John Coltrane - the master

After all, they offer us the only direct aural evidence of his mastery. Yet during his life hewas seen and heard by countless thousands of people as the leader of one of the most enduring and popular working bands in jazz history. Coltrane had clearly thought long and hard about the type of band he wanted to lead while fulfilling his commitments to Miles Davis in 1959-60, for by the time he brought his own groups into Atlantic’s studios it was invariably a sax-led quartet !no second horn). The personnel took some time to settle (Coltrane finally left Davis in the summer of 1960 and could therefore offer steady work to prospective sidemen only after that time) but by October that year Elvin Jones was in place along with McCoy Tyner. The bass chair would be held by a number of fine players, including Steve Davis and Reggie Workman, with Jimmy Garrison becoming a permanent first choice as late as the opening weeks of 1962 That Coltrane chose a quartet told something about his preferences, especially about the amount of space he felt he needed to develop his playing. That he desired a permanent personnel (unlike, for example, Sonny Rollins or Stan Getz, both of whom had a regular turnover of accompanying musicians inthose years) says something also about the level of Interaction he demanded, as well as the lessons regarding stability learned from years on the road with Miles. Coltrane's recording projects during the two or so years he was with Atlantic include two co-led sessions (Milt Jackson and Don Cherry) but largely document the working-through of ideas and concepts he had been refining while still a sideman. His contract with the Impulse! label coincided with his first full year as leader of his own combo and it is no accident that, towards the end of that year, Impulse! spent five nights at the Village Vanguard documenting the progress made by his working band. In fact, with the first Impulse! project being a big band session with charts by Eric Dolphy, it was to be spring 1962 before the quartet went into the studios for the new label. By that time they had toured Europe (with Eric Dolphy carrying on the role he’d taken as a fifth member during the Vanguard sessions) and settled into a busy schedule criss-crossing the US to play in the better clubs. Clearly, Coltrane thought of each record for Impulse! as a separate project, and listening to them in retrospect one is struck by how self-contained each album really is, from the Ballads date through to the partnerships with Hartman and Ellington. Meanwhile, Coltrane's band reverted to being a quartet (Dolphy having left in early 1962) and continued to evolve its approach to what was still a relatively limited performing repertoire. Those limitations were evident during the November 1961 European tour (’Impressions' and 'My Favorite Things' usually lining up at each concert with ‘Mr. P.C.’ and 'Blue Train') and the quartet dates of 1962, including another fall European tour, where 'Giant Steps', 'Bye Bye Blackbird' and 'Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye’ join ‘Tranelng In' and ‘IWant ToTalk About You' as staples. But most of the material committed to tape at the Village Vanguard, or during the studio dates of 1962, is not transferred to the working group. The reason? Coltrane was looking for a combination of flexibility in his material and familiarity of theme for his audiences. He knewwhat hewas playing was difficult, uncompromising music, and he was not averse to helping his fans follow what hewas developing within the band through the simple technique of sticking to known repertoire. Even Impressions', first unveiled at the Village Vanguard in November 1961, was commonly mistaken by audiences for 'So What', a tune (and concept) familiar to them by then from Kind of Blue. What the bandwas doing with this repertoire was, of course, another thing altogether, for the familiarity it gained with the material and with Coltrane's methods allowed it to stretch itself and the musical framework to the point where even musical form itself was being reinvented. This exhilarating process was a direct consequence of Coltrane's single-minded concentration on pursuing his ambition of rendering spontaneous scalar explorations into coherent and logical models of musical expression. The oft pointed-to dynamic in the band between Coltrane and Elvin Jones was nomere stylistic device: Jones and his fiery polyrhythms were a constant reminder to Coltrane of the emotional point to his musical enquiries. If music is a form of artistic alchemy, then Jones heated the cauldron to the point where the various elements in the group’s make-up could metamorphose into new forms. In this respect it is interesting to contrast Coltrane's methodology when playing with Jones to that of Eric Dolphy’s in the same group. Coltrane constantly engages in direct rhythmic and sonic dialogue with Jones, often driving the rhythm ahead with as much power as Jones himself. Dolphy uses Jones' pulse and momentum as a rhythmic vehicle across which he could skate and against which he could execute his tangential harmonic and rhythmic designs. Both men played with greatly vocalised tones and phrasing, and both men generated considerable emotional heat onstage with the group, but the resultant music is vastly different in purpose and expression. By the end of 1962 Coltrane had the group thinking and playing as one. Certain tunes [both those he wrote himself and the standards and blues they regularly resorted to) had developed routines designed to showcase a particular aspect of the saxophonist's current inquiries into the fabric of music. 