NYTimes.com Article: Coltrane at 75: the Man and the Myths

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    Coltrane at 75: the Man and the Myths

    September 23, 2001

    By FRANCIS DAVIS

     

    Music is a "pure" art; a note or chord or rhythmic pattern
    has no literal meaning in the way that a poem, a passage of
    prose, a song lyric, a representational or even an abstract
    painting can. Yet what we hear in music — what we think we
    hear, influenced by the composer's title or some other
    piece of information we accept as a clue to his intentions
    — gradually assumes its own reality. It is often said, for
    example, that "Alabama," a prayerlike dirge written by the
    saxophonist John Coltrane and recorded by him on Nov. 18,
    1963, was his saddened and outraged response to a church
    bombing in Birmingham, Ala., two months earlier. The
    bombing, which took the lives of four young girls, was a
    turning point in the civil rights movement. Yet if this was
    what Coltrane meant for the piece to be "about," he kept it
    to himself in the recording studio, not saying a word about
    the deaths of those children to the pianist McCoy Tyner or
    the drummer Elvin Jones, both of whom were sidemen at the
    session. As far as they remember, the piece didn't even
    have a name yet. They remember being moved by the piece,
    but they don't recall Coltrane saying anything at all about
    the killings after handing out the sheet music.

    In my research for a Coltrane biography, the only person I
    have talked to who claims to have been in the studio that
    day and overheard Coltrane talk about the bombing in
    reference to "Alabama" is Jarvis Tyner, the pianist's
    brother, a longtime Communist who may have his own
    political agenda. The liner notes for "Coltrane at
    Birdland," the album on which "Alabama" was originally
    released, were written by Amiri Baraka, a political
    firebrand as well as a poet and playwright, and not even he
    had anything to say about Birmingham in impressionistically
    describing the piece.

    Yet in listening to "Alabama" now, especially given its use
    over footage of the bombed church and the children's
    funerals in Spike Lee's 1997 film "Four Little Girls," and
    the documentary television series "Eyes on the Prize," we
    might think the piece lets us hear the exact moment in the
    struggle for civil rights when black forbearance gave in to
    anger.

    Today is the 75th anniversary of Coltrane's birth, and his
    influence on jazz and other forms of music shows no sign of
    waning. Beginning with "Naima" and "Giant Steps," several
    of his compositions have entered the standard repertory,
    and no jazz musician today would be playing "My Favorite
    Things," from Rodgers and Hammerstein's "Sound of Music,"
    had Coltrane not established its surprising potential for
    modal improvisation on a 1960 recording, transforming it
    from a sugary waltz into a hypnotic raga.

    Probably the number most closely associated with him during
    his lifetime (a New Orleans concert promoter once billed
    him as "John `My Favorite Things' Coltrane"), this unlikely
    vehicle is the reason that so many alto and tenor
    saxophonists since the 1960's have doubled on soprano, and
    the Eastern influence that briefly dominated Coltrane's
    music in its aftermath has inspired countless musicians to
    look to other cultures. The most emulated of Coltrane's
    methods on tenor saxophone remains his "sheets of sound" —
    critical shorthand for the rush and simultaneity of the
    notes that regularly erupted from his horn in the late
    1950's, when he seemed bent on exploring the chords of
    whatever tune he happened to be confronting from every
    possible angle at once.

    But Coltrane's influence involves more than riffing on his
    tunes and employing certain of his techniques. It has never
    been limited to jazz — he is frequently sampled on rap
    recordings; his echo has been discernible in pop since the
    Byrds' "Eight Miles High" hit the charts in 1966; the early
    minimalist composers admitted to being fascinated by his
    use of rhythmic cycles and harmonic drones; the mystical
    aura that surrounds his music was what Stevie Wonder and
    the band Earth, Wind and Fire, among other soul acts, were
    going for in the 1970's, when they began gazing at the
    heavens or at their own navels.

    Lately, however, Coltrane's significance has begun to seem
    as much symbolic as musical. Musicians far removed from him
    stylistically and likely to define their own music in the
    most secular terms have embraced him as a role model, or at
    least have recognized the high seriousness they can claim
    for themselves by dropping his name. He has come to stand
    for a disciplined mind-set, a desire for spiritual ecstasy,
    a vision of music as ritual and of performance as a holy
    rite. Depending on what a listener wants from it,
    Coltrane's music is a cry for black liberation, the
    soundtrack of a spiritual quest, a backdrop for tripping,
    or merely (merely!) the next evolutionary step for jazz
    after bebop.

