versatility, as the quartet shed new light on old-fashioned standards such as "It's Easy to Remember". Despite a more polished approach in the studio, in concert the quartet continued to balance "standards" and its own more exploratory and challenging music, as can be heard on the Impressions (recorded 1961–63), Live at Birdland and Newport '63 (both recorded 1963). Impressions consists of two extended jams including the title track along with "Dear Old Stockholm", "After the Rain" and a blues. Coltrane later said he enjoyed having a "balanced catalogue."[citation needed]
The Classic Quartet produced their best-selling album, A Love Supreme, in December 1964. It is reported that Coltrane, who struggled with repeated drug addiction, derived inspiration for A Love Supreme through a near overdose in 1957 which galvanized him to spirituality.[19] A culmination of much of Coltrane's work up to this point, this four-part suite is an ode to his faith in and love for God. These spiritual concerns would characterize much of Coltrane's composing and playing from this point onwards, as can be seen from album titles such as Ascension, Om and Meditations. The fourth movement of A Love Supreme, "Psalm", is, in fact, a musical setting for an original poem to God written by Coltrane, and printed in the album's liner notes. Coltrane plays almost exactly one note for each syllable of the poem, and bases his phrasing on the words. The album was composed at Coltrane's home in Dix Hills on Long Island.
The quartet played A Love Supreme live only once—in July 1965 at a concert in Antibes, France.[citation needed]
Avant-garde jazz and the second quartet (1965–1967)
As Coltrane's interest in jazz became increasingly experimental, he added Pharoah Sanders to his ensemble.
In his late period, Coltrane showed an increasing interest in avant-garde jazz, purveyed by Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, Sun Ra and others. In developing his late style, Coltrane was especially influenced by the dissonance of Ayler's trio with bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Sunny Murray, a rhythm section honed with Cecil Taylor as leader. Coltrane championed many younger free jazz musicians such as Archie Shepp, and under his influence Impulse! became a leading free jazz record label.
After A Love Supreme was recorded, Ayler's style became more prominent in Coltrane's music. A series of recordings with the Classic Quartet in the first half of 1965 show Coltrane's playing becoming increasingly abstract, with greater incorporation of devices like multiphonics, utilization of overtones, and playing in the altissimo register, as well as a mutated return of Coltrane's sheets of sound. In the studio, he all but abandoned his soprano to concentrate on the tenor saxophone. In addition, the quartet responded to the leader by playing with increasing freedom. The group's evolution can be traced through the recordings The John Coltrane Quartet Plays, Living Space, Transition (both June 1965), New Thing at Newport (July 1965), Sun Ship (August 1965), and First Meditations (September 1965).
In June 1965, he went into Van Gelder's studio with ten other musicians (including Shepp, Pharoah Sanders, Freddie Hubbard, Marion Brown, and John Tchicai) to record Ascension, a 40-minute piece that included solos by the young avant-garde musicians (as well as Coltrane), and was controversial primarily for the collective improvisation sections that separated the solos. After recording with the quartet over the next few months, Coltrane invited Sanders to join the band in September 1965. While Coltrane used over-blowing frequently as an emotional exclamation-point, Sanders would overblow his entire solo, resulting in a constant screaming and screeching in the altissimo range of the instrument.
Adding to the quartet
PercussionistRashied Ali helped to augment Coltrane's sound in the last years of his life.
By late 1965, Coltrane was regularly augmenting his group with Sanders and other free jazz musicians. Rashied Ali joined the group as a second drummer. This was the end of the quartet; claiming he was unable to hear himself over the two drummers, Tyner left the band shortly after the recording of Meditations. Jones left in early 1966, dissatisfied by sharing drumming duties with Ali. Both Tyner and Jones subsequently expressed displeasure in interviews, after Coltrane's death, with the music's new direction, while incorporating some of the free-jazz form's intensity into their own solo projects.
There is speculation that in 1965 Coltrane began using LSD,[20][21] informing the "cosmic" transcendence of his late period. After the departure of Jones and Tyner, Coltrane led a quintet with Sanders on tenor saxophone, his second wife Alice Coltrane on piano, Garrison on bass, and Ali on drums. Coltrane and Sanders were described by Nat Hentoff as "speaking in tongues". When touring, the group was known for playing very lengthy versions of their repertoire, many stretching beyond 30 minutes and sometimes being an hour long. Concert solos for band members often extended beyond fifteen minutes.
The group can be heard on several concert recordings from 1966, including Live at the Village Vanguard Again! and Live in Japan. In 1967, Coltrane entered the studio several times; though pieces with Sanders have surfaced (the unusual "To Be", which features both men on flutes), most of the recordings were either with the quartet minus Sanders (Expression and Stellar Regions) or as a duo with Ali. The latter duo produced six performances that appear on the album Interstellar Space.
