SOUND PROJECTIONS
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
WINTER, 2017
VOLUME FIVE NUMBER ONE
ORNETTE COLEMAN
Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of:
TYSHAWN SOREY
(November 4-10)
JALEEL SHAW
(November 11-17)
COUNT BASIE
(November 18-24)
NICHOLAS PAYTON
(November 25-December 1)
JONATHAN FINLAYSON
(December 2-8)
JIMMY HEATH
(December 9-15)
BRIAN BLADE
(December 16-22)
RAVI COLTRANE
(December 23-29)
CHRISTIAN SCOTT
(December 30-January 5)
GIL SCOTT-HERON
(January 6-12)
MARK TURNER
(January 13-19)
CRAIG TABORN
(January 20-26)
https://www.allmusic.com/artist/ravi-coltrane-mn0000401568/biography
RAVI COLTRANE
(b. August 6, 1965
Artist Biography by Thom Jurek
Saxophonist Ravi Coltrane is the son of John and Alice Coltrane. John Coltrane passed away when Ravi
was two. While he had a musical upbringing by his mother and began
playing fairly early, he did not commence a jazz vocation until he was
in his early twenties. Coltrane was able to hone his chops playing with Elvin Jones' group before meeting Steve Coleman and Graham Haynes. Coltrane became a member of the M-Base consortium of artists and signed to RCA in 1997 (which lists Coleman on its roster as well). Coleman produced and guested on Ravi's first recording, Moving Pictures (1998), as did trumpeter Ralph Alessi. The critical comparisons were inevitable, but Coltrane seemed to see this coming before he ever recorded a note. Coltrane's tone on tenor (he plays some soprano, too) is more reminiscent of Joe Henderson's
-- though his father's sound is slightly evident -- and in covering
"Inner Urge" on his debut, he made it impossible to deny. Coltrane recorded a second album in 2000, From the Round Box, that was received even more warmly than his debut and featured contributions from Alessi again and pianist Geri Allen. He covered Thelonious Monk, Ornette Coleman, and Wayne Shorter while adding a pair of his own tunes. His father's influence is a bit more evident here, but, nonetheless, Coltrane proved he was working his sound out for himself. By the time he released 2002's Mad 6, Coltrane
had firmly established himself as an ego-free and forward-thinking jazz
musician with a strong musical identity influenced by, but set apart
from, his father's legacy. This impression was only reinforced on such
releases as 2005's In Flux and 2009's Blending Times. In 2012, Coltrane delivered the Joe Lovano-produced Spirit Fiction.
The following year, Coltrane began playing with
guitarist Tsziji Munoz and his various ensembles--reprising a role he'd
held in the early 2000s--recording four albums anbd a live concert video
through 2014. Immediately following he began working in earnest with
drummer Jack DeJohnette and electronic bassist Matthew Garrison (scion of the John Coltrane Quartet's bassist Jimmy Garrison) in a trio. Their ECM debut, In Movement was issued by ECM in 2016.
https://musicians.allaboutjazz.com/ravicoltrane
Ravi Coltrane
Ravi Coltrane- tenor and soprano saxophonist, bandleader, and composer - has fronted a variety of jazz lineups, recorded critically-hailed albums as leader, produced recordings by other artists - including his mother, worked as sideman for jazz luminaries, overseen important jazz reissues, and founded an independent record label. Seventeen years since finding his life's path, it seems music was Ravi's destiny from the outset.
Born the second son of John and Alice Coltrane in 1965 in
Long Island, New York and raised in the Los Angeles area, he was named
after Indian sitar legend Ravi Shankar. Starting in middle school, Ravi
began playing clarinet, though he grew up hearing a variety of music.
(”My mother was playing piano and organ in the house, everyday. She took
us to her performances and to recording sessions. She played my
father's LP's and recordings of classical music. Early on, I listened to
a lot of R and B, Soul music, popular music of the day - James Brown,
Stevie Wonder, Sly Stone, Motown music, Earth Wind and Fire. Later I got
into Prince, The Beatles, I listened to more Symphonic music -
Stravinsky, Dvorak. I was a big fan of film scores. Jazz music was
something I always appreciated but I had to reach my late teens and go
through profound family changes before the music became a dominate force
in my life.”) In 1986, Ravi entered the California Institute of the
Arts to pursue musical studies, focusing on the saxophone.
In 1991, Ravi hooked up with Elvin Jones, his father's renowned drummer from the 60's and received his first taste of the jazz life. Within a year, he relocated to New York City and began playing with a variety of players: Jack DeJohnnette, Rashied Ali, Wallace Roney, Antoine Roney, Geri Allen, Kenny Barron, Cindy Blackman, Joe Lovano, Joanne Brackeen, Gerry Gibbs, Graham Haynes, and Steve Coleman. Ravi's relationship with Coleman through most of the 90's was particularly influential on the budding saxophonist, including tours and appearances on several Coleman albums.
In 1997, after performing on over thirty recordings as a sideman, Ravi entered the studio to record his first album as leader. Moving Pictures was his well-rounded debut on RCA Victor, leading Ravi to assemble his first touring group (pianist Andy Milne, bassist Daryl Hall and drummer Steve Hass, with bassist James Genus and pianist George Colligan frequently filling in) and to travel widely in North America and Europe. In 1999, he married Kathleen Hennessy and his son William was born. From the Round Box, Ravi's second album as leader, was released in 2000 and was warmly received by critics and revealed a growing sense of self-challenge, balancing esoteric covers with compelling originals.
In 2002, to acknowledge a void slowly developing at major label jazz departments Ravi launched his own recording company - RKM Music - with albums by trumpeter Ralph Alessi and saxophonist Michael McGinnis. Partnered with Kathleen Hennessy and McGinnis, he is currently preparing projects with pianist Luis Perdomo, guitarist David Gilmore and poet Julie Patton.
That same year, Ravi produced Legacy, a four-disc, thematic study of his father's career, for Verve, and co-produced and penned liner notes for the Deluxe Edition repackaging of A Love Supreme. Ravi continues his role as family archivist of his father's unreleased material and is working closely on preparing new projects with Verve. 2003 brought the release of Ravi's third album - Mad 6, on Columbia Records. Well received by critics and musicians alike, Mad 6 emulates the pace and energy of an intimate club performance and features two rhythm sections showcasing the talents of Ravi's working bands at the time.
Most recently,
Ravi was the driving and guiding force behind his mother Alice
Coltrane's return to recording after a 26-year hiatus; Translinear
Light, featuring performances by Alice and Ravi along with Charlie
Haden, Jack Dejohnette, James Genus, Jeff Watts, Oran Coltrane and
others, was released in late September, 2004 on Impulse!. Shaping his
own quartet through a series of recent tours and appearances, February
of 2005 saw the release of Ravi's fourth album as a leader - In Flux -
for the Savoy Jazz label. The recording features pianist Luis Perdomo,
bassist Drew Gress and drummer E.J. Strickland - his primary working
unit since 2003. Of “In Flux”, Ben Ratliff of the New York Times writes,
“Mr. Coltrane avoids tired song structures and doesn't want to bore
you. He's fascinated on one hand by miniatures and on the other by the
idea of longer songs that sound like collective improvisation from start
to finish. It's a record that you can point to and say: This is what
jazz sounds like now in New York.”
In addition to working and
traveling with his own group, Ravi recently has made several guest
performances with McCoy Tyner, Pharoah Sanders, Carlos Santana, Wayne
Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, John McLaughlin, Michael Brecker,
George Duke, Stanley Clarke Jeff “Tain” Watts, Branford Marsalis, Mark
Turner, Jacky Terrasson and others.
Ravi Coltrane remains busy,
dedicated and remarkably clear as to the spirit behind his decision to
pursue music as his profession.
“I want to be involved with music
that is truly honest - that's not trying to follow trends or fit into
someone's idea about what jazz 'is'. For Bird, Miles, Monk, Coltrane,
and Wayne Shorter, I hold the highest level of appreciation because
their love and knowledge of tradition was never greater than their need
to follow their own path. The need to be themselves. This is my goal -
my aspiration - to acknowledge with love my influences while attempting a
move forward - to be open and receptive to shifts in the musical
terrain - to make music that is relevant to my present day experience.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/12/magazine/can-ravi-coltrane-live-up-to-his-fathers-legend.html
Chasin’ ‘Trane’
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/12/magazine/can-ravi-coltrane-live-up-to-his-fathers-legend.html
Chasin’ ‘Trane’
Erik Madigan Heck for The New York Times
by ZACHARY WOOLFE
August 10, 2012
New York Times
“Ambition sometimes gets a little out ahead of you,” Ravi Coltrane said.
He was sitting in his living room in Brooklyn, next to his son’s tiny
drum kit, talking about his new album, “Spirit Fiction.” “You start
imagining more than you can actually pull off, and you cross that line
from possibility into impossibility.”
Songs From "Spirit Fiction"
Roads Cross The Change, My Girl Marilyn & TammyThe 6th Floor
Growing Up Coltrane
By WM. FERGUSON
Ravi Coltrane’s highly personal playlist of his favorite tracks featuring his mom and dad.
On the wall nearby was a framed photo of Barack Obama standing in the White House gazing at a black-and-white photo of another musician, a saxophonist like Ravi. “To Ravi,” it is inscribed. “From a huge fan of your father’s.”
Not a little of the ambition of the new record is due to the
ever-present specter of Ravi’s father, John Coltrane, one of most
influential musicians of the 20th century. “Spirit Fiction,” with its
rhythmic complexity and slippery structures, doesn’t so much challenge
John’s legacy as move astride it. The album radiates a quietly
adventurous artistry and a serene self-confidence.
That serene feeling emerged from conditions that were anything but. “Spirit Fiction” is Coltrane’s first record for Blue Note, the most legendary label in jazz and the company that in 1957 released “Blue Train,” the classic that made John Coltrane’s name as a bandleader. For the “Spirit Fiction” sessions, Ravi pushed himself and his bandmates hard. After recording tracks with his longtime quartet, Coltrane felt the urge to return to the studio again, this time in hastily arranged sessions with a quintet of musicians he has known since college. Thrown together with tape running, the quintet played with refreshing looseness, hitting on a mood that Coltrane had been seeking.
The final record contains tracks from both ensembles. Cobbling it together was an exhausting effort that strained some relationships; Coltrane’s quartet, formed in 2003, has gone on hiatus in its wake. It was a lesson his father might have passed along to Ravi: artistic searching sometimes leaves collaborators in its wake.
John Coltrane died of liver cancer at age 40 in 1967, when Ravi was not quite 2. He was raised by his mother, Alice, herself a brilliant composer and performer whose music — a trippy, meditative style of jazz that brought harps, synthesizers and chanting into the mix — was heavily influenced by her Eastern-inflected spiritual practice.
As a boy, Coltrane was sensitive, shy and a little nerdy. He aimed at becoming a filmmaker or a photographer. But he played the clarinet in his high-school marching band, and music — jazz, symphonic, pop (his aunt is the Motown songwriter Marilyn McLeod) — was always around.
“I used to sit in my mom’s car, back in the days when you could play the tape player without having to cue it,” he said. “And I’d literally just sit there after school and play tapes and stare out the windows just looking at the trees moving in the wind.”
He left high school after his older brother died in a car crash in 1982, and as he put it, “I just let a bunch of time pass.” When he emerged, he had left photography behind and returned to his musical roots. He began hanging out with serious jazz lovers, people who for the first time instantly recognized his surname.
“I had been anonymous in that regard,” he said. “Someone would say, ‘John Coltrane — I know that name. Wasn’t he a blues singer?’ I was just me growing up. No one knew who John Coltrane was. He was still an underground figure in many ways.”
He decided to study music and enrolled at the California Institute of the Arts. “Showing up with a saxophone and having the name Coltrane,” he said, “I immediately recognized that this was going to be distracting for people.” But it was also an opportunity. He spent summer breaks in New York with Rashied Ali, the drummer whose free-form style helped define John Coltrane’s late period. During daily jam sessions in Ali’s apartment, Ravi impressed older musicians who once played with his dad. Right out of school he scored a gig in the band of Elvin Jones, who played in John Coltrane’s legendary quartet of the 1960s. He proved himself on grueling international tours, but there were still people attracted solely by the novelty value of his lineage. Some record companies were more interested in getting him to join supergroups made up of the sons of jazz greats than in his own work.
“There were a lot of people who just wanted to take advantage of these things that for me — I felt, Man, I’m not here for that reason,” he said. “Anyone who knows me ultimately understands what I’m doing and why I’m doing it.”
In his airy home studio, he keeps his mother’s Steinway piano and his father’s saxophone, its keys capped in pristine mother-of-pearl. There’s a bass clarinet that belonged to Eric Dolphy, who played with his father. The miniature drum kit seems to have seen the most recent action, though his son Aaron, after begging for it, promptly grew bored by it. I asked Coltrane, who just turned 47, if he wanted Aaron and his brother to grow up to be musicians.
“Secretly, I’d love — ” He stopped himself and started to laugh. “Well, I can’t put that out there. Because it’s up to them — it’s up to them. They’ll be great no matter what they do. They’ll be cool no matter where they go in life.”
