TO HONOR A LEGEND:

In Philadelphia, the Coltrane legacy has been passed down not only through recordings, but through Philly musicians who were early on exposed to him in person and sometimes performed with him. Tyner (pianist in the celebrated John Coltrane Quartet), Liebman, Golson, drummer Mickey Roker, saxophonists Ba-yard Lancaster and Odean Pope, vibraphonist Khan Jamal, guitarist Pat Martino, and organist Trudy Pitts have all had a direct personal impact on today’s play-ers of Philly Jazz. Their own musical debt to Trane is immeasurable. According to Martino, the legendary guitarist of international fame who resides in South Philadelphia and performs and teaches locally when time permits, “John Col-trane influenced my intuitive insight far greater than merely its application to the craft of musicianship. To me Coltrane was a prophet as well as a musician. Along with spending precious moments at a very early age talking with Trane, being absorbed in works like Giant Steps, A Love Supreme, Ascension, and First Meditations literally amplified my interest in a study of Love itself.” In Phila-delphia, there is a constant passing of Trane’s torch to each new generation of musicians.

Adding to this glorious mix, the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts held a critically acclaimed tribute (during September 2004 to May 2005), “Take the Col’Train,” emphasizing Coltrane’s impact on Latin jazz from Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Venezuela, and Panama, under the aegis of pianist Danilo Perez. The May concert featured an appearance by Coltrane’s son, Ravi, an outstanding saxophonist in his own right. Many of Ravi’s Philadelphia friends came out to hear him, lending a very personal note to this outstanding set of concerts featuring top musicians from around the world, such as Perez, trumpeters Claudio Roditi and Bryan Lynch, and trombonist Conrad Herwig.

On the occasion of Trane’s 80th Birthday (he was born on September 23, 1926), this ongoing testimony to Coltrane is complemented by special occasions and fes-tivals. International House and Ars Nova Workshop, under the sponsorship of The Philadelphia Music Project, are featuring a five concert series called “Seraphic Light.” An eclectic mix of established traditions and new musical ideas, the series includes The Philadelphia Four, with bassist Reggie Workman and drummer Rashied Ali, both of whom performed extensively with Trane; a night with the inimitable pia-nist, Cecil Taylor, one of the most innovative musicians in the business; and groups such as Spiritual Unity, The David S. Ware Unit, and Rova Orkestra=Electric Ascen-

In the short span of about ten years, prior to his untimely death in 1967, Trane changed the face of jazz, and his influence is continually felt to this day. It has been said that he was the most influential musician in modern jazz, not only in terms of his own technique, innovation, and self-expression but also his soul-searching attitude, which has served as a role model for so many musicians. As saxophonist Dave Liebman says, “Besides specific technical aspects, Trane’s influence forms the basis of everything I have done musically, the reason I play at all, the meaning of music beyond the obvious, the possibility that music can raise consciousness and improve human kind.” Many others, including the pop star Santana, have echoed these sentiments.

If you go to any night club, concert hall, or festival venue in the Philadelphia area, you will hear and feel the Coltrane influence. The jazz artists who perform regularly at local clubs such as Chris’ Jazz Café, Zanzibar Blue, Ortlieb’s Jazzhaus, and Tritone—among them, pianists Tom Lawton and Jim Ridl, trumpeter John Swana, saxophonists Bootsie Barnes, Ralph Bowen, Larry McKenna, and Ben Schachter, clarinetist Norman David, drummers Tony Deangelis and Jim Miller, and big band leader Bobby Zankel—will tell you how much Coltrane meant to their musical evolution. Lawton says, “For me, it was actually listening to Coltrane’s song Brazilia on the radio that connected me to jazz forever. It was the harmonies and the rhythmic intensity. The best example of Coltrane is to stay true to yourself and bring that kind of intensity and integrity to your work.” According to Ridl,

“Coltrane continues to inspire me. Lately I’ve composed a few things that have that Coltrane-like chant inside of them: simple melodies with an open field for improvisational exploration. This form and model for composition and improvisation is ancient and at the same time fresh.” Bobby Zankel:

“John Coltrane represents the potential for beauty, compassion, and positive action—so you jump out of bed and start practicing or maybe first listen to Bakai or Moment’s Notice, or Vigil, or Chasin’ the Trane. I have spent countless joyful inspired hours playing along with Trane’s records, trying to absorb all of the different aspects that define his playing.”

