There are albums or pieces of music that must arrive at the right time to touch your heart. That's why, even though I've known about this music for a couple of months, I decided to write about it only today. "Why" is a short but compelling title. It challenges listeners to think beyond conventional boundaries, immersing them in the flux of past and present while transcending societal norms. In essence, it embodies what every piece of improvised music should aspire to achieve.
Joel Futterman, like William Parker, is a veteran of free jazz. Born in Chicago in 1946, Futterman was influenced by Clarence Eugene Shaw, a trumpeter and student of Gurdjieff's Fourth Way. Musically, Futterman was a devoted student of Coltrane, Dolphy, and Monk. One striking aspect of his style is that, while sounding contemporary, his melodic approach—even when pointillistic and abstract—sets him apart from Cecil Taylor and other contemporary piano masters.
It has often been said that Taylor played the piano as if it were a drum set. Futterman, however, plays the piano as if all these techniques, borrowed from Monk, Cage, and others, were honed to fit his own unique vision. After playing in Chicago from 1964 to 1969, the pianist moved to Virginia Beach in 1972. His first album as a leader was released in 1979, and his many collaborators have included Jimmy Lyons and Richard Davis.
Following a period of musical inactivity, Futterman returned to collaborate with various artists, including Kidd Jordan and Alvin Fielder. It's not surprising to see him playing in this set with William Parker, who, after a period of playing with musicians of his own generation in the supergroup The Commitment, began collaborating with veterans like Cecil Taylor and Peter Brötzmann. Listening to the "Why" album, it's clear that Futterman and Parker fit together remarkably well.
I've mentioned pointillism, and indeed, Futterman's style of attacking with short phrases and notes, their effect prolonged through subsequent phrases, matches perfectly with Parker's bass playing, both plucked and bowed. There are moments when their interplay is almost telepathic (as it should always be in this music), and you can sense that the two are playing after dismissing all rational thoughts and practices, relying instead on intuition and more emotional skills.
I'm not sure how familiar you are with Gurdjieff and his 'Fourth Way.' One of his most important statements is that we tend to love as we count, using our rational mind. However, he proposes a new way—the fourth—in which we can learn to be different, more complete human beings. In this sense, love, like art, is both a territory in which to enjoy this new self and a doorway to it.
Even the most skeptical listeners can appreciate this music and be captivated by the beauty and density of this dialogue. While Parker, playing with Taylor and English drummer Tony Oxley in the so-called "Feel Trio," was accustomed to playing independently from the other musicians, here the 'interdependence' between the two musicians is clearly enjoyable.
I've recently listened to many free improvisation albums that have both highlights and lowlights, but this album consists entirely of 'highs.' Therefore, I wholeheartedly advise listeners to experience and enjoy it in its entirety. "Why" is not just an album; it's a journey into the depths of musical intuition and emotional resonance.
When I saw this album on the shelves I was
curious and skeptical at the same time. Curious because in Eye
of I (Anti-, 2023), net of the recognizable influences (Ayler, Coltrane,
Ware, Brotzmann) that were available through Lewis’ elocution and that made me
classify him in the limb of the musicians that still need to find their own
distinct voice, the closing composition featuring The Messthetics, even if
reminding of Albert Ayler’s The Last Album (Impulse!, 1969), created interest
in me for future releases.
But now, with this disc in my hands, I was also
skeptical because I was fearing to listen to a derivative musician. The critics
that praised JBL in these last year weren’t mistaken, after all even Wayne
Shorter at the beginning of his career had a strong tie and connection with
Coltrane as a soloist, but being accustomed to listen to every sort of failed
attempt possible in order to give life to a proper improv or avant garde music
in the last ten years or so, I surely expect to be disappointed even by the
most emblazoned artists.
After some listenings I can say this is
partially the case. On a way, the album reminds the listener of the stylistical
changes of Henry Rollins’ Black Flag, prepared by the previous albums but come
to a well defined metal-free jazz shape with the EP Process of Weeding Out
(SST, 1985), a record that opened the doors for a plethora of bands that
incidentally prepared the audience for the future evolutions of post-rock and
stoner rock; on the other hand, more than a well defined bunch of compositions,
the album seems to be nothing more than a recorded jam session. Good stuff but
far from the intentionality we all exspect from some pieces of recorded music.
Even because the LP herein reviewed is without
title or, if you prefer, titled with the name of the band, as is to say ‘this
is our music’. Not that much for a self presentation. But let’s go with some
order. Messthetic is an experimental post punk trio comprised of the rhythm
section by the now on long breaks Fugazi (Joe Lally on bass and Brendan Canty
on drums) plus guitarist Anthony Pirog, a musician acclaimed at his appearance
on the scenes since his versatility and multifaceted style of playing, who
collaborated with the likes of Elliot Sharp and Henry Kaiser.
Arrived at their third album with this release,
Messthetics have been formed because both Lally and Canty wanted to keep on
experimenting with shapes and dynamics as they did since Fugazi’s Red Medicine
(Dischord, 1995). Their encounter with James Brandon Lewis came in occasion of
the last album of the latter Eye of I and this album can be considered as an
extention of the last track of that LP. The album opens with L’Orso where we
can listen to a thick but relaxed dialogue between guitar and saxophone and
some unison moments on a theme used by many jazz musicians as a device for
improvisations: all well done but nothing really new or exciting but the
feeling.
Emergence start showing Pirog virtuosity on
guitar and evolve in a mid tempo punk progression with Lewis on the stands that
suddenly turns into a ride where one can appreciate the tenorist efforts to
give life to a more precise style, confrontational and a little bit less
derivative, even if maybe this impression is a result of the sum of the parts.
That Thang start with another well abused riff that leave space to Pirog and
Lewis evolutions on guitar and tenor, this last more deconstructed, so to
speak, than the guitar parts.
Three Sisters starts as a ballad becoming a
nice progression, and since its use of dynamics is one of the most intriguing
pieces on the album even if it lacks some elements of surprises (that stop and
go moments, dub parts etc.) that were typical of some of the musicians’
mothership. Boatly is a composition that follows in the same furrow and gives
life to a nice, melancholic melody that suddenly turns into an anthem, while
The Time is The Place is another attemp to give life to a nice ground for Lewis
and Pirog respective soloing.
Railroad Tracks Home is yet another abused jazz
riff launched in order to give space to soloism. As far as personal tastes, I
find this alternation of rock and jazz stylistic features a little bit
predictable, and that this way the four musicians would produce an enormous
quantity of albums, that, as an example, is what King Gizzard and The Lizard
Wizard are doing right now. If you’re a great musician it is easy to jam and
produce something reasonable, but instantaneous composition is definitely
another matter.
