JOHN COLTRANE

Clarinet & Saxophone, Winter 2017 15 www.cassgb.org

Coltrane made over 50 albums in his career. This article cannot hope to cover them all but will endeavour to include the best

Kenneth Morris reviews the life and recording legacy of the legendary jazz saxophonist John Coltrane

John William Coltrane was only 40 years old when he died in the Huntingdon Hospital (Long Island, New York, USA) of liver cancer on 17 July 1967. But in the last decade-and-a-half of his musically active life, he managed to:

Jazz

Coltrane at the time of his US Navy service

• appear as a major soloist on Kind of Blue, the biggest-selling jazz record of all time and considered by many critics as also the best, made by the Miles Davis Sextet in 1959;

• make an enormous contribution to the development of three subgenres of modern jazz: hard-bop, modal and avant-garde/free jazz;

• influence vast numbers of both professional and amateur saxophonists worldwide through his prolific legacy of stylistically unique recordings and compositions;

• seriously disturb a significant number of jazz critics, fans and commentators with the stylistic excesses manifest in some of his late period work;

• posthumously secure some sort of canonisation from an African Orthodox Church based in San Francisco;

• deliver such highly rated performances and compositions to secure, again posthumously, a 1982 Grammy Award (for Best Jazz Solo Performance on his Bye Bye Blackbird album), a special Pulitzer Prize (in 2007 for ‘his masterful improvisation, supreme musicianship and iconic centrality to the history of jazz’), and a US Postal Service commemorative stamp issued in his honour;

• meet sales volumes in excess of 500,000 copies for two of his own albums: Love Supreme (in Japan) and My Favorite Things (in the US);

• and secure, hopefully for his heirs and successors, a strong demand for his huge back catalogue (see www.johncoltrane.com, discography section). ➡

JOHN COLTRANE

www.cassgb.org16 Clarinet & Saxophone, Winter 2017

Born in Hamlett, North Carolina on 23 September 1926, Coltrane’s family was not unmusical as his father played several instruments. After an initial interest in community band playing on both the clarinet and E flat alto horn, John, now aged 17 and living in Philadelphia, was gifted an alto saxophone by his mother. Within two years, and presumably influenced by his admiration for Johnny Hodges and Lester Young, he was gigging with a ‘cocktail lounge trio’ while undertaking some sort of musical training at Philadelphia’s Granoff Studios and the Ornstein School of Music.

On 5 June 1945 he heard Charlie Parker for the first time, an episode he related much later as ‘hitting me right between the eyes’. Enlisting in the navy in August that same year, he was posted to Hawaii where the Manama Barracks swing band, known as the ‘Melody Masters’, were happy to use him initially as a guest soloist but ultimately as their leader. Discharged in August 1946, he returned to Philadelphia, more than adequately competent to join the fast evolving ‘be-bop’ scene in that city.

For the next 10 years or so Coltrane worked with a number of leaders of both ‘territory’ (local) bands and named (touring) outfits: initially King Kolax, Jimmy Heath and Eddie Vinson, and subsequently Dizzy Gillespie, Earl Bostic and Johnny Hodges. At the same time, he commenced a study of jazz theory with Dennis Sandole and began to employ the tenor saxophone as his principal instrument.

Several sources mention two further influences on his musical development. Firstly, his inner need to understand fully what compatriot musicians such as Coleman Hawkins and Ben Webster were up to with respect to their modes of improvisation. Secondly, the Philadelphian pianist, composer and theorist Hasan Ibn Ali had espoused some melodic concepts which Coltrane found attractive. Additionally, we must not ignore his proclivities: to practise – for hours a day, days on end, more or less until the day he passed away – and to continuously develop (and most probably research) innovative harmonic approaches until the day he died. For some musicians, this later facet of his artistry is considered to be the most important one. Most players copy others, whereas Coltrane is often viewed as a giant on whose shoulders others stand.

True fame and fortune started to arrive in the mid-summer of 1955, when Miles Davis asked Coltrane to join his group, to be known later as the ‘First Great Quintet’ (Miles, Red Garland, Paul Chambers, Philly Joe Jones and Coltrane). Recording sessions for Prestige followed, with the albums Cookin’, Relaxin’, Workin’ and Steamin’ all garnering five stars from the All Music Guide to Jazz.

It is convenient to describe most of the 1955-60 period as Coltrane’s ‘Miles and Monk’ period – but the word ‘most’ is significant, because our hero freely alternates and interleaves his important recording sessions between different record labels and leaders, making a clean chronological approach to this

biography hard work. Added to this confusion are delayed issues (example: Dakar from April 1957 but only released in 1963). For readers wishing to get to grips, for free, with Coltrane’s detailed discography, use either his own site (see above) or the splendid Wikipedia version.

During 1955-60 Coltrane was not immune to the perils of heroin addiction, which led in 1956 to the collapse of the First Great Quintet and a six-month stint with Thelonious Monk at New York’s Five Spot Cafe. Piece together Hasan Ibn Ali’s musical ideas,

Monk’s individualisms and Coltrane’s ever-exploring musical mind and we can begin to understand where the seeds of his future musical harvest may have originated.

In 1957, Coltrane’s own contract with Prestige Records commenced (albums: Cattin’ with Coltrane, Coltrane, John Coltrane with the Red Garland Trio and Soultrane (the last two get four stars from All Music). Formal sessions featuring ’Trane (his now much-used nickname) with Monk appear to have been pretty rare, but three

Blue Note albums have emerged over time. The first, in 1958, was the very successful Van Gelder Studio’s Blue Train (five stars and a Record Industry Association of America Gold Award). The next two arrived in 1993 and 2005 having been compiled from a 1958 Monk and ’Trane reunion date (album: Live at the Five Spot – Discovery!) and some Voice of America radio material (album: Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall). Both were justifiably received with considerable acclaim.