A version of this article appears in print on August 12, 2012, on page MM16 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Spiritualized.
https://jazztimes.com/departments/at-home/ravi-coltrane/
Ravi Coltrane
Ravi Coltrane. Photo by Jimmy Katz
I’m sorry about the mess,” Ravi Coltrane says at the front door
of his brownstone, on a picturesque residential street in Brooklyn’s
Park Slope. It would be a routine disclaimer, except that the
saxophonist really is apologizing: The night before, he and his wife,
Kathleen Hennessy, threw a dinner party that didn’t end until five in
the morning. So the front stoop is festooned with cigarette butts, and
the kitchen is strewn with plates and pans. “It got a little intense,”
chuckles Coltrane, estimating a total of some 60 guests. “There was one
moment: I turned around and saw Jeff ‘Tain’ Watts, standing next to Greg
Hutchinson, standing next to Clarence Penn, standing next to Rodney
Green. I was like, ‘What are all you drummers doing congregating
together? Spread out a little bit!'”
Party aftermath aside, the Coltrane-Hennessy residence feels like a home. Five-year-old William skitters about in his pajamas, and a black cat named Leo naps contentedly on a chair. Bookshelves in the living and dining rooms are stocked with everything from Susan Sontag’s On Photography to Nobuyuki Matsuhisa’s Nobu: The Cookbook-nearly all Kathleen’s, Ravi sheepishly admits. Atop the TV cabinet is a profusion of family snapshots, including one of Coltrane’s parents, John and Alice. The only other visible allusion to Ravi’s illustrious father is a framed photograph of the Francis Wolff image used on the cover of Blue Train.
Ravi lost his father when he was two, so he was raised by his mother-first on Long Island, then in Los Angeles, where she still resides. Although the house was always full of music, he was a relative late bloomer-getting serious about the saxophone at age 20, and enrolling the following year at CalArts. He was in his early 30s by the time he released his first album, Moving Pictures, on RCA. He went on to record another album for the label, From the Round Box, and one for Sony’s Eighty-Eight’s imprint, Mad 6. Along the way he married Hennessy, whom he met in 1991 when she was managing Boston’s Regattabar, and they had William (a family name). He also founded his own label, RKM Music (rkmmusic.com)-a small operation he runs with the help of Hennessy and saxophonist Michael McGinnis, whose album Tangents was one of its first titles; its latest release is Focus Point by pianist Luis Perdomo, who now plays in the saxophonist’s working band.
The idea of a working band appeals strongly to Coltrane, which may account for how he feels about his own new album, In Flux (Savoy). “To finish a record and feel really good about it,” he says, “has never happened for me before. This one, for a change, I feel really good about from start to finish.” In Flux is the only record Coltrane has made documenting a true working band. (For Mad 6, he reconvened a band that had split up.) He chose to make it gradually, in a handful of short sessions over the course of several weeks, and this method had the effect of removing the unnatural pressures of recording. In Flux is a thoughtful and energetic album, and the quartet-Coltrane, Perdomo, drummer E.J. Strickland and bassist Drew Gress-plays with intensity and poise.
That combination of attributes would be a fine characterization of Coltrane, who is, after all, his parents’ son. His single biggest activity in 2004 was shepherding the release of Translinear Light (Verve), Alice Coltrane’s first commercial effort in 26 years. He mentions the prospect of another Verve project: the release of a 1965 John Coltrane radio broadcast from the Half Note, “some of the most incredible music that group ever made.” But nothing animates him more than talking about William, who apparently has quite the ear. “He’ll come to my gigs and sing along with the tunes. And I’ll say, ‘How do you know that? It’s a new song!’ He’s heard me working on it all this time.” JT
The Personal File
Car?
“We have a Nissan Pathfinder I bought in ’96. I moved to New York from California, where of course, everyone drives. It was always cool to not have a car here, but at one point I was like, ‘Maybe I would get out more.'”
Party aftermath aside, the Coltrane-Hennessy residence feels like a home. Five-year-old William skitters about in his pajamas, and a black cat named Leo naps contentedly on a chair. Bookshelves in the living and dining rooms are stocked with everything from Susan Sontag’s On Photography to Nobuyuki Matsuhisa’s Nobu: The Cookbook-nearly all Kathleen’s, Ravi sheepishly admits. Atop the TV cabinet is a profusion of family snapshots, including one of Coltrane’s parents, John and Alice. The only other visible allusion to Ravi’s illustrious father is a framed photograph of the Francis Wolff image used on the cover of Blue Train.
Ravi lost his father when he was two, so he was raised by his mother-first on Long Island, then in Los Angeles, where she still resides. Although the house was always full of music, he was a relative late bloomer-getting serious about the saxophone at age 20, and enrolling the following year at CalArts. He was in his early 30s by the time he released his first album, Moving Pictures, on RCA. He went on to record another album for the label, From the Round Box, and one for Sony’s Eighty-Eight’s imprint, Mad 6. Along the way he married Hennessy, whom he met in 1991 when she was managing Boston’s Regattabar, and they had William (a family name). He also founded his own label, RKM Music (rkmmusic.com)-a small operation he runs with the help of Hennessy and saxophonist Michael McGinnis, whose album Tangents was one of its first titles; its latest release is Focus Point by pianist Luis Perdomo, who now plays in the saxophonist’s working band.
The idea of a working band appeals strongly to Coltrane, which may account for how he feels about his own new album, In Flux (Savoy). “To finish a record and feel really good about it,” he says, “has never happened for me before. This one, for a change, I feel really good about from start to finish.” In Flux is the only record Coltrane has made documenting a true working band. (For Mad 6, he reconvened a band that had split up.) He chose to make it gradually, in a handful of short sessions over the course of several weeks, and this method had the effect of removing the unnatural pressures of recording. In Flux is a thoughtful and energetic album, and the quartet-Coltrane, Perdomo, drummer E.J. Strickland and bassist Drew Gress-plays with intensity and poise.
That combination of attributes would be a fine characterization of Coltrane, who is, after all, his parents’ son. His single biggest activity in 2004 was shepherding the release of Translinear Light (Verve), Alice Coltrane’s first commercial effort in 26 years. He mentions the prospect of another Verve project: the release of a 1965 John Coltrane radio broadcast from the Half Note, “some of the most incredible music that group ever made.” But nothing animates him more than talking about William, who apparently has quite the ear. “He’ll come to my gigs and sing along with the tunes. And I’ll say, ‘How do you know that? It’s a new song!’ He’s heard me working on it all this time.” JT
The Personal File
Car?
“We have a Nissan Pathfinder I bought in ’96. I moved to New York from California, where of course, everyone drives. It was always cool to not have a car here, but at one point I was like, ‘Maybe I would get out more.'”
Computer?
“I’ve always used Macs,” Coltrane says, adding that he has worked with sequencers and sound editing programs since the ’90s. “I use this software called Nuendo; it’s by Steinberg, who made Cubase. I don’t know how much longer I’m going to be using it. There’s a point where you sort of have to put your hands up and go with what everyone else is using-Pro Tools.”
“I’ve always used Macs,” Coltrane says, adding that he has worked with sequencers and sound editing programs since the ’90s. “I use this software called Nuendo; it’s by Steinberg, who made Cubase. I don’t know how much longer I’m going to be using it. There’s a point where you sort of have to put your hands up and go with what everyone else is using-Pro Tools.”
Movies?
“When I was young I worked at two movie theaters, just because I dug movies so much. But when I started really getting serious about music and playing, it just sort of drifted. Now I maybe see one movie a year, and I’m not proud of that.”
iPod?
“I’ve been listening to a lot of OutKast. Some Aretha Franklin, some Al Green, Stevie Wonder. And the iTunes Music Store is really great for reference.”
“When I was young I worked at two movie theaters, just because I dug movies so much. But when I started really getting serious about music and playing, it just sort of drifted. Now I maybe see one movie a year, and I’m not proud of that.”
iPod?
“I’ve been listening to a lot of OutKast. Some Aretha Franklin, some Al Green, Stevie Wonder. And the iTunes Music Store is really great for reference.”
Practicing?
“I’m trying to focus right now on practicing not just for maintenance but also to develop stuff. If I can play for four or five hours a day, it’s a good day.”
“I’m trying to focus right now on practicing not just for maintenance but also to develop stuff. If I can play for four or five hours a day, it’s a good day.”
Vacations?
“Uhhhhhh, no,” the saxophonist says, laughing. “The last vacation I was on was probably when we were in Cancun, in 1999 or 2000. Every year we reserve space on the calendar but something always comes up. And when you’re traveling so much, you get home and don’t want to think about traveling anymore.”
“Uhhhhhh, no,” the saxophonist says, laughing. “The last vacation I was on was probably when we were in Cancun, in 1999 or 2000. Every year we reserve space on the calendar but something always comes up. And when you’re traveling so much, you get home and don’t want to think about traveling anymore.”
http://ravicoltrane.com/index.php?id=biography
Ravi Coltrane is a critically acclaimed Grammy™
nominated saxophonist, bandleader, and composer. In the course of a
twenty plus year career, Mr. Coltrane has worked as a sideman to many,
recorded noteworthy albums for himself and others and founded a
prominent independent record label, RKM.
Born in Long Island, the second son of John Coltrane and Alice Coltrane, Ravi was named after Indian sitar legend Ravi Shankar. He was raised in Los Angeles where his family moved after his father’s death in 1967. His mother, Alice Coltrane, was a significant influence on Ravi and it was he who encouraged Alice to return to performance and the recording studio after a long absence. Subsequently, Ravi produced and played on Alice Coltrane’s powerful, 'Translinear Light', which was released in 2004.
Ravi has released six albums as a leader. His latest, 'Spirit Fiction', was released in June of 2012 for the Blue Note label. Additional credits include performances as well as recordings with Elvin Jones, Terence Blanchard, Kenny Baron, Steve Coleman, McCoy Tyner, Jack DeJohnette, Matt Garrison, Jeff 'Tain' Watts, Geri Allen, Joanne Brackeem, The Blue Note 7, among others. He is a co-leader of the Saxophone Summit with Joe Lovano and Dave Liebman.
Ravi lives in Brooklyn, NY and maintains a fast paced touring, recording, composing and performance schedule. He leads the effort to restore the John Coltrane Home in Dix Hills, Long Island thecoltranehome.org and presides over important reissues of his parent’s recordings.
https://www.allaboutjazz.com/ravi-coltrane-his-own-man-his-own-thing-ravi-coltrane-by-rj-deluke.php?page=1
Ravi Coltrane: His Own Man, His Own Thing
by R.J. DELUKE
October 8, 2003
AllAboutJazz
OK. We all know Ravi Coltrane is the son of legendary musician John Coltrane, who was not only a saxophonist for the ages but one of the most brilliant and influential musicians ever. He's Coltrane influenced, but name one saxophonist in the last 20 years—no, 30 years—who isn't.
OK. We all know Ravi Coltrane is the son of legendary musician John Coltrane, who was not only a saxophonist for the ages but one of the most brilliant and influential musicians ever. He's Coltrane influenced, but name one saxophonist in the last 20 years—no, 30 years—who isn't.
Now let it go. Ravi Coltrane, who recently released his latest CD, Mad 6 is another working jazz musician. An extremely talented one, working hard, trying to support his family and create genuine, meaningful art. Give the new recording a listen and you can see he's on the right road. The band sizzles and his playing is as worthy as anyone on the scene out there today.
The unassuming Coltrane could have gotten major-league fucked up over being the son of a legend, in the same business and playing the same axe. His mother, keyboardist Alice Coltrane, is also a formidable figure in the music. So it's in the genes, yes. But this 37-year-old has his head firmly screwed on his talented shoulders. And make no mistake, the influence of John Coltrane, both as father and musician, is profound and not lost on Ravi. His respect and admiration as a son and sax man is evident in his eloquently expressed thoughts. In fact, it was an investigation of Trane's music that led Ravi into his life as a professional musician. The relationship with his father, that world, is something no one else can touch, not even the other acolytes of John.
Ravi understands, and handles with incredible composure people's fascination with the 'son of Coltrane" thing. "If I saw the son of Miles Davis with a trumpet, I would have some of the same things going through my head. But it's all about what the person is trying to communicate, what I'm trying to communicate, and I just have to let people know that," he said to the point.
Erin Davis, the only musician offspring of the Black Prince, plays drums.
Another John Coltrane—his brother, John Jr., an alto player—also had a big impact on Ravi's life and after his death in an automobile accident in 1982, Ravi gave up music—he'd been playing clarinet for about five years—and spent the next four years "just trying to adjust and come back to center," he said.
He got through that ordeal. And this Coltrane is moving ahead, tending to business, which not only includes the new recording, but the formation of a new band (not the one on Mad 6 ) and the running of a small record company, RKM Music. Ravi Coltrane is his own man, creating his own art and trying to cope with an unfriendly music environment—like everyone else. Married, with a three-year-old son he idolizes, he is busy trying to balance the challenges of business and every day life—just like the rest of us.