'I Want To Talk About You', a ballad he had been playing since the late 1950s, evolved during the November 1962 European tour and throughout 1963 into a staggering display of saxophone pyrotechnics, firstly in a quartet context, interspersing theme statements and paraphrases with complex multi-note runs, then in a breathtaking unaccompanied coda (a device he'd been toying with on various songs that year) that was itself as long as the group’s part of the performance. ’My Favorite Things' was often used as an extended workout for pianist McCoy Tyner, who would solo for a good 10 minutes before Coltrane's improvisation, allowing the group to function for long stretches as a trio. On other songs, especially the faster blues-based numbers, Tyner would drop out, leaving Coltrane, Jones and Garrison to combine in a relentlessly focused pursuit of shared emotional and intellectual goals. All of these differing approaches to his regular material made for a varied and well-paced concert or club appearance, even when some of the performances themselves were 30 minutes long or more. Coltrane had long outgrown the swing and bop small-group tradition of horn-piano-bass-drum solo sequence on every selection, even though manyof the most popular groups in jazz at this time stuck limpetlike to this rigid performing format. The results of this continuing growth of confidence and understanding within the group are documented on the Impulse! recordings of the quartet at Newport Jazz Festival in July (with Roy Haynes on drums) and in residence at Birdland in October 1963 and more extensively on the tapes of the October/November 1963 European tour. What is remarkable about this collection of live recordings is the combination of almost unbearable intensity (for example, the quartet's version of 'Afro Blue' at Birdland) with utter relaxation and ease (the extraordinarily composed and moving performances issued in the 1970s by Norman Granz on Pablo). There is also evidence of a new bout of composing from Coltrane, with 'Lonnie's Lament’, ‘The Promise' and, shortly after, 'Alabama' being played both in the studio and 'live'. This combination of serenity and exultation suits the nature of the quartet to perfection, allowing it an unusually full flowering of each member's unique contribution. ANewYear's Eve reunion with Eric Dolphy at NewYork’s Lincoln Center ushered in 1964 in some style, the group performing ’Alabama1 in addition to the staples 'My Favorite Things’ and ‘Impressions'. This year saw the production of two masterfully-conceived and executed studio albums, Crescent and A Love Supreme, but there is little or nothing in the way of 'live' recordings that survive from this very busy year to trace the group's further development in front of its fans. Coltrane declined the opportunity to tour Europe that autumn. By the time the quartet is glimpsed once again in front of an audience, in May 1965, the balance within the group has undergone a radical shift only hinted at on the early 1965 studio album The John Coltrane Quartet Plays. Just as he had listened intensely to Ornette Coleman and Eric Dolphy in 1959/60, Coltrane had been absorbing contributions from the younger players emerging in the USat this time - the Ayler brothers, Pharoah Sanders, Archie Shepp - and attempting to incorporate some of their methods into his own music. AMay1965 appearance at the Village Gate on the same bill as Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp and Sun Ra was recorded and reveals Coltrane becoming increasingly more urgent and strained in his vocalisations on the saxophone, especially on the tenor. In response, the quartet played harder, the harsh edge of their combined efforts sounding like a combined attempt to vanquish unknown demons by the time the group played the Newport Jazz Festival that July. The music is hypnotic in its turbulence and the listener, compelled into the centre of the action, is largely unaware of the long build-up in its ferocity due to the unbreakable grip it maintains until the performance ends. The epic proportions of this struggle are emphasised on these live albums by the original LP sequencing where acts with the power of Albert Ayler and Archie Shepp, following on from Coltrane, sound diminished by comparison. The demons are at last vanquished, temporarily, but their very existence points to an ongoing meltdown within the quartet. This is underlined by the titanic and longwinded concerts in France in August 1965, preserved on tape and reissued on a number of labels and even featuring a complete ‘live’ performance of 'A Love Supreme’. By July 1965, Coltrane had recorded Ascension and was continually experimenting 'live' with augmented groups, especially on the percussion front, seeking to expand the range of his musical quest and take the emotional communication to an even more rarefied level. His conception could no longer be contained within the quartet and within six months there would be an entirely newworking group, with just Jimmy Garrison staying on. The evolution of the new group and eventual disintegration of the old is well documented in the studio and it is no accident that the records from this time that Coltrane cleared for release were those with the new influx such as Meditations and (in large part) Kulu Se Mama. The final quartet sessions, released many years after Coltrane’s death, show a group struggling to fit the individual development of all four members within the bounds of its collective creation. The first to leave was Elvin Jones. His replacement, Rashied Ali, was a very different type of drummer whose frequent abandonment of metric time keeping was quickly becoming the ideal for Coltrane’s fast-developing new improvisatory techniques and methods, but ill-suited McCoy Tyner, who left to form his own group in early 1966. His replacement was Coltrane's ownwife, Alice. They had met and eventually settled together in the early 1960s: prior to that she had worked as Alice McLeod with anumber of groups including that of Terry Gibbs. By the time she joined Coltrane's working band she had radically altered her previous post-bop style, opting now during solos for discursive right-hand figures, mostly