BY VIC SCHERMER

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The John Coltrane Legacy in Philadelphia

sion, with the latter performing Coltrane’s monumental work, Ascension. Series impresario Mark Christman says:

“John Coltrane embodies the rigorous experimentalism that we find most engaging in music, particularly his late period which broke every boundary imaginable. He was clearly an improviser in search of answers, and we can only hope that today’s progressive music continues to defy convention and educate.”

In September, the Tranestop Resource Institute spon-sored a two day celebratory event entitled “Tranestop: Giant Steps over Philly,” held at the Awbury Arboretum and nearby locations, featuring such luminaries as Archie Shepp, Stanley Cowell, James Spaulding, Jymie Merritt, Allen Nelson, Sumi Tonooka, Stanley Wilson, Sid Sim-mons, Robin and Duane Eubanks, Billy Paul, and the Dixie Hummingbirds. The power of Coltrane’s contemporary importance is reflected in the fact that all of the musi-cians participating in these Coltrane festivals are doing so because of their debt of gratitude for Coltrane’s many-faceted contributions to their own musical lexicons.

No discussion of Coltrane’s influence on Philadelphia music would be complete without a tribute to his beloved cousin, Mary Alexander, who grew up with him in North Philadelphia. Mary was present at the inception, and John composed the song Cousin Mary in her honor. In recent years, she initiated the designation of John’s home as a national historic site, co-founded the John W. Coltrane Cultural Society, and has been a felt presence in Philly jazz circles, encouraging the musicians and participating as facilitator and mentor at numerous jazz festivals in the Delaware Valley. It could honestly be said that Coltrane lives on in Mary, his son Ravi, his wife Alice, and all his family members as well as in so much of the music we hear, even in the very air we breathe.

What does John Coltrane have to do with Philadelphia music? The answer is: “not less than everything.” “Trane,” as he has been affectionately called, came up in Philadelphia, where he studied theory with the legendary Dennis Sandole, performed with then up and coming local musicians Benny Golson, Trudy Pitts, McCoy Tyner, and many others, and was first inspired by hearing the likes of Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker at the Academy of Music. So it is appropriate that Philadelphia honor Coltrane’s 80th Birthday through the music itself, which was his passion, and which he pursued to its outer limits.

Vic Schermer is a contributing editor for the All About Jazz

website. He lives and works in Philadelphia.

Page 18: John Coltrane, photo: Ray Gibson

Page 19, left to right: Ravi Coltrane; David Liebman (photo:

David Coulter); Odean Pope; Bootsie Barnes; Bobby Zankel

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György Ligeti is one of those artists who, while hardly a household name, has amassed an enormous infl uence in the musical community, and in subtle ways, the cultural sphere as a whole. He has become a great source of in-spiration to a generation of composers, but there are also obvious references in pop culture, most famously, the in-clusion of his music in the landmark Stanley Kubrick fi lm, 2001, A Space Odyssey. Ligeti’s Lux aeterna became, at the time of the movie’s release in 1968, the voice of the future, brashly devoid of conventional technical parameters, but very direct, and certainly emotional. Almost paradoxically, this voice of the future was far more accessible than what was then the paradigm for new music, namely, a strictly serialist approach which was alienating listeners in droves. By the time of the composer’s death, in the spring of this year, Ligeti’s style had become even more inclusive, even as it retained a highly individual profi le.

If the music of Ligeti has made its way into the con-temporary artistic esthetic by way of stealth, this season in Philadelphia presents an unusually generous array of the music of Ligeti up front and center. It is not as if his music has never been played here. In recent seasons, Kim-mel audiences were treated to a luminous performance of the Violin Concerto, courtesy of Yasmin Little, with the

thereafter. Like nearly all aspiring Hungarian musicians at the time, his early heroes were Bartók and Kodaly. A life in music was launched in the intensely musical city of Budapest, but war and politics came to dominate most of Ligeti’s youth. The Holocaust consumed most of his family, and Ligeti himself survived a Nazi labor camp. After his liberation, he witnessed, like all of Eastern Europe, the grotesque irony of one awful tyranny replaced by another.