Finally with Asthenia, a soft ballad, and
Fourth Wall, which have a more sustained rhythm, we’ve gone at the end of this
journey and we can say for sure this music is good enough to become something
we want to put on a plate just to relax while drinking something good, but not
enough good as a tool to learn something new about music developments. For
this, maybe James Brandon Lewis and/or the Messthetics will help us with their
future releases. For the moment we can take note about the fact that they are
able to enjoy their time playing but the spark is still far from shining.
For many people this record will be like a
revelation, since Alice Coltrane, due to some not properly achieved steps like
the release of Infinity, an album of recordings by the last John Coltrane reimagined
through orchestral backgrounds and re-dubbed rhythm section parts that in 1972,
the year of the release of the record by Impulse!, was criticized by fans and
experts. The risk for Coltrane’s wife and last pianist was to be taken as an
inaccurate exploiter of her husband’s legacy.
Nothing more far from the truth. In reality,
Alice Coltrane was an accompished musician/composer in her own right. Her first
four releases as a leader, from A Monastic Trio (Impulse!, 1967) to Journey in
Sathcidananda (Impulse!, 1970) were showing an artist able to play with mastery
and sensitivity both harp and piano, and an interesting composer. Those
qualities couldn’t be tarnished by a single release, and if you think how much
Coltrane loved to experiment with music – he releasaed albums such as John
Coltrane and Johnny Hartman (Impulse!, 1963) with a classic jazz singer – that
release is at least comprehensible as an attempt to give Trane solos a
different context.
More than that, it is difficult to understand
why musicians like Archie Shepp, Pharoah Sanders, Jimmy Garrison or Ed
Blackwell, just to name a bunch that are available also in this double
recording from the Carnegie Hall, should have played with an inferior or non
compliant musician, being exposed to criticisms as all the actors of free jazz
were in the 1960s. It has been written as an example by Peter Niklas Wilson
that not always Albert Ayler was able in the second part of his career to chose
the right players for his music, but, even if I’m not of that opinion, for sure
it isn’t the case for the people I have mentioned.
Anyway, in 1971, the year of this recording,
Alice accomplished a personal and surely passionate path through the loss of
her beloved husband due to a liver cancer. This loss was not only serious for
the jazz environment, but also painful for all the people around him in
particular. A trip to India and the encounter with Swami Satchidananda, the
religious teacher who will become Alice Coltrane’s guru, will help her to get
out of grief and to focus on what she wanted to achieve as an artist.
No surprise so that in that year Alice Coltrane
gave life to a show in honour of and to raise funds for her spiritual guidance.
The music, recorded properly for a future record release but unpublished until
now, and so fully enjoyable as far as content and as far as form, features two
compositions by Alice Coltrane, the title track for the album relased by
Impulse! the year before Journey in Satchidananda, and Shiva-Loka, from the
same record, plus a couple of famous John Coltrane Compsitions, Africa from
1961 and the most recent Leo from another masterpiece, Interstellar Space
(Impulse!, 1967).
The musicians involved in this recordings are
Archie Shepp and Pharoah Sanders at tenor and soprano saxophones, flutes and
percussions; Jimmy Garrison and Cecil Mc Bee on bass; Clifford Jarvis and Ed
Blackwell on drums, and finally Tulsi on tamboura and Kumar Kramer on
Harmonium. As said previously the quality of the recording is excellent, but
for the two drummers who are not separated in the equalization process, so it
is difficult in this case to understand who is playing what as far as their
instruments.
Alice Coltrane plays harp on her compositions,
and switches to piano for her husband works. Journey in Satchidananda, the
opening track, begins with the usual small percussions and bass to create a
climate of recollection for the listeners. Finally the bass start to depict the
line of the composition and the harp enters with her ascending and descending
figures. The waves delineated by the harp give life to something more similar
to the sea waves than to a music.
On this texture the voice of Sanders and the
flute of Shepp are added at about minute 6, creating a fascinating melody, then
finally we are introduced to Sanders first solo on soprano, something that is
reminiscent of one of his first records as a soloist like Thembi – similar is
the emotional temperature of the piece – until the drums depict a small figure
that leaves the sound of the soprano free to paint smaller and gentler
melodies.
An arco bass line enters and start a small talk
with the soprano, then is the turn of small percussions to take the foreground.
Gently we’re arrived almost at the end of the piece, and the waves of the harp
and of the saxophone lead us to a spiritual quiet. It’s time for Shiva-Loka,
another composition from Alice Coltrane, where the saxophone lines by Sanders
and Shepp are decisely more preeminent and articulated even if the mood is
still meditative and introspective while the two drums supply a small circular
pulse, both more careful about nuances than about pushing.
Disc two opens with John Coltrane’s Africa, a
composition I really believe each one of you remembers since present also in
last year release of the album Evenings
at the Village Gate featuring Eric Dolphy. The melody played by Shepp is
obviously the same as John’s original, as faithful is the structure of the
composition, but Alice Coltrane goes far beyond McCoy Tyner’s voicings
orchestrations on her piano, leaving space to open dissonance and to a music
that is more reminiscent of Coltrane mid-60s sound with two drums and horns
than of the swinging perfection of his historical quartet of the first part of
that decade.
Fire music, as not only for the presence of
Shepp, but also for the strenght of the collective effort to be faithful to the
original John Coltrane pursuance of unknown lands of expression, with Sanders
boiling up until the turmoils that were typical of his collaboration with his
late colleague, the music reach another great point where the horns shut up
leaving first the piano, then the drums accompanied by the flutes, then again
the two basses, free to give life to a sonic landscape made of trembling notes
and of a contemplative, final climax at the same time.
Leo, original conceived as a duet between John
Coltrane tenor saxophone and Rashied Ali drums, is another piece whose different
versions vary as far as the number of musicians involved and consequently as
far as arrangement. I have read reviews of this concert in which the reviewers
state that this Alice Coltrane is even more in command than in albums like the
1966 live recordings of John Coltrane At The Village Vanguard Again! and Live
In Japan, both released by Impulse!, but if a certain progression in mastering
her art is surely possible, a comparison between those performances is almost useless.
First of all because the renditions of John
Coltrane compositions live were mostly comprised not only by technique and will
to experiment but also by the mood of that particular night. As an example,
trying to compare the versions of Leo taken from Live in Japan or Interstellar
Space and this rendition is impossible, since the differences in personnel and
feeling or frame of mind.