Death and funeral
Coltrane died from liver cancer at Huntington Hospital on Long Island on July 17, 1967, at the age of 40. His funeral was held four days later at St. Peter's Lutheran Church in New York City. The service was opened by the Albert Ayler Quartet and closed by the Ornette Coleman Quartet. Coltrane is buried at Pinelawn Cemetery in Farmingdale, New York.One of his biographers, Lewis Porter, has suggested that the cause of Coltrane's illness was hepatitis, although he also attributed the disease to Coltrane's heroin use.[22] In a 1968 interview Ayler claimed that Coltrane was consulting a Hindu meditative healer for his illness instead of Western medicine, although Alice Coltrane later denied this.[citation needed]
Coltrane's death surprised many in the musical community who were not aware of his condition. Davis said that "Coltrane's death shocked everyone, took everyone by surprise. I knew he hadn't looked too good... But I didn't know he was that sick—or even sick at all."[23]
Personal life and religious beliefs
Coltrane's second wife, Alice, performed with him and also challenged his spiritual beliefs[24]
In 1955, Coltrane married Juanita Naima Grubbs, a Muslim convert, for whom he later wrote the piece "Naima", and came into contact with Islam.[25] They had no children together and were separated by the middle of 1963. Not long after that, Coltrane met pianist Alice McLeod.[26] He and Alice moved in together and had two sons before he was "officially divorced from Naima in 1966, at which time John and Alice were immediately married."[27] John Jr. was born in 1964, Ravi in 1965, and Oranyan ("Oran") in 1967.[27] According to the musician and author Peter Lavezzoli, "Alice brought happiness and stability to John's life, not only because they had children, but also because they shared many of the same spiritual beliefs, particularly a mutual interest in Indian philosophy. Alice also understood what it was like to be a professional musician."[27]
Coltrane was born and raised in a Christian home, and was influenced by religion and spirituality from childhood. His maternal grandfather, the Reverend William Blair, was a minister at an African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church[28][29] in High Point, North Carolina, and his paternal grandfather, the Reverend William H. Coltrane, was an A.M.E. Zion minister in Hamlet, North Carolina.[28] Critic Norman Weinstein noted the parallel between Coltrane's music and his experience in the southern church,[30] which included practicing music there as a youth.
In 1957, Coltrane had a religious experience which may have led him to overcome the heroin addiction[31][32] and alcoholism[32] he had struggled with since 1948.[33] In the liner notes of A Love Supreme, Coltrane states that, in 1957, "I experienced, by the grace of God, a spiritual awakening which was to lead me to a richer, fuller, more productive life. At that time, in gratitude, I humbly asked to be given the means and privilege to make others happy through music." The liner notes appear to mention God in a Universalist sense, and do not advocate one religion over another.[34] Further evidence of this universal view regarding spirituality can be found in the liner notes of Meditations (1965), in which Coltrane declares, "I believe in all religions."[27]
After A Love Supreme, many of the titles of Coltrane's songs and albums were linked to spiritual matters: Ascension, Meditations, Om, Selflessness, "Amen", "Ascent", "Attaining", "Dear Lord", "Prayer and Meditation Suite", and "The Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost".[27] Coltrane's collection of books included The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, the Bhagavad Gita, and Paramahansa Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi. The last of these describes, in Lavezzoli's words, a "search for universal truth, a journey that Coltrane had also undertaken. Yogananda believed that both Eastern and Western spiritual paths were efficacious, and wrote of the similarities between Krishna and Christ. This openness to different traditions resonated with Coltrane, who studied the Qur'an, the Bible, Kabbalah, and astrology with equal sincerity."[35] He also explored Hinduism, Jiddu Krishnamurti, African history, the philosophical teachings of Plato and Aristotle,[36] and Zen Buddhism.[37]
In October 1965, Coltrane recorded Om, referring to the sacred syllable in Hinduism which symbolizes the infinite or the entire Universe. Coltrane described Om as the "first syllable, the primal word, the word of power".[38] The 29-minute recording contains chants from the Hindu Bhagavad Gita[39] and the Buddhist Tibetan Book of the Dead,[40] and a recitation of a passage describing the primal verbalization "om" as a cosmic/spiritual common denominator in all things.
