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Tonya
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Tonya
Post Number: 171
Registered: 07-2006
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Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, September 22, 2006 - 11:29 am: | 
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Coltrane at 80 -- a talent supreme
Greg Tate, Special to The Chronicle
Friday, September 22, 2006
In an art form more celebrated for its sinners, John Coltrane, who somewhere over the rainbow will turn 80 on Saturday, held the honor of being the music's first saint.
There have been three figures in jazz history who have changed not only the artistic rules of the game but the social field on which it has been played, as well -- Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker and Coltrane, who died in 1967. The mythic status of each remains in dialogue with the others. Armstrong's entertainment ethic stands in marked contrast to Parker's aloof and self-destructive genius profile, and Coltrane's search for God, redemption and goodness offers a reconciliation and a gentle rebuke to them.
By the time I began listening to jazz in the early '70s, you felt Coltrane's influence everywhere in African American culture -- in the music, the politics, religion, literature, visual arts, even food. (Trane's natural diet probably drew as many young players to carrot juice as Parker's habits drew to drugs).
But especially in music, unless your name was Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler or Sun Ra, you had to labor under the long shadow of Coltrane. This was true to such a pervasive degree that not until recently have I been able to truly hear Coltrane's music as a sui generis thing. When an artist is so surrounded by admirers, flatterers and copycats, the originality of what he or she proposes can be lost and even trivialized through the rabid impersonations of their style. If artists live long enough, rest on their laurels often enough, that style can become a trap and a parody of itself.
With Coltrane, though, we have the rare fortune to witness, even in retrospect, an artist of promethean will, talent and force create a means of expression that wasn't bent so much toward perfecting a style as it was toward the calibre of the man himself.
Coltrane brought a self-improvement ethic front and center into jazz, and in a way that couldn't allow the man being less evolved than his art. He once said he wanted to be a force for real good in the world, poised against the opposing forces. He also espoused the belief that the pursuit of art required what he described as a "constant polishing of the mirror."
Coltrane's recording career spans 1955 to 1967, during which time he participated in several groundbreaking albums with Miles Davis, two (posthumously released) live recordings from his time with Thelonious Monk, and a formidable resume of albums under his own leadership. What you can't help but hear across the span of all those tracks is a man chasing perfection, or at least his own perfectibility and capacity for profundity.
If we all live long, the artists we love get more intriguing to us in different ways -- some by merely surviving, some by becoming more visibly, audibly vulnerable and even broken (like the Billie Holiday of her swan song "Lady in Satin"), others, like Armstrong, by sustaining their great generosity of spirit into their golden years.
What makes Coltrane unique is that his artistic pursuit was ultimately of things that art can at best only poetically suggest, a breech-birthed unity between humanity and cosmological creation itself. He's also rare in this most improvisational of music -- where the notion of "destination point" is anathema -- of producing one work that looms as his centerpiece, namely, "A Love Supreme," quite possibly the most cherished jazz recording of all time (though Miles' "Kind of Blue," which Trane and Cannonball Adderley performed such saxophone miracles upon, is more often played).
But "A Love Supreme" is the frame through which we have come to view Trane's entire career, and life even, before and after. (Perversely, it's not my personal favorite, a ranking occupied by the little discussed and posthumously released "Sun Ship," "one of the last studio recordings of the same quartet that erected "A Love Supreme," and certainly the most free of the group's free-jazz forays.)
"A Love Supreme" is also, as Ashley Kahn has pointed out, a genuine singularity in that it is a completely secular work about things spiritual and religious, and anything but academic or exhortatory. "A Love Supreme" is as flesh and blood, as animal and erotic even, as a piece of music can get and, at the same time, as philosophical, conceptual, thoughtful and rigorously mysterious.
By the time the Coltrane quartet made it, Coltrane was already the artist to watch in jazz for a host of reasons -- his own mercurial development had garnered the respect of longtime jazz devotees who'd followed him beyond Miles and Monk to his first recordings with Atlantic, especially "Giant Steps." For those jazz listeners impressed with technical legerdemain in jazz, Trane made them sit up and take notice in a way no one since Parker had, and with a voice as personal, as pulsating with life and as mesmerizing.
Trane produced a bona fide hit with his version of "My Favorite Things," and in doing so he found the wherewithal to form a bridge between the new and the old and to openly endorse and even financially support the younger avant garde musicians like Coleman, Archie Shepp and Taylor. This was at a time when members of Coltrane's own generation like Miles and Mingus openly criticized these players and, bizarrely (given who was signifying), even questioned their mental stability.
Coltrane was the kind of artist whose jug could contain worlds, peoples and multitudes and still not compromise or corrupt his own path or plans. The paradox of the free-jazz movement, and what made it so vulnerable to charges of charlatanism, was that it simplified and complicated the jazz experience at the same time. For better or worse, the movement made jazz a more self-consciously, more self-avowedly intellectual, experimental, mystical and political music -- more science fictional (in keeping with the Cold War's space race) and more vocally Afrocentric.