One can but notice an increase in the substance
of the music itself, such as in reaching a culmination where Leo stands at the
opposite of Journey in Satchidananda. The two tenors, the instrument for which
John Coltrane is mostly known, are finally free to invoke the true spirit of
this music as initially intended by his creator, while at the same time her
wife Alice Coltrane is free to run across her keybord as she was doing during
the live recording of The Olatunji Concert: The Last Live Recording.
According to the Universal website, this
release is only the first step in an initiative held in order to celebrate Alice
and John Music through all this year 2024. If this means there will be new
music in the near future, we will be only happy to hear such new stuff, hoping,
as it happened, that the quality of the recorded sound will improve and
increase from the first 2000s releases of live albums until the present times.
And we also hope this music will be a good starting point for an younger
generation of musicians as an inspiration source.
Since the end of the 1990s, with music lovers
becoming more open minded like they were possibly in the 1960s and the
following decade, Coltrane was again a pivotal figure for all the rock and alt
rock aficionados who wanted to become aware of other styles of music, as jazz
for example. That’s why there was a huge amount of new releases, mostly live
albums.
Many of them were exceptional as far as
material but poor in terms of recordings, like as an example the live at the
Olatunji Center For African Culture (Impulse!, 2000) with Trane’s last quintet
featuring Pharoah Sanders and Alice Coltrane. But others were incredibly good:
take for instance the double album Live at The Half Note (Impulse!, 2005), with
recordings from a radio broadcast of Coltrane’s classic quartet, or again the
recording of the entire A Love Supreme suite included in the deluxe edition of
the album (Impulse!, 2002) from a Juan-Les-Pins festival, or the recordings
with Thelonius Monk (Blue Note, 2005).
All of this material helped people to keep the
flame of Coltrane’s music alive and well. In these last years new original
material has seen the light of day. The two entire studio records, Both
Directions at Once, issued in 2018 and featuring material recorded in 1963,
the other studio album Blue World, issued in 2019 but recorded in 1964 and with
material dedicated to a soundtrack for a movie titled Le Chat Dans Le Sac by
Gilles Groulx, and finally another live version of A
Love Supreme recorded at a Seattle’s jazz club in 1965 and issued in 2021.
Now’s the time for this Evening At The Village
Gate, recorded live with a single microphone in 1961 just a few times after the
recording of Olé Coltrane, featuring the same personnel: Coltrane aside, there
are the unforgotten genius of Eric Dolphy, the rhythm section offered by Elvin
Jones and Reggie Workman, and McCoy Tyner’s piano. The album, even if in mono,
is extraordinary and exquisite as far as the music comprised herein, end it
will be possibly one of the albums of the year 2023.
Recorded originally by Rich Alderson the
afternoon of a lazy August day only in order to understand if the acoustic of
the club was enough good for the night shows, the tapes were lost for many
years and finally recovered for the New York Library for Performing Arts. Last
July, they were released by Impulse! as a single CD or a double vynil, and are
finally available for all of you passionate listeners.
The first track in an incomplete, but beautiful
in its almost 16 minutes lenght, My Favorite Things, one of Coltrane most
successful compositions reworked and reimagined over and over throughout his
entire career where Dolphy and its flute dominate for the first 7 minutes,
thanks to an angular and graspy voice exploring both the severe and sharp tones
of the instrument, over the propelling circular drums by Elvin Jones, Reggie
Workman’s walking bass and McCoy Tyner’s voicings.
When it’s time for Trane to take place, he
exploits his typical churning tone at soprano saxophone, that set of techniques
that will inspire people like Evan Parker in the following decades. Overacute
tones, almost binaural sounds, hints to the melody of the song interspersed
with raucous and furious yells, all the arsenal that made some critic write the
word ‘anti-jazz’ – we’ll see. But Trane is more than that: from the minute 11
he is able to embellish the melody of the song in a logical and consequential
way, again abrasive but far from being an anarchist’s shout.
When Lighs Are Low is another classic tune
shaped originally by Benny Carter and Spencer Williams in 1936 and that was
subsequently interpreted by the likes of Chet Baker and Miles Davis. This
version, again, start with a beautiful, almost cubist solo by Dolphy at bass
clarinet, an instrument played in his high register this way only by Dolphy
itself and few others trying to imitate him.
Those of you who are familiar with Dolphy’s
language through Mingus’ live records will be happy to hear such a soloing in
this version of a song played by the Coltrane quartet, since many critics in
the past, starting from the studio albums in which the two were collaborating,
asserted that Trane and Dolphy collaboration was sometimes harsh and difficult
for both, since the melodic and harmonic idea of music by Coltrane was not
completely malleable for a musician with the harmonic conceptions of Dolphy.
In this piece, instead, we can hear Dolphy
playing at ease and at will for more than seven minutes, before leaving space
to his pal and his soprano until minute 10, where the soloing is left to a
bluesy and dense McCoy Tyner until the end of the song before a brief assertion
by Dolphy again. The following Impressions is almost classical in its
proceeding and sees Dolphy as a perfect partner for Coltrane, whose solo is
developing lavishly and more consistent, which is so difficult to obtain at the
same time, than the studio version.
Dolphy, again at the bass clarinet, shows us
that idea of angularity typical of his concept of harmonic leap, even larger
than that of Charlie Parker, that made him become famous and peculiar as a
musician. The more than 16 minutes for Greensleeves open a song that, far from
the original timing on the Africa/Brass album with the Dolphy/Tyner
orchestrations, shows us, here, all its potential. Melodic as many of Trane’s
material of choice, it becomes a true tour de force for all the musicians
involved.
Finally, the most intriguing live execution of
the record: Africa, a piece recorded originally for the album Africa/Brass with
orchestrations by Eric Dolphy following McCoy Tyner’s piano voicings, with the
two horns proceeding at the same time is that manner that was defined ‘speaking
in tongues’ by the fans and critics following Albert Ayler and his brother Don
in the same years, that means that every horn is proceeding speaking his own
thing before taking time for a solo.
The more than 20 minutes of the composition are
possibly some of those Steve Reich was referring to during the years as an
inspiration for his works as a minimalist, and so they are an important
document for all the people who want to understand better the many links
between different styles of music such as jazz and contemporary classical.
Far from being a mere exhibition for the two
horns, Africa features a beautiful exchange between Reggie Workman and Art
Davis on bass: the first exploring the rhythm, the other expressing a pedal
that is reminiscent of ancient African music. Those were, in effect, the days
when Coltrane was exploring the music of India and Africa from a composer’s
point of view, establishing also a significant friendship with musicians such
as Ravi Shankar – Ravi will also be the name of one of Coltrane’s sons.