Coltrane's spiritual journey was interwoven with his investigation of world music. He believed not only in a universal musical structure which transcended ethnic distinctions, but in being able to harness the mystical language of music itself. Coltrane's study of Indian music led him to believe that certain sounds and scales could "produce specific emotional meanings." According to Coltrane, the goal of a musician was to understand these forces, control them, and elicit a response from the audience. Coltrane said: "I would like to bring to people something like happiness. I would like to discover a method so that if I want it to rain, it will start right away to rain. If one of my friends is ill, I'd like to play a certain song and he will be cured; when he'd be broke, I'd bring out a different song and immediately he'd receive all the money he needed."[41]
Religious figure
Coltrane icon at St. John Coltrane African Orthodox Church
After Coltrane's death, a congregation called the Yardbird Temple in San Francisco began worshipping him as God incarnate. The group was named after Parker, whom they equated to John the Baptist.[42] The congregation later became affiliated with the African Orthodox Church; this involved changing Coltrane's status from a god to a saint.[42] The resultant St. John Coltrane African Orthodox Church, San Francisco is the only African Orthodox church that incorporates Coltrane's music and his lyrics as prayers in its liturgy.[43]
Samuel G. Freedman wrote in a New York Times article that "the Coltrane church is not a gimmick or a forced alloy of nightclub music and ethereal faith. Its message of deliverance through divine sound is actually quite consistent with Coltrane's own experience and message."[42] Freedman also commented on Coltrane's place in the canon of American music:
In both implicit and explicit ways, Coltrane also functioned as a religious figure. Addicted to heroin in the 1950s, he quit cold turkey, and later explained that he had heard the voice of God during his anguishing withdrawal. [...] In 1966, an interviewer in Japan asked Coltrane what he hoped to be in five years, and Coltrane replied, "A saint."[42]Coltrane is depicted as one of the 90 saints in the Dancing Saints icon of St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco. The icon is a 3,000-square-foot (280 m2) painting in the Byzantine iconographic style that wraps around the entire church rotunda. It was executed by Mark Dukes, an ordained deacon at the Saint John Coltrane African Orthodox Church, who painted other icons of Coltrane for the Coltrane Church.[44] Saint Barnabas Episcopal Church in Newark, New Jersey, included Coltrane on their list of historical black saints and made a "case for sainthood" for him in an article on their former website.[45]
Documentaries on Coltrane and the church include Alan Klingenstein's The Church of Saint Coltrane (1996),[46][47] and a 2004 program presented by Alan Yentob for the BBC.[48]
Instruments
In 1947, when he joined King Kolax's band, Coltrane switched to tenor saxophone, the instrument he became known for playing primarily.[1] Coltrane's preference for playing melody higher on the range of the tenor saxophone (as compared to, for example, Coleman Hawkins or Lester Young) is attributed to his start and training on the alto horn and clarinet; his "sound concept" (manipulated in one's vocal tract—tongue, throat) of the tenor was set higher than the normal range of the instrument.[49]In the early 1960s, during his engagement with Atlantic Records, he increasingly played soprano saxophone as well.[1] Toward the end of his career, he experimented with flute in his live performances and studio recordings (Live at the Village Vanguard Again!, Expression). After Dolphy died in June 1964, his mother is reported to have given Coltrane his flute and bass clarinet.[50]
Coltrane's tenor (Selmer Mark VI, serial number 125571, dated 1965) and soprano (Selmer Mark VI, serial number 99626, dated 1962) saxophones were auctioned on February 20, 2005 to raise money for the John Coltrane Foundation. The soprano raised $70,800 but the tenor remained unsold.[51]
Legacy
John Coltrane House, 1511 North Thirty-third Street, Philadelphia
The influence Coltrane has had on music spans many genres and musicians. Coltrane's massive influence on jazz, both mainstream and avant-garde, began during his lifetime and continued to grow after his death. He is one of the most dominant influences on post-1960 jazz saxophonists and has inspired an entire generation of jazz musicians.
In 1965, Coltrane was inducted into the Down Beat Jazz Hall of Fame. In 1972, A Love Supreme was certified gold by the RIAA for selling over half a million copies in Japan. This album, as well as My Favorite Things, was certified gold in the United States in 2001. In 1982 he was awarded a posthumous Grammy for "Best Jazz Solo Performance" on the album Bye Bye Blackbird, and in 1997 he was awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.[13] In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante named Coltrane one of his 100 Greatest African Americans.[52] Coltrane was awarded a special Pulitzer Prize in 2007 citing his "masterful improvisation, supreme musicianship and iconic centrality to the history of jazz."[2] He was inducted into the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame in 2009.[53]
His widow, Alice Coltrane, after several decades of seclusion, briefly regained a public profile before her death in 2007. A former home, the John Coltrane House in Philadelphia, was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1999. His last home, the John Coltrane Home in the Dix Hills district of Huntington, New York, where he resided from 1964 until his death, was added to the National Register of Historic Places on June 29, 2007. One of their sons, Ravi Coltrane, named after the sitarist Ravi Shankar, is also a saxophonist.