It was also a movement that demanded the audience get with the program or get out, with few concessions to entertainment. This made for a host of real starving artists (Coltrane compatriot Pharoah Sanders lived off wheat germ and peanut butter). The numerous kindnesses the already quite financially secure Trane showed his hungry young lions -- from actual cash loans to buying cats groceries to obtaining record deals -- are now part of jazz legend and further support the claims made for Trane's sainthood.
What has continually surprised me in coming back to Coltrane's oeuvre in recent years is how time has made his music sound even more original and exciting, less definitive of the period than of one man's transcendence of temporality.
Some of this is bluntly because where he was once the dominant voice of a radical Black jazz culture, jazz today is anything but Black and radical in its rhetoric and expression, and there are no dominant figures or dominant ideas. The upshot of this, where Coltrane is concerned, is that where you once couldn't avoid referencing him, today there's little that even remotely comes close to the music he made with McCoy Tyner, Elvin Jones and Jimmy Garrison -- unless you count the duo of Trane's wife Alice and son Ravi, who, in their homegrown context, channel Coltrane's widely imitated never-duplicated sound, ideas and depth of feeling in ways more eerie, throat-catching and majestic than one would have ever thought humanly possible.
Honorable mention should also be made of the daring and undaunted Branford Marsalis Quartet, which occasionally performs "A Love Supreme" in its entirety.
What the Coltrane quartet had was two of music's more elusive qualities in combination -- namely, melody and gravitas. You can hear them in certain Black voices that came to fore in the '60s -- Otis Redding, Nina Simone, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X -- and in certain rappers today like Rakim, Nas, GZA. But the Coltrane Quartet, like King, also gave voice and timbre to their heaviest burden, a swollen, implacable compassion for the human condition that required that everything they had be laid on the line. You can't buy that level of commitment off a rack, download it from the Net neither, and you damn sure can't fake it.
You can only deliver it from evil and maybe even bleed for it: Tyner has said he knew it was time for him to leave the band when he saw Trane bleeding from the mouth while blowing and not even seeming to care. That degree of indefatigable discipline and unbridled passion can still render so many fans of the quartet speechless, enchanted, focused, uplifted. An avowed atheist and libertine friend once told me that when he wanted to hear God, he listened to Coltrane. He was hedging his bets that the religious ardor Trane's music invoked in him would be deliverance enough for his sins.
To hear selections of John Coltrane’s music, go to www.sfgate.com/eguide.
Greg Tate's books include "Midnight Lightning: Jimi Hendrix and the Black Experience," "Flyboy in the Buttermilk" and "Everything But The Burden -- What White People Are Taking from Black Culture." He also leads the 20-member conducted-improvisation ensemble Burnt Sugar, the Arkestra Chamber, which has released 10 albums on the truGROID imprint since 2000. Next year will see publication of Tate's annotated "The 100 Best Lyrics of Hiphop" (Penguin Books).
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/09/22/DDGL7L8RGF1.DTL |
Ntfs_encryption
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Ntfs_encryption
Post Number: 740
Registered: 10-2005
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Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, September 22, 2006 - 10:11 pm: |
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Nice article. Thanks. Love the man's music. I listen to it no less than twice a week. |
Cynique
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Cynique
Post Number: 5265
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: 
Votes: 1 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, September 22, 2006 - 11:37 pm: |
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Yes, it was an interesting article. Coltrane is such a force that just his name is magic. The mention of it can make strangers friends, can gain a woman new respect from a man, can make the young feel initiated, and the old feel renewed, can make memories audible and melodies capricious. Coltrane. How ironic that his ascetic lifestyle didn't grace him with more time on this earth. |
Tonya
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Tonya
Post Number: 3221
Registered: 07-2006
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Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, September 27, 2006 - 03:22 pm: |
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Celebrating John Coltrane’s 80th birthday
A jazz revolutionary
By Jack Trudell | September 29, 2006 | Page 13
“One of the most baffling things about America is that despite its essentially vile profile, so much beauty continues to exist here. Perhaps it’s as so many thinkers have said, that it is because of the vileness, or call it adversity, that such beauty does exist.”
--Amiri Baraka, from a 1964 review of John Coltrane’s Live at Birdland
NEARLY 40 years after his death, John Coltrane remains one of the most important figures in jazz history.
Despite a brief recording career that lasted only from the early ’50s to his death in 1967, Coltrane revolutionized jazz and continues to influence musicians today. And as perhaps no other artist, Coltrane’s music came to articulate the struggle for Black liberation in the U.S., as his search to push the boundaries of jazz mirrored the increasingly revolutionary conclusions and aspirations of many involved in that struggle.
Born 80 years ago on September 23, 1926, in Hamlet, N.C., Coltrane and his family moved to Philadelphia in 1943--one of millions of Black families who moved to big cities in the North in search of jobs during the Second World War.