Few months later, John Tynan in Downbeat
will review Coltrane and Dolphy’s music coining the label of ‘anti-jazz’.
Coltrane and Dolphy will stick up for their music from the columns of the
magazine in an interesting article available online and titled John Coltrane
and Eric Dolphy Answer to Jazz Critics. An advised reading for you all,
since if now we can taken Trane and Dolphy music for art, the path to that
consciousness was not linear and it deserves to be deepened in full.
I have to admit it: since I write only for
passion, without any income – I don’t even host banners on this blog, because I
hate when I try myself to read something through my laptop or telephone and all
those bright squares appear abruptly – it is easy to write what I want, being
also my own publisher. But tonight I want, while I listen to some good music
like Oliver Nelson’s The Blues and The Abstract Truth and Pharoah Sanders’
Thembi, to remove some pebbles from my shoe.
Fact is that Italy is a strange place if you
want to be a critic. In every musical genre, the mantra is always “you don’t
like it, you don’t talk about it”. This way, a critic is not a critic anymore.
The market is full of horrorful material and art places are, or better said were, full of horrorful
concerts. But let’s start with some order.
First of all: the ego affair. I was attending a
concert by pianist Vijay Iyer some years ago. I was part of the press staff,
since I was writing reviews for an Italian webzine called Mescalina.
That meant I had my own seat. In front of me an old guy, another critic, told
litterally everyone in the (deconsacrated) church near him: “Let’s see if
tonight I’ll discover a great pianist as I discovered Brad Melhdau many years
ago”. I didn’t knew who the guy was. But this is a first problem.
Mr. Iyer was still discovered. Blow Up, an Italian magazine that is
our version of The Wire – mine is
a conservative country so we always copy everything from foreign countries,
artistically speaking – still issued reviews of records and concerts by the New
York based pianist and composer. There was no need to re-discover him. What the
critic meant was possibly: Iyer need to be brought to the masses. I’ll do it.
What the critic unconsciously was saying was: Iyer need to be brough to my ear
because if I don’t know something, this something is previously unheard by
virtually all those who matter.
And this is the ego affair. There’s no such
thing as humility in the music world. Every critic – even me, for what it
worths – has his own idiosyncrasies – let’s talk about mine: I can’t stand
melodic jazz if played after bebop was born, with notable exceptions by singers
like Nina Simone, but as far as pianists they have to beat it or prepare it, at
the opposite if you’re a drummer and don’t own little percussions you’re out.
Obviously I listen to every styles of music, but
when it comes to jazz it has to be as much distorted. I’m joking about myself,
but if you don’t play free jazz in the present time you’re not adventurous
enough for me. And this is a limit, because I heard a beautiful Italian singer
dedicating a project, an entire CD, to David Sylvian few years ago and I didn’t
even write about it because the arrangements were too smooth to me. See what I
mean?
Now, let’s get over it. Every critic has his
own idiosyncrasies, that was the main point. But every critic – even me? I’m
asking myself right now and I don’t have so a proper answer – at least in my
own country believes his own tastes are the only tastes that matter. That’s why
it would be interesting to have other hands to strum that laptop keyboard for
this blog other than me. But I’m a maniac of control as everyone else in this
business. I think it as to do with the fear people would write with too much
indulgency.
Now, let’s move forward to the second point. In
this industry, you have to be controversial to be successful (and be paid).
This is often misinterpreted for having your own vision. Let’s make an example.
There was a guy, another critic, who now is one of the spearheads of a famous
Italian jazz magazine. Before, he had his own blog as me. Being older,
possessing a record shop and having more time than me to listen and read is a
good difference. Another are his own judgments over my world, that of free jazz
and improvised music in general.
Nothing against Coltrane or Ayler, but Dolphy
as an example was not completely at ease with composition during his career for
this guy – maybe I suggest because Dolphy died at an early age and always had
few money in his pockets: why aren’t we talking about all the musicians that
left the business to play litterally along the road like Giuseppi Logan or
Charles Gayle? And the reason was? The business in itself, not giving enough
money to the musicians and leaving the most part of it to the labels and their
managers.
But the judgment about Dolphy was motivated in
his dissertation about some recent re-releases of Chico Hamilton featuring the
multi-instrumentalist, so I have nothing basically against it but that if you
are a music critic you also need to be a little bit of an historian and an
sociologist. Just a little bit, because you cannot always know everything, but
it helps a lot. And what about Peter Brotzmann? This guy wrote in his blog many
years ago that the German reedist was a “paper mache figure”, with no further
explanation.
The guy also wrote and published a book full of
judgement more argued and debated, but this is the tenor, more or less.
Interestingly enough we had an email exchange in which I asked him why music
and jazz also worldwide was, with notable exceptions, deteriorating. During
those years the Turkish scene was exploding, and it was a good thing for the
experimental music scene in general, but at the same time I heard in my country
people whose attitude was really the one stigmatized by Mingus like, “fuck the
school, I’ll play free”.
I was invited in person to attend at concerts
where the musicians involved, releasing records also for their own little
label, were not even able to LISTEN the one the other and react properly. Same
in the world of contemporary music. So, I asked this now famous critic what
were his thoughts about it, and he wrote me something like he was too busy with
his own woman to think about this topics. I think he was saying I was loosing
my time trying to separate the sheep from the goats.
This leads me to the third point: there’s no
critic at all. An Italian musician once told to a friend of mine, that as me
wanted to write about music: if [name of a famous American saxophonist] plays
in a way you don’t like it, you can always write or say that he “played like it
was”. This, with the other advice other people gave to me about “you don’t like
it, you don’t talk about it”, it’s the end of my (unpaid) job.
It’s the end of the games, the end of the music
also. No critic, no aspiration to create interesting, fresh and new music to be
defined as such. No new music, welcome to the ego trip occupying the space
originally devoted to creativity. I started with the last point, but now the
cycle is complete I believe. Now. In Italy there is a horrible situation for
music. In the world is the same. The old masters are leaving us, the young ones
are interesting, sometimes very interesting – a couple names we discussed also
here: Mary
Halvorson, Patrick
Shiroishi, Lao
Dan – but none of them is renewing the palette bringing new colors to the
light, at least this is my opinion.
Maybe it is not the right time: politically
speaking this decade is worse than the 1980s. Economically and socially our
civilization is in pieces. It is not a surprise we have great talents, but no
innovators – I’d love to discuss this topic in the future with Anthony Braxton,
after rereading some of his books – the real problem is that no one wants to
talk about it. I lost an interview many years ago – my entry ticket to the
press in my country on paper – because of my attitude, my need to define what’s
good to me and what’s not, taking my own risks.