in arpeggio form, played as a type of repeated flourish, while her accompaniment more closely followed McCoy Tyner’s approach. It was her relative freedom from metric time which allowed her to fit the new Coltrane group's style so exactly: her chords and inversions feeding the soloists could quite happily float over the sea of rhythm constantly being laid down by Ali and whoever was appearing with the group on any given occasion, while her solos, similarly photo; © Jan Persson land opposite belowand top) cut free from metre, allowed her limitless musical latitude. The new rhythm section proved to be ideal for Coltrane’s new requirements, giving him the rhythmic urgency as well as total improvisatory freedom that he now required as he further evolved his own playing. If that was all that had happened to his working group, then it is likely that his last 18 months as a performer would have been distinctly less controversial. But, in a reversal of policy not witnessed since the death of Eric Dolphy, Coltrane opted to expand his front line. His choice was as carefully considered as every other, and although he encouraged a plethora of leading avant-garde reed players to sit in with him at concerts, festivals and clubs - including Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp, Marion Brown and Carlos Ward - the permanent addition was the fire-eating tenor player, Pharoah Sanders. Coltrane repeatedly told interviewers and commentators at this time that Sanders acted as an inexhaustible supply of spirit and energy during the group's performances. Hewas the spark-plug that lit everything up and goaded Coltrane to push himself even harder in his improvisations. That Sanders (who first started touring with Coltrane while Jones and Tyner were still in the band) fulfilled this role can be heard on a number of ‘live’ performances from late September 1965 through to April 1967. His upper-register shrieks, multi-toned smears and frenzied overblowing are all built into an underlying conception of jazz improvisation that has its most obvious roots in the modal investigations of Coltrane himself. It is hardly an insult to Sanders to note that his playing has not the scope or range of Coltrane's - no-one's at that time had - and that his live playing with Coltrane shows him to be amusician intent on developing an array of phrases and devices that he can repeat in almost any musical context. Much of what he plays in Seattle in September 1965 is also reiterated in New York at the April 1967 Olatunji Center concert. His many subsequent albums for Impulse! show a similar conservatism of content, even within a self-avowedly radical context: in latter years he has even returned to earlier-period Coltrane for new inspiration. He is hardly unique in jazz in creating and conserving a limited phraseology: people from Johnny Hodges and Ben Webster through to Booker Ervin and Ornette Coleman all carved out significant careers in improvised music by doing just that. What matters here is that what he played at this time was excitingly forward-looking and dovetailed with Coltrane's aims to an uncanny degree: their duets at the Village Vanguard in May 1966 or during a 14-date tour of Japan two months later demonstrate an empathy bordering on the telepathic, pitched at an emotional level that can at times be overwhelming for the unwary listener. Considering that these performances often lasted close on an hour per selection, the expenditure of energy, whether physical emotional or intellectual, is aweinspiring, quite apart from the consistently high level of inspiration Coltrane found in this company. Given the magnitude of this achievement, it can be seen that the closeness of interaction and the consistency of inspiration in this last working group is in its own way equally as impressive as that of the Jones-Tyner quartet. Coltrane’s live appearances eased off after the summer of 1966 - he even cancelled a projected November European tour - but when he did appear, the basic quintet was invariably augmented by horn players and percussionists. In the recording studio, however, Coltrane reverted in 1967 to the quartet formation that had long been of greatest comfort to him. With Alice Coltrane, Jimmy Garrison and Rashied Ali, he made a series of studio dates that explored the musical advances of the previous 15 months in a way that suggests he had reached another phase of relative calm in his musical development. There are times in this last series of recordings (where many of the selections are well under 10 minutes long) where there are pauses, textural clarity and intense lyricism not heard in such concentration since the previous quartet’s peak between late 1962 and the end of 1964. This is true even with the famous series of duets with Rashied Ali from February 1967. The recently issued Olatunji Center concert of April 1967 features another augmented group, with Pharoah Sanders joining in along with extra percussionists, and the musical style reverts to that of the previous summer although Coltrane’s own playing has moved on from that to his last phase of almost infinite elasticity of phrase and motivic expansion. That Coltrane would not have rested at this point had he not succumbed to cancer that July is a certainty. It is probable that he would at some time have evolved beyond the players he used in his last working group and tackled whole new musical conceptions. But it is apparent that in his last recordings he had reached a new and hard-won type of poise and grace, incorporating all the previous elements of his musical evolution and benefiting from the extreme vocalisation of jazz that was then at the cutting edge of the music. All this was achieved through long, stable and endlessly productive partnerships with his working groups, and it is essential, if we are to properly understand the nature of his achievement, for us to acknowledge the role those groups played.