"I have to constantly remind myself not to take my foot off the gas. With the economy and the world, George Bush and company. There's not a lot of hip stuff going on in the world, from my eyes. You have to stand a little bit and rise above the shit. There's not a lot of real positive things in the world. You've got your kid and you're wondering what his life might be like. It can get you down," he said, not with concern, but awareness. "War's going on, the economy sucks, people are losing their gigs. The Internet. No one's buying records anymore. Jazz has always been a hard sell. There's a lot of things to fight. The music itself. What are we going to do" Are you going to play this kind of music, or this kind of thing" Are you going to play Lincoln Center or the Knitting Factory" There's a lot of things to acknowledge and manage for a musician today."
Coltrane, based in New York City, seems to be managing. RKM, a label predicated on giving the artist as much freedom as possible, has three recordings out, Tangents by saxophonist Michael McGinnis, and two from trumpeter Ralph Alessi, Vice and Virtue and This Against That. An disc from pianist Luis Perdomo will come out in the fall, and the company ahs a distribution agreement with City Hall Records out of San Rafael, CA. Coltrane's business partners include his wife, Kathleen Hennessy, and McGinnis.
Mad 6, not on RKM, cooks from start to end. It's a collection of some standards and compositions by Ravi. It's done by Coltrane's former working band, since broken up, and is an example of what people would have heard had they caught them on tour, including different arrangements of standards, like the funky and hip version of "Round Midnight" that features some hot alto playing from the leader. Ravi's talents as a composer are evident, though he says, "I'm not a natural writer. It's something that I have to hammer away at for hours and weeks and months. I get in ruts where I can't write at all. I have about a thousand fragments that need to be completed and stuff like that."
His compositions, the intricate "Avignon," the herky-jerky 'the Mad 6" and the driving "Between the Lines" are all quality and fit in with the other tunes, by John Coltrane, Monk, Mingus. The band is tight, driven by the outstanding propulsive work of drummer Steve Hass, a polyrhythmic trapster influenced by" dare we say it" Elvin Jones.
The group "was the band I had until late 2001 early 2002, I started working less with that group and I was trying to put another band together. And then the opportunity to do the recording came up, and I told them I had two ideas for a project. I told them I had an older band that broke up that plays a lot of standard tunes and that kind of thing, and I'm trying to start a new band to focus on original material and stuff like that. So given the choice, the record company was more interested in recording the band that was playing the standards," said Coltrane, adding tongue-in-cheek 'strangely enough.
"But the benefit was that the band had broken up, but we had never really recorded that group, so that's how it came about. It was basically tunes we were doing on gigs. I was playing my music that had been recorded already for my first couple records, and we were playing standard tunes. I definitely get tired of my own tunes, so we"d play a bunch of my stuff all night and then we"d end the gig by playing "Giant Steps" or something that's fun and we all like to play. So we eventually started these kind of bizarre arrangements and spontaneous arrangements that would stick. The record is really about that. The idea was to have kind of a live-gig-in-the-studio type of record."
Yes, there are John Coltrane tunes on it—"26-2" and "Fifth House"—but it isn't a cosmic connection.
"People were saying, "Wow, you finally recorded some of you father's music. What does it mean" Is it a statement" Of course not, it was music we were playing on gigs. I was hoping it would be obvious. The band did three or four tours in Europe, we played in New York a shitload of times; played in LA a bunch of times. That's the repertoire. A little bit of my music and a bunch of weird standards."
The record is first-rate, but the problem then becomes getting it out to the public. Coltrane said the recording industry is in a state of upheaval and it's one of the reasons RKM was formed.
'the industry is kind of falling apart. It's the time for [RKM] now. Every musician alive on every level at every age has their own record out. I don't know how good a thing that is. There's just tons of product everywhere all the time. But there are people who are serious enough and have been going about it for a long time and they have an audience. Hopefully, people will search out their music, regardless if it's being put out by a label that they know is a major or a musician's own label. That won't be such a factor, I think. Hopefully the music will be out there for people to find."
The goal of RKM, he explained—after quipping "rake it in" and after his chuckling subsided—"is to really let guys do what they want to do. Let the music be first. It's not a money-making thing or status-making thing. It's set up just to kind of put music out there. Not my own, per sae, not at this point. It just seems like a natural kind of thing at this point. If you have the ability to do it, it's something that's kind of needed at this point—to put some music out there."
The music on the RKM releases has the air of musicians that are playing without men in suits looking over their shoulders. It's free and devoid of industry hooks, or, as Coltrane called it, the 'the corporate filters applied to recording projects."
When recording for major labels, Coltrane said, 'sometimes the result you end up with is not really what the artist is seeing 100 percent. Not to say that people in the industry don't know what they"re talking about, or producers only get in the way, but most 75 percent of the time that's just the case."
At RKM, "it's produced by the people who play it, the people who write it and the people who perform it. That's really what it's about. If they"re at a place in their lives as musicians, they don't really need the guidance of someone saying, "Wouldn't it be better if you played it this way," or "wouldn't it be better if you did it this way." I think if you do something for 20 years, you know what you're trying to communicate and what you're trying to put out to an audience. It's not to say that these records get made and there's no creative input from all sides. Obviously, I throw my two cents in, the artists throw their two cents in, the musicians throw their two cents in. And my wife and Mike McGinnis. There's definitely people trying to shape the thing, but I think it has it's own soft propulsion."
All this is happening at a time when recording industry is facing tough times, because sales have dipped in all genres. The Internet, and people's ability to download music for free, is being attributed as one of the key factors. But there are forces in the general area of creative music—a currently down cycle—that are also at work, making it particularly hard for jazz musicians. Coltrane is keenly aware of this.
'there are definitely cycles that have affected different areas of the music. The music itself: what trend is popular for musicians to play" And obviously the industry: Is there interest in jazz that decade" So those trends are always moving along. And now we have the Internet and the whole breakdown of the system. So it's a lot of stuff coming into play and it's hard to say what the end result is going to be. I believe that the majors [recording labels] are just going to have to change, accept the Internet and really change. They can't fight it. They"re gong out and arresting college kids now. I don't really think that's a great way to make amends with these people who stopped buying records. It's not going to do the job.
"You can buy Kind of Blue for $9—so if you want to buy my record, it's going to cost you $18.99, that's kind of ridiculous. For someone at a record company to think that makes any kind of sense today, he's out of his mind. you're not going to do it that way. And they know it. People aren't buying records at all. You need to give them a little bit of incentive by not charging so much. I think we"re past that. They"re kind of clinging on to whatever they can get. If they can sell a record at $18.99, even if they can only sell 1,000 records at $18.99, they"ll do it, as opposed to maybe selling 4,000 or 5,000 at $12.99," he said.
So struggles will continue in the music business, but Coltrane is staying busy in the profession he chose later than a lot of his peers and his elders. It wasn't until age 18 or 19 that Coltrane decided he wanted to try and pursue music. And even then, there were doubts.
Even though he is the son of two jazz musicians, Ravi never knew his father, who died at the age of 40 from a liver ailment. Ravi was only 2. He grew up listening to the sounds of the 1970s and 80s music: James Brown, Stevie Wonder, Earth, Wind & Fire. Even his first brush with Charlie Parker was off a Chaka Khan record where they had sampled an alto solo.
'that was the first time I heard Charlie Parker, which is definitely a bizarre place to hear it. But it freaked me out. That one little break. I played it over and over. It sounded so wild. I did start to listen to a little bit of those recordings. My mother had gotten a really nice box set of Dial and Savoy sessions, LPs. I was listening to a lot of that and really liking it. I felt fond of different types of music. I was into film scores, John Williams film scores, the New World Symphony and all this kind of stuff. But kind of secretive, because the music I was listening to with my friends was much, much different," he said.
"My father's music, I always remembered hearing, but it wasn't anything I began actively listening to for quite some time. I was much older when I was seeking it out, desiring it and really wondering about it."
His mother was a classically-trained pianist and would play that type of music on her piano and the stereo, exposing Ravi to Dvorak, Stravinsky and Rachmaninov, "And I liked that music. I secretly liked it. I couldn't really tell a lot of my friends," he said.
"With jazz music, my mother was still playing professionally and her music was changing, going through many different things I the 70s. So I heard that side of what she was doing. The musician's life. Her integrating all these different things in her music. She'd show up and there would be a tamboura sitting in our living room and that would be there for a while. Things were always being thrown into the mix," he recalled.
Ravi was playing clarinet in high school, but jazz music was just something cool, not anything he viewed serious. Then, after the tragedy that claimed his brother's life, things changed. "For about four or five years, I just stopped doing everything. Stopped playing the clarinet. I wasn't really doing anything. Just trying to adjust and come back to center. We all just went off a little bit. The whole family dynamic changed radically. It was around that time I started thinking about, "what am I going to do""
His love of film and film scores had him considering film school as he worked a variety of odd jobs—supermarkets, a pizza place, movie theaters. It was around 1985 or 1986 that he started to feel the pull from John Coltrane. Gentle, at first. Curiosity. A quest for a bit more knowledge. But it led to a transformation.
"I was getting a little bit older and I wanted to learn more about my father, kind of in a technical way. In my mind, I had already heard the music and more or less knew what it was about. That was my young feeling about it. But I was getting older and I wanted a little more information. I didn't pay attention to the details. It wasn't like, "Let me go to John Coltrane to figure out what music is about." It was like, 'this is my dad, I need to figure out what he was about. Let me just play some of his records. Get some of these dates, some of these names. Who's this guy playing piano" When was this recorded" Trying to fulfill an almost non-musical kind of thing.
"At that point, I started to hear it differently. It started to have a different affect on me. The reason I went to it—everything just sort of stopped. What happened is I really started to connect with the music in a way that I hadn't in my whole life. I got stuck. I stopped listening to most of the music I was listening to at the time—Prince and all kinds of music at that age. I got way into jazz music. I started finding other musicians to listen to and stuff. Sonny Rollins and more Charlie Parker. I just got obsessed with it.
The transformation was more than just musical. It pointed Ravi into the direction that his life has now taken, full steam ahead.
"I didn't realty see it then, but I saw it years later. There was a huge hole in my life. A huge empty space. I needed something. I really needed something and it turned out to be that music. It put me back in motion again."
Coltrane told his mother he'd like to give music school a chance—something she had never pushed on him—and he enrolled at the California Institute of the Arts. "I enrolled to see if music was something I wanted to do or even could do," he said. "It was a total experiment. There was no design. I didn't stand up and say, 'today I will be a musician." It was not like that. My mother never laid that on me my whole life, which was very cool. She never told me, "You have to do this," or "you have to do that."
Ravi expanded his list of sax influences to people like Sonny Rollins, but as he went through school, he was daunted by the heavy aura of the great jazzmen he was investigating. He had doubts about going on, trying to tread in the footsteps of those musical giants. A recording from Wynton Marsalis changed things.
"I got a record called Black Codes From the Underground and I saw all these young black men playing these instruments and it really sounded great. That was a moment when I thought, "Maybe I can do this. Maybe it's possible for people to do this." So I was a big fan of Branford's in school and I started to make little trips to New York. I was meeting people, and people were turning me on to other musicians. I got into Ralph Moore, the tenor player. There was a time I only wanted to sound like Ralph Moore. When you're young, you can idolize different people for different reasons in different ways. I would follow guys around and go to their gigs. It was a fun period for me."
He started doing a few gigs around home. It even got his mother excited, who landed a few gigs with her on keyboards and Ravi on sax, dates Coltrane labels as "premature" in the scheme of things.
"But almost everything I did was kind of premature. People were apt to want to give me a break or give me a chance. "Oh, let's hear this Coltrane guy." Way before I was ever really ready. So every situation for me was like trying to play catch up," he said. Including his big break, the two-year gig with the titan Elvin Jones, the driving rhythmic force behind the classic John Coltrane Quartet that turned everybody out in the 1960s and continues to do so today. Ravi was unsure about the ramifications of having a Jones-Coltrane connection and how people might view. He was also unsure he was up to the task, musically.
Jones saw the same thing, but still wanted Ravi.
"He's a tremendous musician. He was embarrassed not to be recognized for his own talent," said Jones . "He thought people would just cater to him because he was the son of John Coltrane. I had to get him out of that way of thinking. I said, 'You can't control what somebody else thinks. You can control what you think. What you do is because you want to do it. And it's you doing it. Nobody else could play that but you. That mouthpiece is in your mouth not somebody else's. You're the one that has to exert the breath control.' So he sort of came around and got so he could enjoy himself."
"He was so encouraging. And literally I called him and told him I didn't think I was really ready," Coltrane said. "And I did say it would be too distracting to have someone named Coltrane in your band. I said, "I wouldn't want to bring that to your group and to the other players. And I wouldn't want to bring that on to myself." It was something I was learning to dodge and manage the entire time I was playing. Because my whole life went by before I ever heard 'the son of John Coltrane." As soon as I picked up the saxophone was the first time I heard it. I was labeled the son of John Coltrane in 1986. I didn't grow up hearing that. I didn't have any weird pretense about who I was. I was just me. But people were kind of putting this thing on me and I had to say, "I hear where you're coming from, but I'm just trying to do my thing."