Because, if I look at what’s happening in my
country, this is the scenario. On one hand, you have trap music dominating the
hit parade, together or aside with Italian pop music. On the other hand, you have
virtually nothing. People who are in their 20 years or less are not even interested
in rock, alternative or experimental music. People of my generation, the Seventies, think
‘serious music’ is only Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin – or The Cure, or Depeche
Mode – they don’t even know about Idles or Algiers, who are rock bands of the
present time.
As far as music played live, it is full of
40/50 years old people playing that kind of rock music for old boring people as
them. Young guys are interested mostly in people like Dark Polo Gang and their
values: money and success. There is no such a thing as a counterculture in my
country anymore. I truly believe this is also your future if you don’t pay
attention to it. From where do we want to start, right now?
Filming music is easier than photographing it.
Herman Leonard, one of the greatest music photographers, was accustomed to
capture jazzmen in smokey clubs and venues, where smoke was taken as a direct
emanation of the sound of the instruments. Filming music is easier, as we were
pointing out, since you have both movement and the sonorous aspect of it all.
Having a great film of a performance by a
musician is always so fine. You can see how musicians approach physically their
instruments, how they produce their sounds, and finally many things that
previously, while you were listening to your albums, were up to your
imagination, now are real in front of you, as something your eyes can almost
bite.
Yesterday I had the opportunity to see Don’t Go
Gentle – A Film About Idles thanks to a small review in a small cinema in
Milano city not far from the train station and the center of the city itself.
It was the fourth and final act of a review featuring movies about Kurt Cobain,
Joy Division and a documentary about the NY city scene. The movies were
introduced by a nice panel discussion held by music journalists, musicians and
other people coming directly from the music business.
Obviously the movie about the Idles was the
most interesting since Idles are the most contemporary musical act between the
ones featured in the review. They tell so much about what can happen to
musicians nowadays, about how they relate to music, to business, to fans and to
themselves, and about the present time.
We are, so, introduced in Bristol, a city open
to otherness through immigration and love for music like reggae and dub since
the 1970s. It’s not a chance that musicians like Tricky, Massive Attack and
Portishead, but also, way before them, The Pop Group, come from this city. Joe
Talbot and his pals started playing for fun and in the end they become
professionals.
This road is filled with mournings, like Talbot
mother’s and son’s deaths, great encounters, like the community revolving
around the band, and obviously great music. The movie is both enojoyable and
strange in a way. It is strange to hear a band in 2020 proclaiming that they
don’t like Pink Floyd as a symbol of progressive rock in general, as an
example.
This is obviously part of an old script, and if
it is thought as useful in introducing Idles’ music, it doesn’t help in
understanding what this music is made of. Possibly Archer’s and the band’s idea
was to let the music talk about itself, focusing all the interest into the
human factor. A winner’s game, since if we all are aware and well known about
post-punk, it would have been useless mimicking Simon Reynolds. A musician is
not a critic.
The movie cover Idles since their beginning
until their first release for Partisan Records with the album Joy as an Act of
Resistance. During this first years they gave life to music that was in a way a
soundtrack for Brexit, problems with immigration, recession and more intimate
topics like the aforementioned mournings, love, friendship and mental health
just to name a few.
Hated by conservatives all around the world,
even by rock fans who in front of them discover to be conservatives – it’s full
and they’re cultivated also by some magazines as such – because of their
‘sloganistic’, or better said anthemic approach to politics, critisiced as a
bunch of white privileged men who try to criticize white privilege itself,
Idles are nonetheless one of the most intriguing band nowadays.
Because of their approach to music, precise as
a razor blade, because of their approach to life, with this attitude made of
bringing to light every possible weak point and made a force out of it, because
of their relationship with fans, that are allowed to feel fragile and open to
each other during meetings and online, they in a way say nothing new in the
realm of the history of music, but say something relevant as far as human being
in the present times.
When Joe Talbot in an interview reported
in the movie says ‘I want to become a better man through music, and so in the
end I want to create better music from it’, these are the exact same words
pronounced decades before by John Coltrane. And if the music is different
stylistically, the importance of this thought is nonetheless that of a person
who want to create a virtous relationship between his art and his life.
The fact that this approach to both reality and
sound is explicit and appreciated is something not completely new but
interesting in a world, that of the art, where we are accustomed to hear things
like “political correctness is impossible to manage because we should erase the
memory of most of the artists in the world because of their behavior towards
other human beings” – think about Picasso and women, or Gaugin and native
Tahitians as good examples.
Far from wanting to create a Police of the
morals through music, Idles and Coltrane, or Idles and other musicians, like
many in the punk and post-punk scenes all around the world, are part of a
history of music and of musicians wanting to create a community to make life
more bearable for its participants. We sould not erase artists, but also we
should not erase the importance of these attemps.
“[...]
Being connected with children as I have in my life, I feel that it’s important
to keep this alive, this fantasy. [...]What is reality? What is fantasy?” Don Cherry, March 12, 1970
Born in Oklahoma City (Oklahoma) in 1936,
Don Cherry is well known as the trumpet player of Ornette Coleman during his
successful attempts to revolutionize jazz music. Mind, my readers: we won’t
discuss here the principles of harmolodics, thing we hope we’ll face in the
future, even if we’ll talk diffusely about the records our two heroes gave life
together. For the moment it is important to stress that, if Coleman played a
plastic saxophone in order to utilize the microtones – do you remember what we
were discussing some
months ago when talking about soprano saxophones and straight horns? – to
create a freer music in comparison to bebop and the previous jazz music, Cherry
used a pocket trumpet, an instrument with a nasal and a less chrystalline sound
than an usual trumpet.
One thing that always hit me when I think about
Coleman and Cherry’s instrumental choices, and an example I want to use to
explain myself better, is that of those photographers who, in the digital i.e.
in an extremely precise era, go back to Polaroids and toy cameras. Leaving some
processes to the accident, to a form of creative chaos – as the saturation of
colors, the impossibility to control contrast through different films and papers
or, in the case of music, the difficulty in controlling instruments that are
not thought to be heavily precise – is a good way to play a music in which
there is no wrong note in a given process since it depends from what will
follow.
So, what Coleman and Cherry were trying to
obtain was an extreme freedom starting from extreme constrictions. If Something
Else!!!, the first album by Ornette Coleman (Contemporary, 1958) shocked the
audience of that time for its extreme freedom, it is true that it is an album
full of beautiful, recognizable and memorable melodies. Mind about Jayne, third
track of the album: trumpet and alto go at a nice unison before soloing, with
Coleman producing himself in his typical ‘laughters’ before playing a melody
with an undefined and mocking tonal center.