Four essential albums featuring Coltrane

Clearly inspired by some larger force, ’Trane continued to evolve and innovate his take on jazz until the very end

JOHN COLTRANE

Clarinet & Saxophone, Winter 2017 17 www.cassgb.org

Perhaps I should pause here to explain that Coltrane made over 50 albums in his career. This article cannot hope to cover them all but will endeavour to include the best. An example: across 1957-58 for Prestige, he recorded tracks for Lush Life, an album of ballads including some with the minimum instrumentation of tenor sax, bass and drums. This line-up requires extraordinary powers of ‘suggesting’ a harmonic line while simultaneously playing or improvising on the melody, which Coltrane does quite spectacularly.

Coltrane re-joined Miles Davis in January 1958, and during this particular year it is possible to detect a stylistic morphing from hard-bop to the start of modal jazz. Neither Coltrane nor Miles invented modal jazz (the composer-arranger-pianist George Russell seems to have had the biggest hand in this with his paper ‘Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organisation’) but they were most definitely its first successful exponents.

The 1958-59 period saw two significant (both five star, again) Miles Davis albums for Columbia consolidate both Miles’s and

’Trane’s reputations for all time: Milestones and Kind of Blue. These launched the era of ‘modal jazz’ and introduced us to those scale patterns which, for the jazz of the time, were more interesting than the usual major or minor runs. Kind of Blue has been so successful, so influential and so innovative as to collect: 10 pages for a Wiki entry; a 224-page book (Ashley Kahn’s Kind of Blue – the making of the Miles Davis masterpiece); sales of at least four million copies; and an inclusion in the US Library of Congress National Recording Registry for 2002. Its influence has reached well beyond jazz into both rock and classical music, together with a seemingly endless application as backing music for film dramas and documentaries. Incidentally, the disc did nothing but favours for the other musicians involved: ‘Cannonball’ Adderley (alto), Bill Evans and Wynton Kelly (piano), Paul Chambers (bass) and Jimmy Cobb (drums).

In mid-1959 Coltrane signed up with Atlantic Records resulting in four more well-received albums: Giant Steps, Coltrane Jazz, My Favorite Things and Ole Coltrane. Each has merits in abundance, stemming from Coltrane’s improvisational skill or that of his supporting musicians. Giant Steps also demonstrates ’Trane’s compositional strengths – in particular the title track which has become a popular practice exercise (the ‘Coltrane changes’) and the ballad ‘Naima’, named for his wife. It was also chosen for the US National Recording Registry in 2004.

My Favorite Things continues with Coltrane’s modal style and introduces his use of the soprano saxophone. An edited version of the title track became a radio hit single in 1961, and the whole album secured a Grammy in 1998 – underscoring the value of re-issues (the title tune was, from 1961 onwards, Coltrane’s most requested item).

Possibly the least popular of the four Atlantic sessions is the last one, Ole Coltrane. This project ‘doffs its cap’ as it were to Coltrane’s own Africa/Brass album (recorded for his new label Impulse! just two days before) and Miles’s historic Sketches of Spain album. I now have to be honest and state that with one exception (1965’s

A Love Supreme on Impulse!) Coltrane’s output from Africa/Brass onwards places me in the camp of critics who find the material quite hard to understand, more so the nearer we get to 1967. I do not think I’m alone, as from Africa/Brass onwards the Downbeat and Rolling Stone review scores start to decrease. Up to mid-1961 ’Trane’s

work is accessible, by which I mean understandable and intriguing, certainly to other saxophonists. His solos and even some of his compositions may be difficult to play, but the intention is clear. As we move through the 60s, however, there are reports of audiences booing live performances.

Returning to the biographical/discographical format of this article, from mid-1961 Coltrane continued to develop his ideas beyond modal jazz into avant-garde/free jazz, which he did virtually for the rest of his days. Following the expiry of his Atlantic contract he completed (in 1960) another three albums for the label: The Avant-Garde co-led with Don Cherry, Coltrane Plays the Blues with pianist McCoy Tyner, and Coltrane’s Sound, also with Tyner. Between 1961 and 1967, Impulse! issued 14 Coltrane studio albums plus a further 11 from live concerts.

After his death, the label found material for another eight.

YouTube carries a fair number of these later albums, bringing with it a small sample of opinion on the album content by way of the comments section. It becomes very clear from the number of ‘likes’ that many listeners, from a wide variety of nationalities, secure spiritual and/or emotional uplift from Coltrane’s late period

performances. Others, including myself, discover nothing but an absence of musicality, though there are great swathes of artistic endeavour requiring remarkable technical competence.

As previously mentioned, A Love Supreme (recorded in 1964, first released in 1965 and reissued in 2001) is an exception. It has to join the quartet of must-have Coltrane albums in any jazz enthusiast’s collection, exemplifying his mastery of four subgenres: Lush Life (rhapsodic bop), Kind of Blue (hard bop/modal jazz), Giant Steps (‘Coltrane changes’/modal) and A Love Supreme (avant-garde/jazz-spiritual). Clearly inspired by some larger force, ’Trane continued to evolve and innovate his take on jazz until the very end. n

The author would like to thank Mike Hall for some valuable editing.

www.johncoltrane.com

We must not ignore his proclivity to practise for hours a day, days on end, more or less until the day he passed away