There were several key sideman gigs after Jones, including Geri Allen and Kenny Barron. Also a two-tenor group he formed with Antoine Roney, Grand Central, and a couple other CD's under his own name. His career has moved along well.
Being the son of a legend could have been intimidating, even crippling. But it's something Ravi has handled with comparative ease. He appears absolutely centered and aware of his own individuality, his own potential, his own passion.
'the burden is very exterior. It's not an internal burden within me, something that I struggle with daily, like "Oh my god, my father's John Coltrane so I have to be great." I didn't grow up that way. It wasn't that this man was in my house and I saw him every day and tried to emulate him. Maybe the offspring of some famous people who witnessed them and are kind of drawn into their energy, maybe they end up with more of that internal struggle. I didn't have that growing up. I'm just a guy who digs music. I pick up my horn for the same reason that 99 percent of the people pick up their horns: because they heard some music that turned them on and that's why they started playing," he said straight forward.
"I've had the weirdest reviews sometimes. Everything is directed to John Coltrane. 'the first tune Ravi played he didn't sound like John Coltrane and the second tune he played he kind of sounded like him" What guy in the world gets reviewed this way" But I can't really help that. I can only do what I can do, and hopefully somebody can see that I'm a guy that's just trying to play."
Still, the force of his father is strong, and it's something he continues to deal with, but not out of intimidation or out of the perception that he has to approach the great Trane's status. He separates Dad from Trane.
The two forces are kind of strong. Anybody's feeling about their own father, especially a father they never knew, obviously there's going to be a strong feeling there. Separate from who he was and what he did in the public sense. I heard stories from my mother and different family members about my father and the kind of things he did as a man and a person and a father. Home movies and photos. Yeah, there's a very distinct line in that regard. And obviously, there's his station as one of the very greatest saxophonists to ever play. He's pretty strong," said Coltrane, adding with a laugh, "and then they kind of meld at times and I really get freaked out."
Ravi Coltrane has come to terms with all of it. He embraces his lineage, but isn't stifled by it. He understands when people bring it up, and is unruffled. There's enough to deal with out there in the world and in the industry without getting genitalia tied in a knot over such things.
"At this point I want to bear down and focus," he said.
"All I know is I want to be doing something that's creative and personal. Everybody that I look at in the past, that's what they did. Monk was not trying to play like anybody else. John Coltrane was not trying to carry on the legacy of Dexter Gordon or Lester Young. He was doing his thing. He loved that music and it was a part of what he did, in a way, but he did his own thing.
"Fortunately the people I associate with and play with today, that's what we all kind of feel, regardless if the critics are buying it or we"re selling records. The idea is to be as creative and as personal as you possibly can. To me, that's what I want to continue doing and hopefully, that's what I will be doing."
Dad would be proud. So would Trane.
Visit Ravi Coltrane on the web.
https://www.allaboutjazz.com/a-love-supreme-with-ravi-coltrane-ravi-coltrane-by-harry-s-pariser.php
"A Love Supreme" with Ravi Coltrane
!["A Love Supreme" with Ravi Coltrane](https://s3.amazonaws.com/allaboutjazz/media/large/6/0/2/b88d384092ac21904792caf0347d3.jpeg ""A Love Supreme" with Ravi Coltrane")
by
AllAboutJazz
AllAboutJazz
A Love Supreme: John Coltrane Celebration
SFJAZZ
San Francisco, CA
September 23, 2017
"It's one of his great, great records... The music and creative expression that came from John, it's overwhelming—you know, to think of what he was able to achieve with this brass tube with buttons on it." —Ravi Coltrane, as quoted by Richard Scheinin in the Mercury News
It would have been his father's 91st birthday. To mark the occasion, his son took the stage to front a gifted ensemble who would perform one of his classics. He chose to refashion, rather than recreate, his father's famous jazz album. A packed house was present for this, the second show of that evening. Such was the scene when Ravi Coltrane and company performed their version of A Love Supreme (Impulse, 1965) at SFJAZZ on September 23rd, 2017.
One of the most acclaimed jazz albums of all time, many fans and critics regard A Love Supreme as John Coltrane's masterpiece, one on which he played exclusively tenor. Released in 1965, it had already sold 500,000 copies by 1970. Its influence continues to this day. A four-part suite, A Love Supreme is divided up into "Acknowledgement" (which contains the chant which gave the suite its name), "Resolution," "Pursuance" and "Psalm." John Coltrane played tenor exclusively throughout the suite. While the composition reflects Coltrane's upbringing in the Protestant church, some believe it was also influenced through his exposure to Islam. It was conceived as a way of expressing Coltrane's thankfulness to the creator for his musical talent.
Clad in gray, Coltrane, entered and blew on his tenor to mark the start of his father's composition "Crescent" (not featured on A Love Supreme). Matthew Garrison (son of John Coltrane Quartet bassist Jimmy Garrison) came in on electric bass as Coltrane stepped away. Drummer Marcus Gilmore (grandson of John Coltrane collaborator Roy Haynes) employed his mallets skillfully. Then Nicholas Payton, wearing his trademark black top hat, entered and sat down at his Fender Rhodes. Innovative electric guitarist Adam Rogers, who has played with the likes of Bill Evans and Chris Potter, then joined in, pressing down one of the numerous pedals at his feet and then soloed. Payton took trumpet in hand again and blew.
The group then moved into the advertised feature. "Acknowledgement" began with its chant of "A Love Supreme." Then, the lights dimmed as Gilmore took an extended, highly improvisational, rapid fire solo. Then Coltrane re-entered. Payton looked on intently as he blew; Payton, after a stint on his organ, soloed on his trumpet.
Rogers was given his time in the spotlight, building up a sonic wall with his carefully-fingered guitar, before the band re-entered. Coltrane soloed, then Peyton, who concluded his solo amidst applause. At the end, the lights went dim, then up. A standing ovation brought the musicians all together, their hands around each others shoulders. They took a bow.
SFJAZZ
San Francisco, CA
September 23, 2017
"It's one of his great, great records... The music and creative expression that came from John, it's overwhelming—you know, to think of what he was able to achieve with this brass tube with buttons on it." —Ravi Coltrane, as quoted by Richard Scheinin in the Mercury News
It would have been his father's 91st birthday. To mark the occasion, his son took the stage to front a gifted ensemble who would perform one of his classics. He chose to refashion, rather than recreate, his father's famous jazz album. A packed house was present for this, the second show of that evening. Such was the scene when Ravi Coltrane and company performed their version of A Love Supreme (Impulse, 1965) at SFJAZZ on September 23rd, 2017.
One of the most acclaimed jazz albums of all time, many fans and critics regard A Love Supreme as John Coltrane's masterpiece, one on which he played exclusively tenor. Released in 1965, it had already sold 500,000 copies by 1970. Its influence continues to this day. A four-part suite, A Love Supreme is divided up into "Acknowledgement" (which contains the chant which gave the suite its name), "Resolution," "Pursuance" and "Psalm." John Coltrane played tenor exclusively throughout the suite. While the composition reflects Coltrane's upbringing in the Protestant church, some believe it was also influenced through his exposure to Islam. It was conceived as a way of expressing Coltrane's thankfulness to the creator for his musical talent.
Clad in gray, Coltrane, entered and blew on his tenor to mark the start of his father's composition "Crescent" (not featured on A Love Supreme). Matthew Garrison (son of John Coltrane Quartet bassist Jimmy Garrison) came in on electric bass as Coltrane stepped away. Drummer Marcus Gilmore (grandson of John Coltrane collaborator Roy Haynes) employed his mallets skillfully. Then Nicholas Payton, wearing his trademark black top hat, entered and sat down at his Fender Rhodes. Innovative electric guitarist Adam Rogers, who has played with the likes of Bill Evans and Chris Potter, then joined in, pressing down one of the numerous pedals at his feet and then soloed. Payton took trumpet in hand again and blew.
The group then moved into the advertised feature. "Acknowledgement" began with its chant of "A Love Supreme." Then, the lights dimmed as Gilmore took an extended, highly improvisational, rapid fire solo. Then Coltrane re-entered. Payton looked on intently as he blew; Payton, after a stint on his organ, soloed on his trumpet.
Rogers was given his time in the spotlight, building up a sonic wall with his carefully-fingered guitar, before the band re-entered. Coltrane soloed, then Peyton, who concluded his solo amidst applause. At the end, the lights went dim, then up. A standing ovation brought the musicians all together, their hands around each others shoulders. They took a bow.
https://www.allaboutjazz.com/blending-times-ravi-coltrane-savoy-jazz-review-by-mark-f-turner.php
Ravi Coltrane: Blending Times
by
Saxophonist Ravi Coltrane stands in the legacy of not one, but two
great influences: his honored father, John Coltrane, one of the most
influential musicians in jazz, and his mother, Alice Coltrane, a superb
musician and spiritual guide whose untimely passing in January 17, 2007
left a void that will not be easily filled. Yet with a quiet demeanor
contrasted by profound abilities, Ravi Coltrane delivers the
long-awaited Blending Times.
This is his fifth release as a leader following 2005's acclaimed In Flux (Savoy). It is even more dynamic due in part not only to Coltrane's personal experiences, but also because of his excellent band that includes longtime members Luis Perdomo, a remarkable pianist, Drew Gress, a demonstrative in-demand bassist, and E.J. Strickland, a gifted drummer who is also the twin brother of saxophonist Marcus Strickland.
Coltrane's tenor is more robust than ever—marked by quickness, stamina, and warmth—showing glimpses of true brilliance on "A Still Life" with inquisitive soloing that has equal amounts of power and gentleness. The appropriate titled "Shine" shows stylistic properties—deliberate, passionate, freely expressed within an enlightening melody where the solos are connected like links in a chain.
The music follows the band's form: a gelatinous continuity conveyed in a mix of stirring contemporary music. Improvisational puzzles ("First Circuit" and "The Last Circuit"), some tricked funk syncopation in "Narcined," a circuitous cat-and-mouse chase in "One Wheeler Will," and swinging bopacity in Thelonious Monk's "Epistrophy." One of the many highlights is "Amalgams," which moves from atmospheric lushness into a smoldering groove. It articulates an identifiable group sound with sparkling individualism that documents a strong performing unit.
As in his previous recordings, there lies a cerebral quality in the music that is undeniable. This reaches an apex on the recording's final track with "For Turiya," a superb ending featuring special guests, longtime friend/bassist Charlie Haden and harpist Brandee Younger.
Written by Haden, the composition begins with a simply beautiful harp solo by Younger which introduces the theme, followed by declarative statements from Haden and Coltrane. It conjures memories of classic recordings that featured both Alice Coltrane's harp and John Coltrane's saxophone with gracefulness and serenity.
Coltrane can't deny his rich heritage and thankfully embraces it. But of equal import, he clearly has it within, to leave his own imprint, as witnessed on this superb release.
This is his fifth release as a leader following 2005's acclaimed In Flux (Savoy). It is even more dynamic due in part not only to Coltrane's personal experiences, but also because of his excellent band that includes longtime members Luis Perdomo, a remarkable pianist, Drew Gress, a demonstrative in-demand bassist, and E.J. Strickland, a gifted drummer who is also the twin brother of saxophonist Marcus Strickland.
Coltrane's tenor is more robust than ever—marked by quickness, stamina, and warmth—showing glimpses of true brilliance on "A Still Life" with inquisitive soloing that has equal amounts of power and gentleness. The appropriate titled "Shine" shows stylistic properties—deliberate, passionate, freely expressed within an enlightening melody where the solos are connected like links in a chain.
The music follows the band's form: a gelatinous continuity conveyed in a mix of stirring contemporary music. Improvisational puzzles ("First Circuit" and "The Last Circuit"), some tricked funk syncopation in "Narcined," a circuitous cat-and-mouse chase in "One Wheeler Will," and swinging bopacity in Thelonious Monk's "Epistrophy." One of the many highlights is "Amalgams," which moves from atmospheric lushness into a smoldering groove. It articulates an identifiable group sound with sparkling individualism that documents a strong performing unit.
As in his previous recordings, there lies a cerebral quality in the music that is undeniable. This reaches an apex on the recording's final track with "For Turiya," a superb ending featuring special guests, longtime friend/bassist Charlie Haden and harpist Brandee Younger.
Written by Haden, the composition begins with a simply beautiful harp solo by Younger which introduces the theme, followed by declarative statements from Haden and Coltrane. It conjures memories of classic recordings that featured both Alice Coltrane's harp and John Coltrane's saxophone with gracefulness and serenity.
Coltrane can't deny his rich heritage and thankfully embraces it. But of equal import, he clearly has it within, to leave his own imprint, as witnessed on this superb release.
Track Listing: Shine; First Circuit; A Still Life; Epistrophy;
Amalgams; Narcined; One Wheeler Will; The Last Circuit; Before with
After; For Turiya.
Personnel: Ravi Coltrane: tenor saxophone; Luis Perdomo: piano; Drew Gress: acoustic bass; E. J. Strickland: drums; Charlie Haden: bass (10); Brandee Younger: harp (10).