Things change a little with the following album
Tomorrow is The Question! (Contemporary, 1959) where piano is excluded from the
palette, which increases in tonal and harmonic freedom. Coleman is taking bebop
revolution to its extreme. If Charlie Parker and his peers were playing with
dissonances resolution trying to give life to a more and more complex game,
defying the listener and the other musicians involved, the music of Ornette
Coleman instead is prone to give into new directions.
Once John Coltrane, a Parker’s enthousiast
during his younger age and a contemporary of Coleman,told an interviewer that he was, during his ‘sheets of sound
period’, trying to express one sentence going in two different directions at
once; Coleman himself wanted to reach with his music every possible direction.
What we have here is a conscious attempt to go beyond the limits of an
intellectual experience as bebop became in the end, trying to open new paths to
the musicians who wanted to follow this new road even if at risk of not being
understood.
There’s in fact a huge tradition of musicians
who not only did not dig Ornette Coleman’s idea and practice of music, but also
a great quantity of musicians who imagined the jazz Coleman and Cherry were
creating was only a sum of incoherent, unrepeteable melodic lines in which
dissonance had the effect of destroying the musicians ability to change chords
and play with different intonations. Coleman music was taken by many – by
Charles Mingus as an example: take for instance his interviews contained into
the book Mingus Speaks by John F. Goodman where the bassist and composer talks
diffusely about the music of Albert Ayler and others – as an attack to the
seriousness and complexity of music itself.
If we try to observe better how things
happened, we will notice, instead, that a huge amount of musicians from the end
of the 1950s until the end of the following decade dedicated their energies to
sort out of the shallows of a more and more intellectual drift in order to
obtain always more freedom of expression. Albery Ayler with his ‘speaking in
tongues’ melodies, Coltrane with his ‘sheets of sound’ and then with his
collaboration with Pharoah Sanders in order to obtain the unpredictability of a
music driven by two different musicians instead of one, Archie Shepp with his
rawness and fierceness, and so on.
Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry gave life to a
music that conveyed different emotions, as one can feel listening to his most
known composition, Lonely Woman, that opens his third album The Shape of Jazz
To Come (Atlantic, 1959) where a simple and again memorable melody is played
through a rough and raucous style in order to create some anguish, as in the
famous picture The Scream by Edvard Munch. A nightmarish urban solitude is what
we can approach through Coleman way of playing. Don Cherry, on the other hand,
with his graspy and anti-crystalline sound is the perfect, crackling partner
for the altoist and composer.
And even if tracks like Peace and Focus on
Sanity are less anguishing, the unpredictability of where the horns will go was
leaving the linstener of that time with a potent sense of disorientation.
Things are going even worse – but we prefer to say: even deeper – with Free
Jazz (Atlantic, 1961), an album where two quartets, one led by Coleman and the
other led by his friend and pivotal figure of that time Eric
Dolphy, are intersecting each other in a disorientating stream of
consciousness of about 37 minutes.
Notably, the previous album This is Our Music
(Atlantic, 1960) features a Coleman composition titled Beauty is a Rare Thing
that in a way anticipates the trumpeter’s future enterprises as you can hear
through Mu, a collection of two LPs issued by Actuel in 1969. But let’s keep on
following the tracks in the right order. Obviously Ornette Coleman’s music not
only encountered solid oppositions, but also arose curiosity at a point in which
another contrasted innovator, the above nominated John Coltrane, in 1961 wanted
to record an entire album of Coleman compositions alongside with his partners
Don Cherry on pocket trumpet, Percy Heath and Charlie Haden on bass, and Ed
Blackwell on drums.
Listening to the album The Avant Garde released
by Atlantic is a strange experience. One can hear Coltrane trying to fit
Coleman melodies with his peculiar style, not following harmolodic rules –
harmolodics is the name of the music theory Coleman gave shape through his
playing and thinking – but his own path. In a way this is comprehensible since
no jazz musician can play as someone else and everybody has to stay as close as
possible to his or her world of reference, but in another way this album seem to
me as a wasted opportunity since there is not a real encounter between Coleman
and Coltrane worlds, only a juxtaposition of compositions and styles into one
album.
Anyway, soon Don Cherry started figuring out
how his own music would sound, and soon he signed a contract with Blue Note
producing his own trilogy in which one can hear how playing with two giants
saxophonists helped him developing his own conception of art. Cherry’s trilogy
embodying Complete Communion (Blue Note, 1965), Symphony for Improvisers (1966)
and Where is Brooklyn? (1967) is one of the most accomplished statements in the
realm of improvised music.
The concept is similar for each of the three
records: there is a theme introducing a ‘tutti’, a unison, and then there is
place for every soloist in order to express himself. If Complete Communion,
featuring Gato Barbieri on tenor, Henry Grimes (from Albert Ayler combos) on
bass and Ed Blackwell on drums, divided into two different parts, one for each
LP side, it’s the most airy and catchy, relatively speaking, while the ending
of the trilogy is left to the most newyorican, groovy and nervous Where is
Brooklin?, where Cherry is supported by Pharoah Sanders, increasing his debt
with Trane idea of sound and music.
Symphony for Improvisers, the album that stays
in the middle of the trilogy, is possibly the most complex. The line up is
comprised of Cherry on pocket trumpet, Pharoah Sanders and Gato Barbieri, Henry
Grimes, Karl Berger on piano and vibraphone – possibly after the removal of
these melodic instruments from the Coleman groups Cherry would love to know how
they could be reintegrated into the music without loosing that peculiar stream
of consciousness his pal gave life to – and the resulting music is aggressive,
intimate and fluent at the same time.
Another couple of collaborations we have to
mention are Charlie Haden project of the Liberation Music Orchestra (Impulse!,
1969), where Cherry is present with both his pocket trumpet and a flute, giving
life to a melange between the songs the Hispanic anarchists were singing
between their courageous battles against the army of Francisco Franco and more
free jazz oriented parts, and the previous album recorded by the New York
Contemporary Five with Archie Shepp (Sonet, 1964), where Cherry, Shepp on
tenor, altoist John Tchicai, bassist Don Moore and drummer J.C. Moses give life
to a music devoted to Coleman’s and Monk’s heritage.
But Cherry is the kind of person who don’t
sleep on other people’s music theories, and by 1968-69 he starts exploring new
territories in music, thanks also to a fruitful collaboration with Terry
Riley, giving life to a previously unheard mix of improvised, ethnic music,
art rock and psychedelia (not all the subgenres are always present together in
the same project, but they convey into Cherry’s music as far as their essence,
leaving every album and every project free to develop where the particular
moment and musicians involved can make the sound fluorish).