    After a period as an obscure journeyman with a heroin
    habit, during which he toiled anonymously in Dizzy
    Gillespie's big band, Earl Bostic's small group and several
    Palookaville rhythm-and-blues outfits, Coltrane began to
    attract notice when he joined Miles Davis toward the end of
    1955. He was a prominent figure in jazz until his death
    from liver cancer in 1967, at the age of 40. In those 12
    years his music changed so regularly and so quickly that he
    became synonymous with the will to change. He passed
    through at least four overlapping stages: his
    apprenticeship with Davis and Thelonious Monk, his
    sheets-of- sound period, modalism, and an ambiguous role as
    both high priest and acolyte in the jazz avant-garde of the
    mid-1960's.

    In an overview of Coltrane's career published soon after
    his death, the critic Martin Williams described him as "a
    man in the middle," a soloist suspended between hard bop
    and free form. But Coltrane was a man in the middle in
    another way: though he was essentially apolitical (or
    perhaps reluctant to voice his political convictions) and
    was a practicing member of no specific religion at his
    death (despite the many Christian and Islamic references in
    his composition titles and a hallucination of God that
    sounds very much like a typical born-again experience while
    going cold turkey in 1957), he was nevertheless perceived
    to be in the thick of things in the 1960's, when politics
    and religion began to merge — the beginning of a continuing
    chapter in American life.

    At St. John's in San Francisco — a church named for
    Coltrane, where his music is part of the liturgy and where
    he was once worshiped as a deity, before being demoted to
    saint after the congregation's affiliation with a branch of
    the African Orthodox Church — services are conducted with a
    haloed Coltrane gazing down from two Byzantine-style
    paintings, a scroll of some sort in his left hand and
    tongues of fire pyramiding in the bell of the horn he holds
    like a staff in his right. Although clearly meant to
    signify the Pentecost (and perhaps the living hell of drug
    addiction), those flames also inevitably suggest a tendency
    to set Coltrane's music of the 1960's against a backdrop of
    that era's wars and rumors of war — against remembered
    images of napalm dropped from helicopters and inner cities
    put to the torch by their own residents. (July 17, 1967,
    the night he died, was the worst night of the Newark
    riots.)

    Jazz is often spoken of as if it were a religion, and the
    founders of St. John's took literally what the pianist Red
    Garland intended figuratively in 1955, when he described
    Coltrane to a record producer as "the new Messiah." Garland
    meant that Coltrane was the next Charlie Parker. There were
    hipsters who went on a midnight picnic with Parker in Los
    Angeles in the late 1940's and swore they saw him walk on
    water. But this may have been the reefer talking, and not
    even Parker ever had a church named for him.

    "All of the monotheistic religions developed a mystical
    tradition," the religious scholar Karen Armstrong points
    out in "A History of God," referring to Judaism,
    Christianity and Islam. "Only a few people are capable of
    true mysticism, but in all three faiths (with the exception
    of Western Christianity) it was the God experienced by the
    mystics which eventually became normative among the
    faithful." In Coltrane's case, there are listeners and
    musicians for whom his journey comes to a stop after the
    album "A Love Supreme," which he recorded in 1964. They
    reject as ill-advised and virtually unlistenable the music
    from his three final years, when he gave his blessing to
    the supposed heretics of that era's avant-garde by allowing
    them to share the bandstand with him. But it was during
    those years that those who stuck with him began to speak of
    him in mystical terms, and this is now the language applied
    retroactively to even his earliest, more temporal work.

    All religions have their apocrypha, and jazz is no
    exception, especially when it comes to Coltrane. Even some
    people who knew him personally still buy his own story that
    he began toying with soprano saxophone after finding one
    that had been left in the trunk of his car by an unnamed
    musician to whom he gave a ride. In fact, Coltrane
    purchased the soprano he used on "My Favorite Things" from
    a factory in Elkhart, Ind., making a special trip there
    from Chicago with the saxophonist James Moody, after
    seeking advice from Steve Lacy, one of the very few
    modernists to play soprano before Coltrane. The more
    colorful account was Coltrane's way of taking the pressure
    off until he gained adequate facility on his new horn.