Title: Blending Times | Year Released: 2009 | Record Label: Savoy Jazz
Personnel: Ravi Coltrane: tenor saxophone; Luis Perdomo: piano; Drew Gress: acoustic bass; E. J. Strickland: drums; Charlie Haden: bass (10); Brandee Younger: harp (10).
Title: Blending Times | Year Released: 2009 | Record Label: Savoy Jazz
https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21817-in-movement/
Drummer and jazz legend Jack DeJohnette pairs up with saxophonist Ravi Coltrane and bassist (and electronics whiz) Matthew Garrison, to spellbinding and haunting results.
Jack DeJohnette knows how to turn traditions inside out. He can invest light-touch cymbal playing with the feel of pulsing funk. His freer patterns of blast can sound like some of the most refined avant-percussion you've ever heard. Though while DeJohnette is obviously an original, he's not bent on tearing down all the boundaries between jazz sub-genres. His engagement with various aspects of blues and swing flows from an evident reverence for each specific style. Even when pushing his own creative language to new places, DeJohnette manages to keep the inherited forms in view.
His half-century discography suggests how invaluable (and how rare) that philosophy of performance has been. DeJohnette played on Miles Davis' Bitches Brew, was part of an acoustic trio led by pianist Bill Evans, and also collaborated with experimental visionaries from the Chicago scene, many of whom were active in the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (or AACM). In decades since, he's worked with Keith Jarrett and Pat Metheny, while recording frequently as a leader for the ECM label.
DeJohnette's 2015 release on the imprint, Made in Chicago, referenced his deep relationships with various AACM musicians while staying mostly focused on recent compositions from that all-star group of players. The drummer's latest album follows a broadly similar path, by affording DeJohnette a chance to create some new pieces alongside two scions of jazz: the saxophonist Ravi Coltrane and the bassist (and electronics whiz) Matthew Garrison. The aura of history is inescapable on a project that includes them both, given that their fathers were members of the “classic” John Coltrane Quartet. And DeJohnette's new trio plunges right into the deepest of jazz-legacy waters by tackling one of the classic Coltrane quartet's most iconic tunes, at the very beginning of In Movement.
“Alabama” was the elder Coltrane's response to the 1963 white-supremacist terror bombing of Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church. The studio take is a piece that can stand with any work of tragic poetry, from any artistic discipline. When the climactic tenor line breaks through, there is an emotional transition—from a state of mourning to one of wrenching, cathartic protest. (Spike Lee used this portion of the song to shattering effect during 4 Little Girls, his documentary on the murders.) It's one of the great compositions and performances of music history. As a consequence, it's a risky thing for anyone else to touch.
Here, after a few seconds of cymbal work from DeJohnette, the trio's
performance begins in earnest when Ravi Coltrane plays a closing portion
of the song's main theme. This needle-drop, in media res
choice conjures up the haunting suggestion of “Alabama” playing on an
everlasting loop, as a mandated accompaniment for each and every
occurrence of racially motivated violence. This sense of disquiet is
also promoted by Garrison's electric bass playing. His clouds of
fuzz-tone thicken noticeably when Coltrane moves up to the famous
high-register cry. The purgatorial (or else eternally damned) quality of
this “Alabama” feels even even grimmer than the original. There's no
swinging, breakdown section (as in the originally issued album version).
And even DeJohnette's rollicking percussive moments have a pensive air.
Still, the liberties taken here feel well thought-out, while also
keeping the performance from seeming backward looking.
The mood brightens considerably during the pair of lengthy (and
jointly composed) original tunes that follow “Alabama.” “Two Jimmys” is a
joint tribute to Garrison's father as well as Jimi Hendrix, and it has a
variable-but-intense groove pitched somewhere between Sun Ship and Band of Gypsys. But the real stomper on In Movement
is the trio's Earth, Wind and Fire cover, “Serpentine Fire,” which this
trio stretches with abandon. Similarly refashioned is “Blue in Green”
from Miles Davis' Kind of Blue**,
which finds DeJohnette moving from behind his kit to offer some rich
support on piano. Along with two lyrical ballads by DeJohnette, this
cover also offers a respite after some of the album's noisier material.
The only cut on the 50-minute set that feels a little too beholden to
the past is “Rashied,” a tribute to Coltrane's hookup with drummer
Rashied Ali on the duo set Insterstellar Space. It's certainly
an energetic performance—and both DeJohnette and Coltrane avoid sounding
like they're directly copying the players this piece sets out to honor.
But the duo-setup that animates this performance doesn't feel as
freshly conceived as the trio's performance of “Alabama” does.
That may sound like a high critical bar, but it's one this group sets
for itself. Despite the grand shadows cast by their forbears, In Movement
shows how both Ravi and Matthew have emerged as distinct
instrumentalists on the contemporary jazz scene. And they have skills
that match up with DeJohnette's own. No one in this group has to run
from history, or overly fetishize it, in order to sound like an
individual—a shared skill that makes In Movement a frequently spellbinding experience.
Ravi Coltrane: Digging Deeper
Ravi Coltrane’s onstage at the Village Vanguard, fronting his own
quartet in his first-ever appearance as a leader at this hallowed
venue. It’s been more than 40 years since his legendary father played
here, and now the son commands the same stage in that triangle-shaped
subterranean room where so much jazz history was made.
“It’s almost like being in church,” he confided to WBGO’s Josh Jackson in a pre-set interview to accompany the gig’s National Public Radio broadcast. “A day doesn’t go by where we don’t see these people or hear their music,” he continues, pointing to an impressive photo gallery that includes an image of his father alongside portraits of Dizzy, Miles, Elvin Jones, Max Roach and other jazz immortals who have gigged at the Vanguard. “They’re an active part of our lives. They’ve been gone for decades in a mortal sense, but they’re as much a part of our lives as they could ever be. We live and breathe these musicians. Their image, their music, is always with us.”
He’s bobbing and weaving now with his tenor sax, digging into the fabric of the aggressive set opener with steely conviction, double-timing and blowing serpentine lines against a contrapuntal current supplied by bassist Drew Gress, drummer E.J. Strickland and pianist Luis Perdomo. On a rendition of his father’s “Harmonique,” a bluesy track from 1960’s Coltrane Jazz, Ravi delivers with bold tones and touches of tricky multiphonics on the jaunty head. He follows with “For Zoe,” a deeply meditative, droning dedication to poet-writer-jazz-critic Zoe Anglesey that carries some allusions to his father’s somber “Wise One.” Ravi wraps up his maiden voyage at the Village Vanguard in triumphant fashion with “First Circuit,” a playful “trading duets” vehicle from his superb new album (Blending Times, Savoy Jazz), and a rousing rendition of Thelonious Monk’s “Epistrophy” that has him digging deep.
This is a newly confident, grounded Ravi Coltrane, who at age 43 is coming into his own as a thoughtful, deliberate composer, assured bandleader and potent improviser. And while the physical resemblance to his famous father remains striking, he clearly has forged his own path in a musical journey that began back in 1986, when he started studying jazz at the California Institute of the Arts with Charlie Haden.
A month after his successful Vanguard debut, Coltrane was at the Blue Note, holding his own as a special guest alongside McCoy Tyner’s quartet and tap-dancing sensation Savion Glover as part of the legendary pianist’s weeklong 70th birthday celebration. Sitting in the audience that night, it was hard not to reflect on the historic, magical connection between the great pianist and the late tenor titan, who died when Ravi was only 2. Again, the family name and physical resemblance between father and son compels us to dream.
We’ve watched Ravi grow up in public. Some in New York will recall his apprenticeships during the early ’90s with drummer Rashied Ali (his father’s last drummer), tenor saxophonist David Murray and trumpeter Wallace Roney. While still in the formative stage of his career, as a member of the Elvin Jones Jazz Machine in the early 1990s, he seemed young, rather shy and sometimes visibly intimidated onstage following alto saxophonist Sonny Fortune in the band’s solo order. An important tenure with Steve Coleman’s Five Elements band during the mid- to late ’90s allowed Ravi to absorb Coleman’s language-based systems of musical organization, giving him an entirely different perspective on harmony and rhythm, one separate from a purely bebop sensibility or the modal music of his father.
In April 1998, Coltrane made his first splash as a leader with Moving Pictures for RCA. Produced by Coleman, who also played alto sax on the session, it included Jeff “Tain” Watts on drums, Lonnie Plaxico on bass, Michael Cain on piano and Ralph Alessi on trumpet. (Liner notes for that release were by renowned writer-poet Amiri Baraka.) It was an auspicious debut that garnered much acclaim for the 32-year-old saxophonist. Since that time, he’s been on a mission to find his own personal style and sound within the music.
Fatherhood came along at the end of 1999 with the birth of his first son, William, making Ravi fully aware that the Coltrane legacy was being extended to the next generation. The birth of his second son, Aaron, in April 2006 amplified that point and only helped to deepen Ravi’s musical expression. “Kids have a way of grounding you,” he acknowledges, before launching into a litany of his boys’ favorite things.
Ravi himself grew up in a household full of music. If it wasn’t his mother, Alice, playing organ, there were tons of records to absorb, including classics by both his parents. Since the mother-son bond ran so deep, it was especially rewarding when Ravi began collaborating in 2000 with his mother on a recording project that would ultimately be released in 2004 on Verve as Translinear Light. Along with drummers Jack DeJohnette and Jeff “Tain” Watts, bassists James Genus and Charlie Haden, his brother Oran Coltrane on one tune and the Sai Anantam Singers from Alice’s Vedantic Center Ashram in Agoura Hills, Calif., Ravi delved into a blend of his mother’s devotional music (“Jagadishwar,” “Sita Ram”), his father’s music (“Crescent,” “Leo”) and traditional folk tunes (“Walk With Me,” “This Train”) on this uplifting collection.
“My mom was kind of reluctant to do that record,” recalls Coltrane, “but I kept slowly, gently pushing her. That started back in 2000 and it was a process of baby-stepping toward something from that point on.”
Knowing the depth of his mother’s musical expression, he was also aware that she had made a choice years ago to step away from recording and performing in public to focus on her spiritual work at the ashram she opened in 1974. “She played music her entire life,” says Ravi. “She left the public performance of it, but the music never left her. So when I began pushing her to do these things, it was because I knew that she still had this great ability to achieve something musically that was potent and personal and uplifting.”
While on the road during the ’90s, Ravi continued to hear from people asking him about his mother and her possible return from self-imposed exile. “As many people would ask me about Alice Coltrane as would ask me about John Coltrane, maybe even more,” he says. “I think more people had opportunities to see her play in the ’70s, so they were naturally curious about whether or not she was ever going to return to the recording scene. And I used to tell her whenever we spoke, ‘Yeah, Mom, they were asking about you again.'”
Alice finally did emerge from retirement in June 1998 for a performance with Ravi’s quartet at New York’s Town Hall, as part of the Texaco Jazz Festival. They later appeared in concert together in November 2002 at Joe’s Pub in New York to commemorate the simultaneous release of Ashley Kahn’s book, A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane’s Signature Album (Viking Press), and a special edition of that landmark Impulse! recording. “A lot of Verve people were there that night,” Coltrane recalls of that special engagement. “Most of them had never seen her perform live, of course. And a week later they called me and said, ‘Do you think your mom would want to do a record for us?’ So that’s how the ball started rolling with that recording. And things just kind of steamrolled from there.”
Mother and son followed the release of Translinear Light with a brief tour in the fall of 2006 that showed great promise. “We did four gigs that were all spaced out by a couple of months,” says Coltrane. “We played quartet gigs at UCLA and in Ann Arbor, which was like a homecoming for my ma [she was born in Detroit]. We also did a full orchestral performance with strings and horns and a choir at NJPAC [New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark]. And at the end of the year we played the Masonic Hall in San Francisco with the quartet [with Roy Haynes subbing for DeJohnette]. After that last gig in San Francisco I got really excited about going out and playing with my mom. I felt like we needed to get over the hump of those first four gigs, and with each gig she got a little more of her thing back … a little looser, a little more momentum. The first few gigs she was still feeling it out, but by that Masonic Hall gig I felt like, ‘Yeah! Now it’s time. She’s ready; we’re ready. Let’s really go out and make important, creative music, from her perspective.’ We already had gigs booked in 2007, and I remember also saying to my mom, ‘We should record this music.'”
Alice had actually already recorded some of this new music at her son Oran’s studio in California, though without the strings and horn arrangements that she had written for the triumphant NJPAC gig. As Ravi explains, “We had talked about possibly going back and re-recording those pieces. We couldn’t overdub string and horn arrangements onto the pieces she had already recorded because she changed the key of the piece for the string arrangements. So we were in the process of discussing what to do about that project when she died.
“In the last phone conversation that I had with her, when she was in the hospital, I asked, ‘When and where are we gonna record these strings? Are we gonna do it in New York? Are we gonna do it in Los Angeles? We could do it in February…'”
The release of that project, to be titled Sacred Language of Ascension, remains in limbo. “Basically, Oran didn’t want to change anything, I wanted to change a lot of things, and it was a big conflict,” says Ravi. “I had some issues with the recording technically. My ma was all about the energy and the feel of everything. I’m about that as well, but I also like that to be balanced with as strong a technical presentation as we can manage. So if things need to be fixed or there’s some work to be done, I say do it.” As of this writing, there was no resolution between the brothers.