More theatrical than his previous music, as one
can see through different live performances recorded live and reproducible
online, Don Cherry’s new path will be harshly absorbed by jazz intellighentzja,
but important tracks will be visible in artists like Sergeij
Kuryiokhin, a musician we talked diffusely last year. Mu – First Part and
Mu – Second Part (BYG, 1969 and 1970) are possibly Cherry masterpieces,
together with Symphony for Improvisers. Featuring the trumpeter accompanied
only by Ed Blackwell on drums in a series of beautiful duets where Don Cherry
plays time after time his pocket trumpet, a bamboo flute, piano, his own voice
and a series of small percussions, this couple of records helped the musician
in finding his own most personal voice.
Not ascribable exclusively to the realm of
improvised music nor to that of exotic or world music but living a life of its
own somewhere in the middle, this music is the higher point in Cherry’s career,
not easily replicable as the less accomplished El Corazon (ECM, 1982) will show
and an inspirational source for musicians to come, as the double CD Piercing
The Veil (AUM Fidelity, 2007) by Cherry’s enthousiasts bassist William Parker
and drummer Hamid Drake will show you.
Don Cherry’s releases at this point in his
career become discontinuous and sometimes repetitive even if in a way
fascinating. Orient and Blue Lake (both BYG, 1971) are attempts to broaden the
landscape adding tampoura – played by his wife Moqi Cherry – and other
instruments to the palette of the two Mu, but partly for the repetition of some
formulas partly because of a lesser compelling inspiration the result is
discontinuous.
A fascinating result is, instead, Brown Rice
(Horizon, 1975) where Cherry, at his own pocket trumpet and also at Yamaha
keyboards is accompanied by Frank Lowe on tenor saxophone, Charlie Haden on
bass, Billy Higgins on drums and Ricky Cherry at acoustic and electric piano,
giving live to a music similar to the so called krautrock explored in the same
years by Can – raised by Irmin Schmidt, a student of Karlheinz Stockhausen,
where psychedelia and trance are scratched by Lowe’s statements and sweetened
by Don’s caressing but at the same time determined voice.
During his last years, Cherry’s music was
issued by Manfred Eicher’s ECM, a label famous for his peculiar sound design:
Cherry encountered old friends like Charlie Haden and new accolites like
percussionist Nana Vasconcelos, producing a less adventuros but better recorded
music coherently in line with his Theatre of Eternal Music idea. Passed away on
October 19, 1995, Cherry’s music is one of the most intriguing and personal statements
of one of the most creative of XX Century.
Sometimes you’re uneasy or unfamiliar, at least
at the beginning, with what comes out of your stereo or during a concert
onstage, and sometimes this unfamiliarity or this sort of uneasiness is good
for you. Terry Riley said once that when we’re at ease with music, it is
because we project something about ourselves in it, and this is not completely
good. I’m paraphrasing, but this is also what I think.
Not that this Chirps, recorded live in 1985 in
Berlin at the Haus am Waldsee, is a particularly difficult record to handle.
Not at all, if you still know the music of the two masters involved in this
album. Steve Lacy started the most vital part of his career as a sideman for
Thelonious Monk, and he transposed that ‘hip’ language, so angular, peculiar
and full of spaces between the notes, on his own instrument, the soprano
saxophone.
After all, soprano is one of the most difficult
horns to play. Being a straight reed instrument, it doesn’t warm or round the
microtones every instrument carry with itself. So, instead of try and hide the
mistakes, Lacy started to exacerbate them. His peculiar way of playing soprano
starts from that point. An italian follower of Lacy, the mourned Gianni Mimmo,
once explained that to an AAJ interviewer.
And Roscoe Mitchell once said to me he was try
and build new curved sopranos in order to have some more enjoyable and able to
be mastered instruments. Strangely enough, but undoubtedly, from Monk another
road lead to the soprano. This other path passes through John Coltrane and his
tritones, his almost binaural sound.
An idea that had a further development thanks
to Evan Parker. Parker is not a simple musician to handle, you cannot put him
in a box quickly, because he passed through various phases and his sound and
techniques have evolved during the passing of time forming a wider palette. So
before listening to this particular record I thought I would listen to two
different way of playing soprano and their attempt to mix together in a way or
another.
Obviously the album is different from what I
thought at the beginning: Parker and Lacy try to come close the one to the
other. If Lacy initially seems to be the more keen on his usual style, the one
we have described before in this post, Parker demonstrates a great ability to
dialogue and fold his techniques in order to create the best music in order to
accompany his partner.
Only at the end of Full Scale, the album
first track, Parker explodes in something that can be related to his binaural
outbursts sculpted into the void, with Lacy following him. For the rest the
relationship between full (of sound) and void are fiercely lacy-esque. What
changes between this record and others outputs – I think particularly of a 1986
release of Lacy and Potts – is that Parker share a similar idea of time and
recollection.
If you’ll listen to the second track,
Relations, you’ll hear the usual Lacy’s angularities interspersed with Parker
attempts to create a more fragmented sound, something unusual since Lacy looks
often for less abrasive, more grandiloquent partners in order to create a
contrast and have some propulsion for his own statements.
It seem to me, this way, that this music is
really one of the best attempts, even more than Lacy supported by another
partner, pianist Mal Waldron, to be loyal to Monk heritage, not literally but
as a matter of spirit. The final four minutes of Twittering present another
dialogue where some phrases are taken from one instrumentalist to the other in
order to build variations and diversities yet in a perspective of unity.
My final advice is not to be disappointed by
the shortness of the album (only 41 minutes and 31 seconds) because this kind
of dialogues need time to develop themselves; on the other hand it would be
easy for such navigated improvisers to try and amaze the audience with longer
performances emptying all the pockets with tricks and techniques. The
interesting thing about this record is, instead, that the musician kind of want
you to take your time and enjoy the music, leaving you with the opportunity to
listen to it again more than once. You’ll want more for sure.
October 2, 1965, a Saturday night. The
place is The Penthouse, a club held by Joe Brazil where people like Roland Kirk
and Chick Corea played many times. Mr Brazil won’t be very happy of the
performance of that night, but not because of the music: the deal is, ‘Trane
lovers drink only one beer, then they listen to that demanding music with
almost religious concentration. But they’re right. That night, John Coltrane
enlarged his historical quartet in order to welcome a bunch of other musicians,
so it was worh to listen to them carefully.