At the war’s end, however, most found their hopes dashed on the twin pillars of Jim Crow segregation in the South and de facto segregation, poverty and institutionalized racism in the North. This simmering anger exploded in 1955 with the Montgomery bus boycott, which forced the desegregation of busing and sparked a wave of sit-ins and boycotts against segregation across the U.S.
This resistance was expressed in jazz by the development of hard bop, a movement by Black jazz musicians reacting to the growth of “cool jazz’ in the early 1950s.
Cool jazz was a trend largely of white jazz musicians, centered on the West Coast, who increasingly rejected blues as a major source of jazz, instead blending in European influences. They presented jazz as “respectable” concert music to the delight of many established white critics.
As the great trumpet player Miles Davis wrote, “It was the same old story, Black shit was being ripped off all over again.”
Hard bop instead emphasized jazz’s roots in Black music, particularly the blues and gospel, and gave increased room for individual improvisation. Song and album titles began to reflect a growing sense of Black pride and celebration of urban Black culture.
Coltrane joined the Miles Davis Quintet in 1955, and his tenor saxophone, which white critics derided as too “angry,” can be heard on Davis’ 1956 hard bop classics Relaxin’, Workin’, Steamin’ and Cookin’.
Fired by Davis because of his heroin addiction in late 1956, Coltrane recorded both with bebop founder Thelonious Monk and as a leader himself, releasing in 1957 the fantastic Blue Train and establishing himself as one of jazz’s dominant voices on tenor--“Trane was blowing his ass off,” is how Davis put it.
After kicking heroin, Coltrane in 1959 recorded two albums that transformed jazz. With Davis, he recorded Kind of Blue, regarded as one of the great jazz recordings and a landmark for its luxurious modal sound--playing fewer chord changes to allow for more experimentation with scales.
And with his own band, he recorded Giant Steps, introducing the revolutionary technique of playing multiple chords simultaneously, dubbed “sheets of sound” by critics. To this day, weaving one’s way through the chord changes of “Giant Steps” is a rite of passage for jazz players.
Beginning in 1960, Coltrane recorded seven albums over a year, including My Favorite Things, his most popular record to date, on which he played both tenor and soprano sax. He then formed his famous quartet--the great Elvin Jones on drums, McCoy Tyner on piano and Jimmy Garrison on bass--and recorded a remarkable series of albums, including Africa/Brass, Live at the Village Vanguard and A Love Supreme.
As Martin Smith, the author of a book on Coltrane, described them, “Each one was more musically adventurous than the (last). The backdrop was hard bop, but more and more Coltrane was pushing back the boundaries of musical improvisation.”
While many jazz musicians--notably Max Roach, Sonny Rollins and Charles Mingus--openly supported the civil rights movement, Coltrane never saw himself as a political activist. But when in 1963, Martin Luther King launched a campaign of marches and sit-ins in Birmingham, Ala., Coltrane, like tens of thousands nationwide, was drawn to the civil rights struggle.
He played eight benefit concerts in support of King, and in 1966 his record Cosmic Music, which contained the track “Reverend King,” was dedicated to the civil rights leader.
Birmingham would also move Coltrane to write “Alabama” in 1964, inspired by the murder of four young Black girls by white racists who dynamited their church in late 1963. Coltrane reportedly based the song on the rhythms of the King’s eulogy at the girls’ funeral.
In the mid-’60s, the struggle shifted north. As cities like Detroit and Los Angeles’ Watts exploded in a series of urban rebellions, many in the movement were drawn to more radical, militant politics--first Malcolm X and later the Black Panthers.
Meanwhile, Coltrane, particularly with 1965’s Ascension, fully broke with hard bop and threw himself headlong into a new music of pure improvisation. He quickly vaulted to the head of the “new jazz” or avant-garde jazz movement--a movement which for many of its young leaders, like Archie Shepp, was an artistic revolution linked to the rebellions sweeping cities across America.
Their music shared a common rejection of Western ideas of melody, harmony and rhythm, often rejecting form altogether in favor of simultaneous improvisation. As Davis wrote, “Trane was on a search, and his course kept taking him further and further out.”
He went on to say, “Trane’s music...during the last two or three years of his life represented, for many Blacks, the fire and passion and rage and anger and rebellion and love that they felt, especially among the young Black intellectuals and revolutionaries of that time.”
“He was expressing through music what H. Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael and the Black Panthers and Huey Newton were saying with their words...He was their torchbearer in jazz.”
Coltrane died of liver cancer in 1967. In a society still rife with racism, oppression and war, we should look not just to celebrate his unquestionable musical genius but to learn from the struggles which informed that genius and to which he leant his considerable voice.
Josh Wilson contributed to this review.
http://www.socialistworker.org/2006-2/603/603_13_Coltrane.shtml |
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