Alice passed away on Jan. 12, 2007, of respiratory failure. She was 69.
Processing the loss of this most significant figure in his life has been a huge personal challenge for Ravi and his siblings, Oran and Michelle. “My mom was like our God,” he says with a laugh. “She was my only parent that I’ve known and my relationship with her did not change much from childhood to adulthood. Although she was at her ashram in California and I lived in New York, she was still a major guide for me in the choices that I would make, consciously and subconsciously. Anything that happens in your life, you call your mom, right? So I was always on the phone with her: ‘Hey, Ma, I just got nominated for a Grammy!’ or ‘Hey, Ma, I just played with so-and-so.’ I wouldn’t get on a plane without calling her.
“She was my main supporter and advocate,” he continues, “and when that’s removed, it’s disorienting and shocking in ways that I hadn’t anticipated. Not just the fact that my mother, whom I love, is not there anymore, but that the whole system is kind of displaced because she was still so much an active part of my daily life. I lived 42 1/2 years with my mom and only a year and a half or so without her. So it’s been a little hard to try and kind of regain the equilibrium since she’s been gone. I feel like a fish out of water now, like I have to re-learn how to live.”
With the absence of Alice in his life, Ravi has been forced to re-examine his motivation for playing music. “I’m starting to ask myself, ‘What is it really about? Why am I doing this? What am I trying to achieve? What can I achieve? What should I be trying to strive for?'” he says. “Re-examination is a good thing to apply at any period to a creative person’s life, but when it’s informed by these types of traumatic events, we start finding more meaningful things to examine. And we connect with things that maybe weren’t as important to us before. I was never a nostalgic person so much before … and I don’t know if ‘nostalgia’ is the word I’m looking for. … But this sense of my past and how it’s influencing my present is very apparent to me now. It’s almost like every note that you play now is informed by something that happened before. And it’s not even a thought process. Every fiber of your being is responding to this traumatic event that happened in the past. Instinctively, intuitively, you’re just doing things differently because of it.”
He adds that for the majority of 2007 and a good part of 2008, “I was kind of in this strange zone … this blending of my past and my present. Now, moving forward, I’m processing and relating to my past in a different way than I was last year.”
Which brings us to Blending Times, his fifth recording as a leader and follow-up to 2005’s Grammy-nominated In Flux. The outing comes on the heels of 2008’s Seraphic Light (Telarc), the powerful 2008 Saxophone Summit release featuring Ravi with Joe Lovano and Dave Liebman. (In that trio, Ravi replaced the late Michael Brecker, who died on Jan. 13, 2007, the day after Alice passed.) Blending Times is Ravi’s most emotionally charged, fully realized statement to date.
From the lyrical, Keith Jarrett-esque opener “Shine” to the swirling polyrhythmic funk of “Narcined,” the delicate rubato pieces “A Still Life” and “Before With After,” the playful, M-BASE-ish romp “One Wheeler Will” and an energized take on Monk’s “Epistrophy,” Coltrane distinguishes himself as a first-rate player and conceptualist. But easily the most moving track on Blending Times is the beautiful but somber closer, “For Turiya,” a touching ode to Alice Coltrane written by Charlie Haden for their duet together on Haden’s 1976 Horizon album Closeness.
“Charlie was a huge follower and believer in Alice Coltrane and her music,” says Ravi. “He just always recognized that she was someone to sort of hold up in a special light.”
Ravi and Haden first performed “For Turiya” together at her Elevation Service at the ashram on Jan. 27, 2007, and then again at an Alice Coltrane Ascension Ceremony on May 17 at St. John the Divine Cathedral in New York. “This was around the same time that I was trying to finish Blending Times,” recalls Ravi, “and after playing it with Charlie at the St. John’s memorial I knew that I wanted to have it on this record. So I flew to California with Brandee Younger, the harpist who played at all of the tribute concerts that we did for my mother, and we recorded at Capitol Records in Hollywood. The last time I recorded at Capitol was with Charlie and my mother for Translinear Light. So I’m standing basically in the same spot that I was recording a few years earlier with my ma and Charlie and Jack. And now it’s Charlie and me and Brandee.”
Ravi kept a picture of his mother on a music stand throughout the session as they recorded “For Turiya.” “I didn’t have any music,” he recalls. “I just looked at this picture of her the whole time we were in the studio. I haven’t had a lot of experiences where I can musically connect with something that’s beyond music, but in that moment that we were recording that tune, it was like every note was about me and my mother, or me not having my mother anymore.”
During that session, Coltrane experienced a flood of emotions ranging from sadness and regret to joy and elation. “I’m not an overly sentimental person and I know that music has purposes and functions that we have to address, regardless of what’s personally happening in our lives,” he says, “but there are certain moments that require you to kind of give in … to kind of release and let certain things come in. And this track was one of those moments. I have a hard time listening to it now because I can hear how sad I am. I can’t put on any other piece of music where I can identify an emotion so clearly in what I’m playing. It’s so revealing.”
While Coltrane awaited the mid-January release of Blending Times, he was also preparing for an extensive 50-city tour with the Blue Note 7-an all-star ensemble with pianist and musical director Bill Charlap, alto saxophonist Steve Wilson, trumpeter Nicholas Payton, guitarist Peter Bernstein, drummer Lewis Nash and bassist Peter Washington-in support of their January release, Mosaic: A Celebration of Blue Note Records.
Also, as of this writing, Coltrane remains hopeful that he would be invited to play at the inauguration for President-elect Barack Obama. “I played at Bill Clinton’s with Elvin,” he says. “But if I don’t play at Barack’s inauguration, I hope I get a chance to meet him and hang with him. I know he’s got some John Coltrane and Miles Davis on his iPod. So we’ll have to see if I get the call.”
“It’s almost like being in church,” he confided to WBGO’s Josh Jackson in a pre-set interview to accompany the gig’s National Public Radio broadcast. “A day doesn’t go by where we don’t see these people or hear their music,” he continues, pointing to an impressive photo gallery that includes an image of his father alongside portraits of Dizzy, Miles, Elvin Jones, Max Roach and other jazz immortals who have gigged at the Vanguard. “They’re an active part of our lives. They’ve been gone for decades in a mortal sense, but they’re as much a part of our lives as they could ever be. We live and breathe these musicians. Their image, their music, is always with us.”
He’s bobbing and weaving now with his tenor sax, digging into the fabric of the aggressive set opener with steely conviction, double-timing and blowing serpentine lines against a contrapuntal current supplied by bassist Drew Gress, drummer E.J. Strickland and pianist Luis Perdomo. On a rendition of his father’s “Harmonique,” a bluesy track from 1960’s Coltrane Jazz, Ravi delivers with bold tones and touches of tricky multiphonics on the jaunty head. He follows with “For Zoe,” a deeply meditative, droning dedication to poet-writer-jazz-critic Zoe Anglesey that carries some allusions to his father’s somber “Wise One.” Ravi wraps up his maiden voyage at the Village Vanguard in triumphant fashion with “First Circuit,” a playful “trading duets” vehicle from his superb new album (Blending Times, Savoy Jazz), and a rousing rendition of Thelonious Monk’s “Epistrophy” that has him digging deep.
This is a newly confident, grounded Ravi Coltrane, who at age 43 is coming into his own as a thoughtful, deliberate composer, assured bandleader and potent improviser. And while the physical resemblance to his famous father remains striking, he clearly has forged his own path in a musical journey that began back in 1986, when he started studying jazz at the California Institute of the Arts with Charlie Haden.
A month after his successful Vanguard debut, Coltrane was at the Blue Note, holding his own as a special guest alongside McCoy Tyner’s quartet and tap-dancing sensation Savion Glover as part of the legendary pianist’s weeklong 70th birthday celebration. Sitting in the audience that night, it was hard not to reflect on the historic, magical connection between the great pianist and the late tenor titan, who died when Ravi was only 2. Again, the family name and physical resemblance between father and son compels us to dream.
We’ve watched Ravi grow up in public. Some in New York will recall his apprenticeships during the early ’90s with drummer Rashied Ali (his father’s last drummer), tenor saxophonist David Murray and trumpeter Wallace Roney. While still in the formative stage of his career, as a member of the Elvin Jones Jazz Machine in the early 1990s, he seemed young, rather shy and sometimes visibly intimidated onstage following alto saxophonist Sonny Fortune in the band’s solo order. An important tenure with Steve Coleman’s Five Elements band during the mid- to late ’90s allowed Ravi to absorb Coleman’s language-based systems of musical organization, giving him an entirely different perspective on harmony and rhythm, one separate from a purely bebop sensibility or the modal music of his father.
In April 1998, Coltrane made his first splash as a leader with Moving Pictures for RCA. Produced by Coleman, who also played alto sax on the session, it included Jeff “Tain” Watts on drums, Lonnie Plaxico on bass, Michael Cain on piano and Ralph Alessi on trumpet. (Liner notes for that release were by renowned writer-poet Amiri Baraka.) It was an auspicious debut that garnered much acclaim for the 32-year-old saxophonist. Since that time, he’s been on a mission to find his own personal style and sound within the music.
Fatherhood came along at the end of 1999 with the birth of his first son, William, making Ravi fully aware that the Coltrane legacy was being extended to the next generation. The birth of his second son, Aaron, in April 2006 amplified that point and only helped to deepen Ravi’s musical expression. “Kids have a way of grounding you,” he acknowledges, before launching into a litany of his boys’ favorite things.
Ravi himself grew up in a household full of music. If it wasn’t his mother, Alice, playing organ, there were tons of records to absorb, including classics by both his parents. Since the mother-son bond ran so deep, it was especially rewarding when Ravi began collaborating in 2000 with his mother on a recording project that would ultimately be released in 2004 on Verve as Translinear Light. Along with drummers Jack DeJohnette and Jeff “Tain” Watts, bassists James Genus and Charlie Haden, his brother Oran Coltrane on one tune and the Sai Anantam Singers from Alice’s Vedantic Center Ashram in Agoura Hills, Calif., Ravi delved into a blend of his mother’s devotional music (“Jagadishwar,” “Sita Ram”), his father’s music (“Crescent,” “Leo”) and traditional folk tunes (“Walk With Me,” “This Train”) on this uplifting collection.
“My mom was kind of reluctant to do that record,” recalls Coltrane, “but I kept slowly, gently pushing her. That started back in 2000 and it was a process of baby-stepping toward something from that point on.”
Knowing the depth of his mother’s musical expression, he was also aware that she had made a choice years ago to step away from recording and performing in public to focus on her spiritual work at the ashram she opened in 1974. “She played music her entire life,” says Ravi. “She left the public performance of it, but the music never left her. So when I began pushing her to do these things, it was because I knew that she still had this great ability to achieve something musically that was potent and personal and uplifting.”
While on the road during the ’90s, Ravi continued to hear from people asking him about his mother and her possible return from self-imposed exile. “As many people would ask me about Alice Coltrane as would ask me about John Coltrane, maybe even more,” he says. “I think more people had opportunities to see her play in the ’70s, so they were naturally curious about whether or not she was ever going to return to the recording scene. And I used to tell her whenever we spoke, ‘Yeah, Mom, they were asking about you again.'”
Alice finally did emerge from retirement in June 1998 for a performance with Ravi’s quartet at New York’s Town Hall, as part of the Texaco Jazz Festival. They later appeared in concert together in November 2002 at Joe’s Pub in New York to commemorate the simultaneous release of Ashley Kahn’s book, A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane’s Signature Album (Viking Press), and a special edition of that landmark Impulse! recording. “A lot of Verve people were there that night,” Coltrane recalls of that special engagement. “Most of them had never seen her perform live, of course. And a week later they called me and said, ‘Do you think your mom would want to do a record for us?’ So that’s how the ball started rolling with that recording. And things just kind of steamrolled from there.”
Mother and son followed the release of Translinear Light with a brief tour in the fall of 2006 that showed great promise. “We did four gigs that were all spaced out by a couple of months,” says Coltrane. “We played quartet gigs at UCLA and in Ann Arbor, which was like a homecoming for my ma [she was born in Detroit]. We also did a full orchestral performance with strings and horns and a choir at NJPAC [New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark]. And at the end of the year we played the Masonic Hall in San Francisco with the quartet [with Roy Haynes subbing for DeJohnette]. After that last gig in San Francisco I got really excited about going out and playing with my mom. I felt like we needed to get over the hump of those first four gigs, and with each gig she got a little more of her thing back … a little looser, a little more momentum. The first few gigs she was still feeling it out, but by that Masonic Hall gig I felt like, ‘Yeah! Now it’s time. She’s ready; we’re ready. Let’s really go out and make important, creative music, from her perspective.’ We already had gigs booked in 2007, and I remember also saying to my mom, ‘We should record this music.'”
Alice had actually already recorded some of this new music at her son Oran’s studio in California, though without the strings and horn arrangements that she had written for the triumphant NJPAC gig. As Ravi explains, “We had talked about possibly going back and re-recording those pieces. We couldn’t overdub string and horn arrangements onto the pieces she had already recorded because she changed the key of the piece for the string arrangements. So we were in the process of discussing what to do about that project when she died.