It wasn’t the first time for the multireedist,
this kind of enlargement of his quartet. Few months before, during the sessions
leading to the album The John Coltrane Quartet Plays, he hosted bassist Art
Davis, along with Jimmy Garrison, for a mournful version of the classic song
Nature Boy. Also, the same year, Coltrane recorded his pivotal album Ascension,
released only the following year, where he led his classical quartet plus Art
Davis again, trumpeters Freddie Hubbard and Dewey Johnson, altoists Marion
Brown and John Tchicai, and tenorists Pharoah Sanders and Archie Shepp.
This period, from 1965 until the end of ‘Trane
life in 1967 for a liver cancer, is my favorite in the saxophonist career. Les
schizophrenic than the previous years, where Impulse! managers were constantly
asking him to produce a hit song like Atlantic’s My Favorite Things, forcing
the musician to issue records like Ballads, John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman,
and Duke Ellington and John Coltrane, while it was clear listening to his less
commercial stuff like Africa/Brass, India and the live versions of My Favorite
Things what Coltrane’s real direction was, the 1965/1967 period marks the end
of the classic quartet and an attempt to follow more experimental paths.
Unluckily the extraordinary machine of the
classic quartet in the end disbanded. Pianist McCoy Tyner declared more than
once how unable to listen to the music he was with the passing of time, due to
the volume of the two tenors – Coltrane took Pharoah Sanders as a permanent
member of his band, and for a short amount of time tried to set a couple of
drummers, putting Rashied Ali and Elvin Jones side by side – the latter also
said farewell not knowing exactly how to manage with the uncertainties of
‘Tranes experimentations.
But with Alice Liddle, further also Coltrane’s
wife, on piano, and Jimmy Garrison as the only member of the previous group
remained as pivotal contrabass, the music went on for that short amount of time
leaving some masterpieces like Meditation, the above mentioned Ascension, Kulu
Sé Mama and the drums/saxophone duets contained in the beautiful Interstellar
Space.
Anyway, that night, the second occasion we know
in which Coltrane played the A Love Supreme suite in its entirety, was for sure
a special night. Just to start, Carlos Ward on alto and Pharoah Sanders on
tenor and percussions are present in this concert/record, as well as Donald
Rafael Garret at a second bass. Ward has been mostly a sidemen for people like
Coltrane, Karl Berger, Don Cherry, Abdullah Ibrahim and Cecil Taylor if we
refer to jazz, but for the most part of his life the man played also funk.
Donald Rafael Garret has been one of those rare
musicians whose career is difficult to put in a box and to label. A
collaborator of Muhal Richard Abrahms and his Experimental Band, he played also
with Sun Ra, Coltrane – he is present also on the double album Live In Seattle,
on Om and on Kulu Sé Mama –Johnny
Griffin and Roland Kirk between the many others.
This version of A Love Supreme is very far from
the original, even if the themes of the four sections are all expressed in
their entirety and clearly distinguishable. But the variety of musicians involved
and the different intros before every part of the suite make this album one of
those products of research you can also be disappointed with, if you’re not
that much adventurous. Another characteristic of this record is that the use of
small percussions by Sanders and the presence of Ward make this rendition of
the suite more keen on the experiments of the AACM, building a bridge between
the wave of NY free jazz and the Chicagoan avant garde movement.
Those who are familiar with the Juan-Les-Pins
version of the suite – played on July 26, 1965 by his classic quartet – will be
not particularly swept up by ‘Trane performances on this Seattle date, since he
was careful in order to leave the correct amount of space to his many hosts.
Ward solo on Pursuance is possibly the most interesting part of the record
since it is completely unheard before and Ward himself is not an
overrepresented musician – unluckily – but for sure he has something to say:
his solo is flamboyantly obliquous but clear and meaningful in his statement.
Pharoah Sanders solo on Pursuance is something
every Coltrane fan wanted to hear in a clearer recorded environment since the
release of the Olatunji Concert in 1999. There, the noise of the poor recording
wasn’t helpful in making us concentrate on Sanders honks, squeals, parodistic
marches, while here his solo, that for some parts is not that much different
from that on My Favorite Things, is finally clearly audible.
And it is an important statement. Apparently,
Pharoah is not matching with the rest of the band and seems not consequent to
what John previously have played, but if you listen closely it makes completely
sense. Hazardous as it is melodically, harmonically and chromatically, Sanders’
solo is one you don’t forget quickly and that in a way change emotionally at
every listening, depending on the feeling it moves in you, that can be
different every time.
In his liner notes for the album, Ashley Kahn
writes that maybe there can be other live versions of A Love Supreme to
discover. We hope so, and we hope they will be different the one from the
other, in order to touch with our ears how different even a perfect music can
be while involving other human hearts or the same in different occasions. Quick
note for the listener: this live version is recorded with the drums and the
piano on the foreground and the saxophones and the bass on the background.
Disappointing as this can be for some of you, some people say that listening to
it in mono, if your stereo gives you this opportunity, is a good
correction.
March 6th, 1963. Englewood
Cliffs, Van Gelder Studios. Saxophonist John Coltrane joined his
partners – bassist Jimmy Garrison, pianist McCoy Tyner and drummer
Elvin Jones – for a recording session. The result will be: four
short versions of Impressions (one pianoless), two untitled originals
with Trane on soprano (the most interesting pieces), a version of
Nature Boy which is a short game based on the theme of the song, two
versions of Vilia, one Slow Blues and two versions of the piece One
Up, One Down.
Part of the material, recorded the day
before the session with singer Johnny Hartman, is pianoless. That
means that possibly Trane had Sonny Rollins, his eternal rival, in
mind. Hearing for the first time this material, Rollins said “This
is like finding a new room in the great pyramid”. But we're so far
here from a “new Coltrane album”, from a “lost album”.
The recordings, held by Naima Grubbs,
Trane's first wife, and discovered only recently, are in fact only a
session of music, recorded only with the purpose of leaving Coltrane
free to listen to them. An album is usually something more complex,
with material coming from different sessions. So, while listening to
this record anyone can feel like a peeping tom, which is quite good
since you're listening to unreleased material by John Coltrane.
Ok, so what about the music? The two
untitled originals go near the land of free jazz, while the remaining
pieces are pure post-bop. Trane himself described his style and
articulation to Wayne Shorter as “starting a sentence in the middle
and then going to the beginning and the end of it at the same time”.
And obviously you can hear that in this
session. The music in this album is important since you can hear
Coltrane on solid rock starting with his future sonic
experimentations, in a period, our present tense, of reflux, with so
many musicians standing on solid ground. A call to do something else,
something new.