The Hungarian communists were very faithful Stalinist toadies, and by 1948 all of the arts, including music, were highly proscribed by the cultural commissars. Even the music of Bartók, the national musical hero, was largely prohibited, with the exception of his most conventional sounding works, such as the Concerto for Orchestra and the Piano Concerto No. 3. The exploding new music scene in the West was made invisible to Hungarian artists. During this period, Ligeti wrote beautiful folk infl uenced music, much of it vocal, in the manner of Kodaly. At the same time, Ligeti, and many of his colleagues, were writing what they called “bottom drawer” work, that is, music which could not be performed but was merely hidden away for some future op-portunity for exposure. And the carefully built walls were not completely impassable; Ligeti’s wife was able to procure underground copies of treatises on twelve tone composition.

And yet nothing of his extraordinary imagination or inklings of new trends could prepare Ligeti for the reality of the new music scene he would encounter in the West. In 1956, following the heartbreaking and brutal suppression of the Hungarian revolution by Soviet tanks, Ligeti and his wife walked across the Austrian border to begin a new life. Ligeti found himself in Cologne, Germany, where he met Stockhausen and Boulez, among other leading lights of the avant-garde. For the still youthful Ligeti, the experience was akin to a little boy let loose in a candy shop. He was especially enamored of the concept of Klangfl ächenkomposition, which stresses the primacy of the mass and texture of the sound itself, as opposed to any clear ar-ticulation of melody, harmony and rhythm. This philosophy, which is embodied in the Lux

extraordinary accompaniment of the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Simon Rattle, and the Pennsylvania Ballet has danced to his music. The main showcase this season is from Orchestra 2001, which presents a season long tribute, originally conceived as a celebration of an amaz-ing career, but now appearing as a memorial. Each of the fi ve Orchestra 2001 programs will include a work of Ligeti, crossing a range of styles and vintages.

In October, pianist Linda Reichert played a Ligeti Etudeat a Settlement Music School concert. Reichart, the artis-tic director of Network for New Music, and no slouch at the keyboard (she is also on the Settlement faculty) slyly described the work as one of the “easy” Etudes. These wonderfully lively works, daunting though they may be, deserve a wider audience. On January 7th, from the stage of Field Concert Hall at the Curtis Institute of Music, the fi rst lady of American new piano music, Ursula Oppens, will be joined by Mathias Tacke, violin, and Carl Williams, horn, in the Horn Trio of Ligeti.

But who was Ligeti? As is the case with so many twen-tieth century artists, it is indispensable to examine Ligeti’s biography when considering his evolution as an artist. He was born in Transylvania, Romania in 1923 into a Hungar-ian-Jewish family, which moved back to Hungary shortly

Remembering György Ligeti

aeterna, would come to dominate his style for the mature period of his career. Much of this music was harsh and forbidding, but there was also a great deal of humor and even joyousness in his work, especially in contrast to the grim work of so many of his modernist colleagues.

Ligeti himself described the change in his work after 1956 as a 180 degree turn. By the late sixties and early seventies, he shifted his focus again, this time away from the total chromaticism of his most daring work. This he described as a 90 degree turn; he refused to abandon his affi nity for avant-garde art, but became interested in the U.S. West Coast scene, in particular, the exotic micro-tonal music of the great American original Harry Partch. He also explored more non-Western material, including African music. The result of this late in life cultural tourism resulted in a vibrant, distinctive body of work that managed to include, in a masterfully co-hesive manner, a remarkable lifetime of infl uences.

This musical season in Philadelphia pres-ents a rare opportunity to experience the delightful, strange, provocative and profound work of a twentieth century giant. Perhaps this modest celebration will presage more Ligeti in seasons to come. Every generation of artists produces a small sliver of work that transcends their time; there is every reason to believe that Ligeti has given us music for the ages.

BY PETER BURWASSER

Peter Burwasser is the classical music critic for the

Philadelphia City Paper and a regular contributor to

Fanfare magazine and Philadelphia Music Makers.

As a freelance writer, he has also contributed

articles and reviews to the Philadelphia Inquirer,WRTI Program Guide, and Carnegie Hall Playbill.

Page 20: György Ligeti, photo: Kimmo Mántylá

Page 21: György Ligeti, photo: Gunter Glücklich