“In the last phone conversation that I had with her, when she was in the hospital, I asked, ‘When and where are we gonna record these strings? Are we gonna do it in New York? Are we gonna do it in Los Angeles? We could do it in February…'”
The release of that project, to be titled Sacred Language of Ascension, remains in limbo. “Basically, Oran didn’t want to change anything, I wanted to change a lot of things, and it was a big conflict,” says Ravi. “I had some issues with the recording technically. My ma was all about the energy and the feel of everything. I’m about that as well, but I also like that to be balanced with as strong a technical presentation as we can manage. So if things need to be fixed or there’s some work to be done, I say do it.” As of this writing, there was no resolution between the brothers.
Alice passed away on Jan. 12, 2007, of respiratory failure. She was 69.
Processing the loss of this most significant figure in his life has been a huge personal challenge for Ravi and his siblings, Oran and Michelle. “My mom was like our God,” he says with a laugh. “She was my only parent that I’ve known and my relationship with her did not change much from childhood to adulthood. Although she was at her ashram in California and I lived in New York, she was still a major guide for me in the choices that I would make, consciously and subconsciously. Anything that happens in your life, you call your mom, right? So I was always on the phone with her: ‘Hey, Ma, I just got nominated for a Grammy!’ or ‘Hey, Ma, I just played with so-and-so.’ I wouldn’t get on a plane without calling her.
“She was my main supporter and advocate,” he continues, “and when that’s removed, it’s disorienting and shocking in ways that I hadn’t anticipated. Not just the fact that my mother, whom I love, is not there anymore, but that the whole system is kind of displaced because she was still so much an active part of my daily life. I lived 42 1/2 years with my mom and only a year and a half or so without her. So it’s been a little hard to try and kind of regain the equilibrium since she’s been gone. I feel like a fish out of water now, like I have to re-learn how to live.”
With the absence of Alice in his life, Ravi has been forced to re-examine his motivation for playing music. “I’m starting to ask myself, ‘What is it really about? Why am I doing this? What am I trying to achieve? What can I achieve? What should I be trying to strive for?'” he says. “Re-examination is a good thing to apply at any period to a creative person’s life, but when it’s informed by these types of traumatic events, we start finding more meaningful things to examine. And we connect with things that maybe weren’t as important to us before. I was never a nostalgic person so much before … and I don’t know if ‘nostalgia’ is the word I’m looking for. … But this sense of my past and how it’s influencing my present is very apparent to me now. It’s almost like every note that you play now is informed by something that happened before. And it’s not even a thought process. Every fiber of your being is responding to this traumatic event that happened in the past. Instinctively, intuitively, you’re just doing things differently because of it.”
He adds that for the majority of 2007 and a good part of 2008, “I was kind of in this strange zone … this blending of my past and my present. Now, moving forward, I’m processing and relating to my past in a different way than I was last year.”
Which brings us to Blending Times, his fifth recording as a leader and follow-up to 2005’s Grammy-nominated In Flux. The outing comes on the heels of 2008’s Seraphic Light (Telarc), the powerful 2008 Saxophone Summit release featuring Ravi with Joe Lovano and Dave Liebman. (In that trio, Ravi replaced the late Michael Brecker, who died on Jan. 13, 2007, the day after Alice passed.) Blending Times is Ravi’s most emotionally charged, fully realized statement to date.
From the lyrical, Keith Jarrett-esque opener “Shine” to the swirling polyrhythmic funk of “Narcined,” the delicate rubato pieces “A Still Life” and “Before With After,” the playful, M-BASE-ish romp “One Wheeler Will” and an energized take on Monk’s “Epistrophy,” Coltrane distinguishes himself as a first-rate player and conceptualist. But easily the most moving track on Blending Times is the beautiful but somber closer, “For Turiya,” a touching ode to Alice Coltrane written by Charlie Haden for their duet together on Haden’s 1976 Horizon album Closeness.
“Charlie was a huge follower and believer in Alice Coltrane and her music,” says Ravi. “He just always recognized that she was someone to sort of hold up in a special light.”
Ravi and Haden first performed “For Turiya” together at her Elevation Service at the ashram on Jan. 27, 2007, and then again at an Alice Coltrane Ascension Ceremony on May 17 at St. John the Divine Cathedral in New York. “This was around the same time that I was trying to finish Blending Times,” recalls Ravi, “and after playing it with Charlie at the St. John’s memorial I knew that I wanted to have it on this record. So I flew to California with Brandee Younger, the harpist who played at all of the tribute concerts that we did for my mother, and we recorded at Capitol Records in Hollywood. The last time I recorded at Capitol was with Charlie and my mother for Translinear Light. So I’m standing basically in the same spot that I was recording a few years earlier with my ma and Charlie and Jack. And now it’s Charlie and me and Brandee.”
Ravi kept a picture of his mother on a music stand throughout the session as they recorded “For Turiya.” “I didn’t have any music,” he recalls. “I just looked at this picture of her the whole time we were in the studio. I haven’t had a lot of experiences where I can musically connect with something that’s beyond music, but in that moment that we were recording that tune, it was like every note was about me and my mother, or me not having my mother anymore.”
During that session, Coltrane experienced a flood of emotions ranging from sadness and regret to joy and elation. “I’m not an overly sentimental person and I know that music has purposes and functions that we have to address, regardless of what’s personally happening in our lives,” he says, “but there are certain moments that require you to kind of give in … to kind of release and let certain things come in. And this track was one of those moments. I have a hard time listening to it now because I can hear how sad I am. I can’t put on any other piece of music where I can identify an emotion so clearly in what I’m playing. It’s so revealing.”
While Coltrane awaited the mid-January release of Blending Times, he was also preparing for an extensive 50-city tour with the Blue Note 7-an all-star ensemble with pianist and musical director Bill Charlap, alto saxophonist Steve Wilson, trumpeter Nicholas Payton, guitarist Peter Bernstein, drummer Lewis Nash and bassist Peter Washington-in support of their January release, Mosaic: A Celebration of Blue Note Records.
Also, as of this writing, Coltrane remains hopeful that he would be invited to play at the inauguration for President-elect Barack Obama. “I played at Bill Clinton’s with Elvin,” he says. “But if I don’t play at Barack’s inauguration, I hope I get a chance to meet him and hang with him. I know he’s got some John Coltrane and Miles Davis on his iPod. So we’ll have to see if I get the call.”
https://www.npr.org/2012/07/19/157060981/at-home-with-the-coltranes-listening-to-stravinsky
At Home With The Coltranes, Listening To Stravinsky
Saxophonist Ravi Coltrane is the son of jazz icons John and Alice Coltrane. His new album Spirit Fiction was released June 19. Deborah Feingold/Courtesy of the artist
Today, All Things Considered continues its Mom and Dad's Record Collection series with a musician who is a heir of American musical royalty. Saxophonist and composer Ravi Coltrane is the son of jazz icon John Coltrane, and his mother, Alice Coltrane, was a renowned jazz pianist and composer in her own right.
His father died when he was very young. And while Ravi Coltrane
now plays jazz, it was his mother's love for a very different kind of
music that provided the childhood soundtrack for him and his siblings.
"I
remember my mother playing lots of symphonic music," he tells NPR's
Robert Siegel. "Specifically, my mom was a great admirer of Igor Stravinsky. Her favorite pieces were The Rite of Spring and, more so, the Firebird Suite."
Coltrane says he enjoyed listening to Stravinsky as a kid, even though it wasn't anything like the other music he grew up with.
"It
was very different than the music that we were accustomed to hearing as
young kids growing up in the mid- to late '60s, you know, R&B
music," he says. "My mother's from Detroit so [she played] a lot of
Motown-influenced music and, of course, my mother being Alice Coltrane,
she was very active in recording and performing during that time. We
heard music constantly, but there was something about The Firebird that really spoke to us."
Alice Coltrane used to play this recording of Igor Stravinsky's Firebird Suite in the Long Island home she shared with John Coltrane. It now sits in her son Ravi Coltrane's studio. Courtesy of the artist
Coltrane says his and his siblings' favorite part of The Firebird was its finale.
"The very end of the piece begins in this very tranquil way and builds into this overture, this very simple theme," he says. "We used to dance around to it like we were on the stage. It is a ballet, The Firebird, so I guess we were channeling that idea."
Ravi Coltrane says he never lost that passion for Stravinsky's music — and that it intensified when he rediscovered his mother's old vinyl.
"It was only recently that I found the recording that my mom used to play, the actual album," he says. "It's the Columbia Symphony Orchestra version that Stravinsky conducts himself. I was used to some other versions of the piece, but hearing that version again, it really brought me back to Dix Hills, Long Island, late '60s. Just the sound of that recording and obviously the effect that Stravinsky, the composer conducting his own work, had on the piece — it still had the same power."
http://www.sfchronicle.com/music/article/Ravi-Coltrane-works-up-a-sax-filled-storm-at-11732207.php
Ravi Coltrane works up a sax-filled storm at Stanford Jazz
August 3, 2017San Francisco Chronicle
Ravi Coltrane and a team of jazz greats worked their way
through a dizzyingly ecstatic live set Wednesday, Aug. 2, at Stanford
University’s Dinkelspiel Auditorium. The 2017 Stanford Jazz Festival
closed this week, and Coltrane gave it a magnificent send-off. His set
was hypnotic, mournful, emotional and tense, and nourished the spirit in
ways that the brain can only begin to process.
http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/music/ravi-coltrane-son-of-jazz-greats-scales-his-own-mountains-20170912-gyg9t8.html
Ravi Coltrane: Son of jazz greats scales his own mountains
by John Shand
September 13, 2017
★★★★½ The Basement
September 12, 2017
This
concert was rather like Ravi Coltrane's career: slow to start; of
growing interest; utterly enthralling. The opening pieces revealed
little more than a well-knit band and the accepted virtuosity. But amid
overly busy playing and emotionally opaque music the promise of more was
already evident. It was there in the interaction between bassist Dezron
Douglas, drummer Johnathan Blake and brilliant young pianist Glenn
Zaleski as they left gaping rents in the music's fabric on the latter's
first solo. It was there in Coltrane's breadth of sound on his tenor
saxophone even when he stood in a different postcode to the microphone.
Gradually
the quartet's internal dynamics began to emerge: the way the band
pivoted around Blake; the way in the concert's early stages the music
continued to hold more fascination the more air the players invested in
it, as on Coltrane's moody Marilyn & Tammy.
From
there the interest grew, with Zaleski crafting thrilling solos while
using the rhythm section as an acrobat does a trampoline. There was
Blake, chopping up the grooves like so much kindling, and building
infernos beneath Coltrane, whose playing began to ignite.
Charlie Haden's gorgeous ballad First Song
featured Douglas' only solo of the night: heartfelt, restrained and
with a liquid flow of lines underpinned by an elegant sound. Coltrane's
re-entry on this marked the beginning of the end. If his ballad sound
was wiry rather than lush it was a clue to the torrential power he was
about to unleash as Blake hunted up a backbeat, and they took the song
somewhere Haden had never imagined.
The saxophone sound hardened further on Ralph Towner's The Glide,
and there was new-found density to Coltrane's ideas. Then this son of a
jazz immortal simply said, "Here's a John Coltrane tune called Countdown,"
and his tenor was soon boiling amid the maelstrom of cross-currents
whipped up by Blake, Douglas and Zaleski. With all players peaking the
music attained an unstoppable rolling quality like massive waves. It was
worth the wait.
Ravi Coltrane's music shows translucent beauty
Chicago Tribune
September 23, 2016
No wonder the Jazz Showcase was packed on a Thursday night — not a common occurrence.
Ravi
Coltrane's annual visits to the club have built a large and loyal
following, the saxophonist seemingly more persuasive with each
engagement.
This time followed suit, Coltrane's
characteristically modest stage manner counterbalanced by the leonine
quality of his music-making. Combine the man's mild-mannered persona
with the striking originality of his art, and you have a compelling
experience.
The questing nature of Coltrane's music was apparent from
the beginning, especially in "Marilyn and Tammy," from one of Coltrane's
most daring albums, "Spirit Fiction." Coltrane's long and sinuous lines
on tenor saxophone stretched out over irregular, unsettling rhythms
from pianist Orrin Evans, bassist Dezron Douglas and drummer Johnathan
Blake.
As "Marilyn & Tammy" unfolded, Coltrane's
sound — which always has been translucent at its core – gained heft and
body. And what began as something close to a whisper evolved into a big,
growling roar.
Drummer Blake proved invaluable here and
everywhere else in the set, the power and presence of his statements
matched by the clarity of his attacks and relentlessness of his sound.
Yet Blake, bassist Douglas and pianist Evans made sure to play just
under Coltrane's decibel level, understanding that the distinctly
luminous nature of the saxophonist's tone can withstand only so much
accompanying volume and force.
Coltrane turned in his
most poetic playing in Charlie Haden's "First Song (For Ruth)," penned
for the late, great bassist's wife, Ruth Cameron. Here was balladry
without sentimentality, Coltrane's openly romantic melodic gestures
intensified by the sharp edge of his sound. Invoking minimal vibrato,
Coltrane crafted gestures of unadorned beauty. He avoided melodic
embellishments and ornate turns of phrase, letting the music speak
urgently for itself.