    He is often said to have made his 1962 album of nothing but
    three- to four-minute ballads because he was suffering from
    dental and embouchure problems at the time and unable to
    sustain fast tempos or long improvisations. But he
    continued to play fast and long in clubs, and any
    saxophonist will tell you that ballads are the last thing
    you want to try if your teeth are hurting and you can't
    find a comfortable mouthpiece. The truth is that these
    ballads were intended as jukebox singles, and that Coltrane
    occasionally thought commercially.

    Another popular story goes that he found out that "A Love
    Supreme" had been certified gold, signifying sales of a
    half-million copies, when he visited the offices of Impulse
    Records a few days before his death and saw the gold record
    on his producer's wall. But "A Love Supreme" was not
    certified gold until late last year, and there is no
    evidence to prove that Impulse ever cheated Coltrane out of
    royalties.

    In the end, the greatest miracle performed by Coltrane
    might be his success in gaining a large audience despite
    representing everything that people supposedly dislike
    about modern jazz, beginning with the complexity of his
    solos and their sheer length. A friend of mine claims to
    have once gone to hear Coltrane at a club in Boston, left
    to go record shopping for an hour or so during his solo on
    "My Favorite Things," and then returned to the club just in
    time to hear him end with the theme. I might be inclined to
    dismiss this story as apocryphal, too, except that I have
    heard too many others like it.

    Elvin Jones once likened Coltrane's epic performances to
    black church services, which also tend to go on long; you
    leave them spiritually renewed, Mr. Jones said, not
    physically tired. But the analogy doesn't work, because
    black congregations play active roles in their services,
    whereas Coltrane put audiences in the position of playing
    flies on the wall while he worked at splitting the atom.

    Earlier this year, a ballad anthology was released called
    "Coltrane for Lovers." The concept wasn't exactly new;
    Coltrane's 1963 album with the crooner Johnny Hartman has
    for decades served as high-end make- out music, something
    tasteful to bring to an intimate dinner, along with a good
    wine.

    Coltrane certainly had a seductive way with ballads, but it
    wasn't the ballads that kept the faithful coming back night
    after night when he would play their local clubs in the
    1960's, and it isn't the ballads that draw so many of us to
    him now. At its highest level, music is a form of
    mathematics, and in the work of some experimentalists you
    can practically hear the click of an abacus. Coltrane draws
    attention away from it by somehow making us believe that
    whatever was at stake for him in his solos is also at stake
    for us. More than any other performer of his time or ours,
    he is a god we create, if not in our own image, then
    according to our desires and beliefs.   `New' Coltrane on
    CD

    The most provocative of the CD's being released in time for
    John Coltrane's 75th anniversary is "The Olatunji Concert"
    (Impulse 314 589 120-2). It captures his last band,
    featuring the tenor saxophonist Pharoah Sanders and the
    drummer Rashied Ali, performing a benefit for a Harlem
    cultural center created by the Nigerian percussionist
    Babatundi Olatunji. The concert, in April 1967, was three
    months before Coltrane's death.

    "Late" Coltrane, as the music is frequently referred to,
    qualifies as such strictly by default; there is no way of
    knowing whether he would have continued on the winding path
    we hear him taking here. The free jazz movement, which he
    drew as much inspiration from as it drew from him, ground
    to a virtual standstill in response to his death. Poor
    sound quality makes it almost impossible to judge the
    merits of the two long performances on "The Olatunji
    Concert," beyond noting its lacerating intensity. But that
    intensity is its own reward: this is music from the only
    period of Coltrane's career that remains controversial, and
    the CD allows us the privilege of dropping in on disputed
    history in the making.

    Also recommended is "Live Trane" (Pablo 7PACD-4433), a
    seven-CD box, which more than doubles the amount of
    commercially released material from the European tours
    Coltrane made from 1961 to 1963, and which finds him
    routinely topping his greatest studio work from the same
    period.

    The most wide-ranging of the various anthologies is
    "Legacy" (Impulse 314 589 295-2), scheduled for release
    early next year. It's a four-CD set of performances wisely
    chosen by the tenor saxophonist Ravi Coltrane, John
    Coltrane's son.

    Still, probably the best introduction to Coltrane remains
    the intact albums on which his reputation was initially
    based: "Giant Steps," "My Favorite Things," "Live at the
    Village Vanguard" and "A Love Supreme."
    Francis Davis, a contributing editor of The Atlantic
    Monthly, is the author of ``Like Young,'' a collection of
    essays on music, to be published this fall.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/23/arts/music/23DAVI.html?ex=1002263478&ei=1&en=ab73c5a50e346a44

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