The Coltrane family reportedly possesses much more unreleased music, mostly mono reference tapes made for the saxophonist, and, as with the 1995 release Stellar Regions, master tapes that were checked out of the studio and never returned.[citation needed] The parent company of Impulse!, from 1965 to 1979 known as ABC Records, purged much of its unreleased material in the 1970s.[54] Lewis Porter has stated that Alice Coltrane intended to release this music, but over a long period of time; Ravi Coltrane is responsible for reviewing the material.[citation needed]
Discography
Main article: John Coltrane discography
The discography below lists albums conceived and approved by
Coltrane as a leader during his lifetime. It does not include his many
releases as a sideman, sessions assembled into albums by various record
labels after Coltrane's contract expired, sessions with Coltrane as a
sideman later reissued with his name featured more prominently, or
posthumous compilations except for the one which he approved before his
death. See main discography link above for full list.Prestige and Blue Note Records
- Coltrane (debut solo LP) (1957)
- Blue Train (1957)
- John Coltrane with the Red Garland Trio (1958)
- Soultrane (1958)
Atlantic Records
- Giant Steps (first album entirely of Coltrane compositions) (1960)
- Coltrane Jazz (first appearance by McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones) (1961)
- My Favorite Things (1961)
- Olé Coltrane (features Eric Dolphy, compositions by Coltrane and Tyner) (1961)
Impulse! Records
- Africa/Brass (brass arranged by Tyner and Dolphy) (1961)
- Live! at the Village Vanguard (features Dolphy, first appearance by Jimmy Garrison) (1962)
- Coltrane (first album to solely feature the "classic quartet") (1962)
- Duke Ellington & John Coltrane (1963)
- Ballads (1963)
- John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman (1963)
- Impressions (1963)
- Live at Birdland (1964)
- Crescent (1964)
- A Love Supreme (1965)
- The John Coltrane Quartet Plays (1965)
- Ascension (quartet plus six horns and bass, one 40' track collective improvisation) (1966)
- New Thing at Newport (live album split with Archie Shepp) (1966)
- Kulu Sé Mama (1966)
- Meditations (quartet plus Pharoah Sanders and Rashied Ali) (1966)
- Live at the Village Vanguard Again! (1966)
- Expression (posthumous and final Coltrane-approved release; one track features Coltrane on flute) (1967)
References:
- "ABC-Paramount Records Story", by David Edwards, Patrice Eyries, and Mike Callahan, Both Sides Now website, retrieved January 29, 2007.
- Citations
- DeVito, Chris; Fujioka, Yasuhiro; Schmaler, Wolf; Wild, David (2008). The John Coltrane Reference. Routledge. ISBN 0-415-97755-X.
- Lavezzoli, Peter (2006). The Dawn of Indian Music in the West. Continuum International Publishing Group. ISBN 0-8264-1815-5.
- Nisenson, Eric (1995). Ascension: John Coltrane and His Quest. Da Capo Press. ISBN 0-306-80644-4.
- Porter, Lewis (1999). John Coltrane: His Life and Music. University of Michigan Press. ISBN 0-472-08643-X.
Further reading
- Kahn, Ashley (2003) [2002]. A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane's Signature Album. Elvin Jones. Penguin Books. ISBN 0-14-200352-2.
- Simpkins, Cuthbert (1989) [1975]. Coltrane: A Biography. New York: Herndon House Publishers. ISBN 0-915542-82-X.
- Thomas, J.C. (1975). Chasin' the Trane. New York: Da Capo. ISBN 0-306-80043-8.
- Woideck, Carl (1998). The John Coltrane Companion. New York: Schirmer Books. ISBN 0-02-864790-4.
External links
Find more about
John Coltrane
at Wikipedia's sister projects |
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Media from Commons |
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Quotations from Wikiquote |
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Data from Wikidata |
- John Coltrane – official site
- John Coltrane discography at Discogs
- John Coltrane at DMOZ
- "John Coltrane". Find a Grave. Retrieved March 31, 2008.
- John Coltrane infography
- John Coltrane discography
- John Coltrane House site
- Coltrane Church Website site
- John Coltrane 1957 Carnegie Hall performance in transcription and analysis
- John Coltrane Images of Trane by Lee Tanner in Jazz Times, June 1997
- John Coltrane at Library of Congress Authorities, with 220 catalog records