Yet
before long, what had begun as a ballad transformed into a rhapsody,
Coltrane delving into guttural rasps and plaintive high notes, albeit at
an unhurried tempo. Here was the center of gravity for the entire set, a
measure of how deep Coltrane's art runs.
His
collaborators were right there with him, Evans unfurling lush,
blues-tinged pianism alongside Douglas' melodic counterpoint on bass.
Drummer Blake's brushwork provided ample atmosphere, "First Song (For
Ruth)" bringing out warm expression from all the players. Haden's music
tends to do that.
Earlier in the evening, Coltrane turned
to soprano saxophone in original compositions, consistently leaning on
long-held notes to produce a softly radiant timbre.
He
ended the set on tenor with a full-throated account of "Countdown," a
standard by John Coltrane, his father. But even amid all the excitement,
it was what Ravi Coltrane did with the theme that mattered most. By
altering its rhythmic profile, punctuating it with unexpected pauses and
reworking it through rigorous improvisation, he added to our
understanding of the continued potential of the piece.
Drummer Blake once again proved a major contributor here, contrasting vast sound with stop-on-a-dime precision.
Ultimately,
Coltrane's visits to the Showcase — where a photo of his father looms
large on one prominent wall — have become highlights of the season.
Thursday night's opener explained why.
Howard Reich is a Chicago Tribune critic.
Twitter @howardreich
When: 8 and 10 p.m. Friday and Saturday; 4, 8 and 10 p.m. Sunday
Where: Jazz Showcase, 806 S. Plymouth Court
Tickets: www.jazzshowcase.com
https://www.npr.org/2012/07/17/156915256/ravi-coltrane-a-noble-sound-witness-to-its-heritage
https://www.npr.org/2012/07/17/156915256/ravi-coltrane-a-noble-sound-witness-to-its-heritage
Review
Ravi Coltrane: A Noble Sound, Witness To Its Heritage
Ravi Coltrane's new album is called Spirit Fiction. Deborah Feingold/Courtesy of the artist
The jazz musician Ravi Coltrane, 47, didn't make his burden any lighter by choosing to play tenor and soprano saxophones — the same instruments his father, John Coltrane, indelibly stamped with his influence.
Ravi knew early he needed his own voice. On tenor, he has his own ways of bending and inflecting a note, applying flexible vibrato. Even when his noble sound bears witness to his heritage, Ravi Coltrane can draw on his father's language and make it his own.
On tenor or liquid-mercury soprano sax, Ravi Coltrane is no nostalgist. He's a musician of his own era, like his longtime bandmates, pianist Luis Perdomo, bassist Drew Gress, and E.J. Strickland, crisp contemporary drummer who goes easy on the ride cymbal, to get a dryer sound. Even when the music's agitated, the players leave room for the listener to breathe. You can hear as much on "Cross Roads," a recording that isn't your father's soprano sax feature.
"Cross Roads" appears on Ravi Coltrane's new album Spirit Fiction. For a few tracks here Coltrane reconvenes an older quintet including trumpeter Ralph Alessi. On Alessi's tune "Yellow Cat," the horns play straight through Geri Allen's two-minute piano solo, an oddball move. You think they'd be in her way, but the background horns help you hear how Allen weaves through and around the harmonies.
Ravi Coltrane tweaks the two band lineups on his new album, to allow for one-off combinations from duo to sextet, without losing his focus. He also works in a couple of guest shots by producer and likeminded tenor saxophonist Joe Lovano, on tunes by Paul Motian and Ornette Coleman.
For all the musical chairs, there's a depth and seasoned quality to Spirit Fiction that befits an artist approaching 50. But Coltrane doesn't like things too settled, which is why he's now put his working quartet on hiatus; they know each other's moves too well. Looking to subvert that easy interplay, he recorded the quartet's members two at a time on the title track of Spirit Fiction. Then those improvised duos were artfully superimposed to reconstitute the band. Its success says a lot about these players' mutual understanding: They're in sync even when they can't hear each other.
THE MUSIC OF RAVI COLTRANE: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH RAVI COLTRANE:
En concierto. Música en el CCK: Ravi Coltrane(capítulo completo
Ravi Coltrane Covers Equinox
Ravi Coltrane Quartet: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert
Ravi Coltrane - "Leaving Avignon”
Ravi Coltrane Quartet - Between Lines
Ravi Coltrane Quartet live at The Jazz Standard
Ravi Coltrane live at the Jazz Showcase “Segment"
Ravi Coltrane Quartet — Coincide
Ravi Coltrane Quartet
Giant Steps - Ravi Coltrane's Solo
Jack DeJohnette • Ravi Coltrane • Matthew Garrison — In Movement
Ravi Coltrane on jazz as a living art form:
Ravi Coltrane, son of jazz legend John, joined Denis Walter in the 3AW studio on Wednesday, March 2, 2016
Ravi is in Melbourne, Australia for a six-night run at Bird's Basement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ravi_Coltrane
Ravi Coltrane
| Ravi Coltrane | |
|---|---|
McCoy Tyner (left) and Ravi Coltrane performing at the Newport Jazz Festival on August 13, 2005
| |
| Background information | |
| Born | August 6, 1965 |
| Origin | Long Island, New York, U.S. |
| Genres | Jazz, post bop |
| Occupation(s) | Musician, composer, bandleader, record producer |
| Instruments | Tenor saxophone, soprano saxophone, clarinet |
| Years active | 1991–present |
| Labels | Warner Bros., RCA, Sony, Savoy Jazz, Blue Note |
| Website | www |
Ravi Coltrane (born August 6, 1965) in Long Island, New York) is an American post-bop jazz saxophonist. Co-owner of the record label RKM Music, he has produced artists such as pianist Luis Perdomo, guitarist David Gilmore, and trumpeter Ralph Alessi.[1]
Contents
Biography
Ravi Coltrane is the son of saxophonist John Coltrane and jazz pianist Alice Coltrane. He is also a cousin of experimental music producer Steven Ellison, aka Flying Lotus. He was raised in Los Angeles, California, and was named after sitar player Ravi Shankar. Coltrane was not yet two years old in 1967 when his father died.
He is a 1983 graduate of El Camino Real High School in Woodland Hills, California. In 1986, he studied music, focusing on the saxophone at the California Institute of the Arts. He has worked extensively with M-Base guru Steve Coleman, a significant influence on Coltrane's own musical conception. Coltrane has played with Geri Allen, Kenny Barron, McCoy Tyner, Pharoah Sanders, Herbie Hancock, Carlos Santana, Stanley Clarke, Branford Marsalis and others.
In 1997, after performing on over thirty recordings as a sideman, Coltrane recorded his first album as leader Moving Pictures, working with drummer Jeff "Tain" Watts, bassist Lonnie Plaxico and pianist Michael Cain. This led to extensive touring with his working band, featuring Andy Milne on piano, drummer Steve Hass, and bassist Lonnie Plaxico. Coltrane's second disc, From the Round Box (2000), was recorded with pianist Geri Allen, trumpeter Ralph Alessi, bassist James Genus, and drummer Eric Harland. Mad 6 (2002), Coltrane's first release for Sony music, featured drummer Steve Hass, pianist George Colligan, and bassist James Genus. In Flux (2005) included bassist Drew Gress, pianist Luis Perdomo, and drummer E.J. Strickland.
In January 2005, Coltrane performed in India for the first time as part of a delegation of American jazz musicians sent on a State Department tour to promote HIV/AIDS awareness. Also participating were vocalist Al Jarreau, guitarist Earl Klugh, and pianist George Duke. Performances included a January 16 concert in Mumbai (Bombay), a tribute to Martin Luther King Jr. in Delhi on January 17, and a music festival in Delhi on January 18 organized by violinist L. Subramaniam. Also on January 18, Coltrane performed at the Coltrane Shankar Centre, where Coltrane met with the man he was named after. Picking up a clarinet to engage in an unplanned jam session with a pair of shehnai players, Coltrane said, "I'm a little nervous with the master here."[2]
The Coltrane Quartet played at the Monterey Jazz Festival in 2001 and 2013, the Montreux Jazz Festival and the Newport Jazz Festival in 2004, and the Vienna Jazz Festival in 2005.
In 2008, Coltrane became part of the Blue Note 7, a septet formed that year in honor of the 70th anniversary of Blue Note Records. The group recorded an album in 2008, entitled Mosaic, which was released in 2009 on Blue Note Records/EMI, and toured the United States in promotion of the album from January until April 2009.[3] The group plays the music of Blue Note Records from various artists, with arrangements by members of the band and Renee Rosnes.
Gallery
Ravi Coltrane with McCoy Tyner, Christian McBride, Roy Haynes and Michael Brecker performing at the Newport Jazz Festival on August 14, 2004.
Ravi Coltrane (left, in black shirt) with Terell Stafford and Charnett Moffett at the Newport Jazz Festival on August 13, 2005.
Ravi Coltrane at Bonnaroo, 2007.
Ravi Coltrane performing with the Blue Note 7 at the Manchester Craftsmen's Guild in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on April 4, 2009.
Discography
As leader
- 1998: Moving Pictures (RCA Records)
- 2000: From the Round Box (RCA Records)
- 2002: Mad 6 (Sony Music)
- 2005: In Flux (Savoy Jazz)
- 2009: Blending Times (Savoy Jazz)
- 2012: Spirit Fiction (Blue Note)
In group collaboration
- 1992: Sax Storm (Evidence Music), with Grand Central
- 1993: The Chase (Evidence Music), with Grand Central
- 1995: Tenor Enclave: A Tribute to Hank Mobley (Evidence Music), with Grand Central
- 2008: Seraphic Light (Telarc), with Saxophone Summit
- 2009: Mosaic: A Celebration of Blue Note Records (Blue Note Records/EMI), with The Blue Note 7
- 2016: In Movement (ECM Records), with Jack DeJohnette and Matthew Garrison
As sideman
With Elvin Jones
- In Europe (Enja, 1991)
- Going Home (Enja, 1992)
With David Murray
With Ryan Kisor
- 1992: Minor Mutiny (Sony Music)
With Wallace Roney
- 1993: Munchin' (Muse Records)
- 1994: Misterios (Warner Bros. Records)
- 1999: No Job Too Big Or Small (Savoy Jazz)
With Steve Coleman
- 1994: Steve Coleman & Metrics, A tale of 3 cities, the EP (BMG)
- 1995: Steve Coleman And Five Elements, Def Trance Beat (Modalities Of Rhythm) (BMG)
- 1996: Steve Coleman & The Mystic Rhythm Society, The Sign And The Seal (BMG)
- 1998: Steve Coleman And Five Elements, Genesis & the opening of the way (BMG)
- 1999: Steve Coleman And Five Elements, The Sonic Language Of Myth (RCA Records))
- 2004: Steve Coleman And Five Elements, Lucidarium (Label Bleu)
With Art Davis
- 1996: A Time Remembered (Jazz Planet)
With Dave Douglas
- Orange Afternoons (Greenleaf, 2011)
With Billy Childs
- 1996: The Child Within (Shanachie Records)
With Bheki Mseleku
- 1996: Beauty of the Sunrise (Polygram))
With Yosuke Yamashita
- 1996: Canvas in Vigor (Universal Records)
- 1997: Wind of the Age (Verve Records)
With Gerry Gibbs
- 1996: The Thrasher (Warner Bros. Records)
With Cindy Blackman
- 1998: In The Now (HighNote Records)
With Tisziji Muñoz
- 2000: Parallel Reality (Anami Music)
- 2003: Divine Radiance (Anami Music)
- 2013: Divine Radiance Live! (Anami Music)
- 2013: Paul Shaffer Presents: Tisziji Muñoz – Divine Radiance Live! DVD (Anami Music)
- 2014: Let The Sound Go Forth! (Anami Music)
- 2014: Healing Waters (Anami Music)
- 2014: Sky Worlds (Anami Music)
With David Gilmore
- 2001: Ritualism (The Orchard)
With Andrei Kondakov
- 2002: Kind Of Optimistic (Boheme Music)
With Jeff "Tain" Watts
- 2002: Bar Talk (Columbia Records)
With Scott Coley
- 2002: Initial Wisdom (Palmetto)
With Alice Coltrane
- 2004: Translinear Light (Verve Records)
With Luis Perdomo
- 2005: Focus Point (RKM Music)
With Flying Lotus
- 2010: Cosmogramma (Warp Records)
Compilations
- 2003: Bird Up — The Charlie Parker Remix Project (Savoy Jazz)
- 2005: Impulsive! Revolutionary Jazz Reworked (Verve Records)
- Lion Hearted (1993)
With Glenn Zaleski
- My Ideal (2014)
With Terence Blanchard
- Magnetic (2013)
With Jack DeJohnette
- In Movement (ECM, 2016)
References
External links
- Ravi Coltrane official website
- RKM Music
- All About Jazz: Ravi Coltrane: In Flux
- Ravi Coltrane Live At The Village Vanguard
