The Guide to Classic Recorded Jazz (71 page)

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Authors: Tom Piazza

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BOOK: The Guide to Classic Recorded Jazz
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second solo and Stitt the first; the liner notes have the order backward), and, above all, the ferocious, up-tempo "The Eternal Triangle," on which Rollins and Stitt each take extended solos, then come back for chorus after chorus of exchanges that are the stuff of myth. Rollins pulls out all the stops; his big-toned style and percussive lines are perfectly complemented by Stitt's even, sinuous straight bop lines, each one's brilliance drawing out even greater brilliance from the other. This is one of the greatest cutting contests ever captured by recording equipment. Rollins probably ends up on top, but not by a whole lot. Please don't miss this.
John Coltrane
John Coltrane was certainly one of the most influential tenor saxophonists in jazz, an intense, searching player with an instantly identifiable sound. But beyond that, he was a dedicated artist who practiced incessantly and never stopped growing; he became influential not just as an instrumentalist but as a bandleader in the early 1960s, leading a quartet with McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, and Elvin Jones.
Coltrane began his musical life in the late 1940s steeped in the bebop idiom, as well as in all the other music that had come before (Sidney Bechet was his inspiration in picking up the soprano saxophone); by the early 1960s he was one of the elder statesmen of the avant-garde, or free jazz, movement of the time. Coltrane was, from all reports and from the aural evidence, a hardworking craftsman whose dedication to the craft was a channel for enormous vital energy. Everything Coltrane played, until the final phase of his career, was extremely ordered and even mathematical in its formal preoccupation.
He was fascinated with the technical sound-producing qualities of the tenor itself and expanded the conception of what could be done on the horn, even playing more than one note at a time (as he does on "Harmonique," on the album
Coltrane Jazz
[Atlantic 1354-2]). More important, he was obsessed with the mathematical aspects of linear harmony and seemed to have set himself the task, for a while at least, of playing every permutation of every possible scale on every chord change in the popular songs and jazz standards he performed. This produced a sort of musical blur comprised of carefully articulated melodic elements played at high speed, a technique critic Ira Gitler dubbed "sheets of sound." It was as if Coltrane were trying to get to a place beyond harmony by running harmony out to its limit, pointing toward a drone effect by using chord changes to their logical extreme, just as many different colors projected on a blank wall will combine to produce white.
The particular musical dilemma he found himself in as the 1950s drew to a
 
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close had wide implications for jazz as a whole. Coltrane's musical development is discussed in some detail in the Ensembles section; this section will focus on mapping out the best recordings he made as a leader and sideman.
Early Trane
Coltrane began more or less as a Dexter Gordon imitator, and throughout his career (at least until its final phase) Gordon's influence was audible both in Coltrane's sound and in his legato, chord-changes-oriented approach to improvising. His first recorded solo, on "We Love to Boogie," a 1951 Dizzy Gillespie record, may be heard on
Dizzy Gillespie: Dee Gee Days
(Savoy ZDS 4426). The Gordon influence is obvious, although Trane's characteristic wail is there already, along with one or two typical harmonic turns of mind in his second chorus.
Our real interest in Coltrane begins when he joined the Miles Davis quintet in late 1955. Although he had played with Gillespie and with Johnny Hodges's band, he was hardly well known. The records he made with the quintet put him on the map; his volubility and fire were the perfect contrast to Davis's lyricism and spare playing, and the sound of the band, with Red Garland's popping piano, Paul Chambers's full, brilliant bass, and the galvanic drumming of Philly Joe Jones, is irresistible and not dated in the least.
The albums they made for Prestige -
The New Miles Davis Quintet
(Prestige/OJC-006),
Cookin'
(Prestige/OJC-128),
Relaxin'
(Prestige/OJC-190),
Workin'
(Prestige/OJC-296), and
Steamin'
(Prestige/OJC-391) - are discussed in the Miles Davis section, as is their first Columbia set, '
Round about Midnight
(CK 40610). They are excellent, full of great solos by all. In them we can hear Coltrane working out his sound and his approach to playing on changes. He stayed with Davis until early 1957 when he left to free-lance, working during the summer and fall with the Thelonious Monk quartet.
Until recently, the only surviving recordings of that Monk quartet, which played a legendary engagement at New York's Five Spot, were some studio titles included on
Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane
(Jazzland/OJC-039). Coltrane plays fabulous things on Monk's "Nutty," the intricate "Trinkle, Tinkle," and the lyrical, gorgeous masterpiece "Ruby, My Dear." Essential Monk, essential Coltrane. This set also includes alternate takes of two tunes from the session that produced
Monk's Music
(Riverside/OJC-084), a large-band date that paired Coltrane with tenor patriarch Coleman Hawkins. In 1993, though, Blue Note released some recordings that Coltrane's wife made of the Monk quartet at the Five Spot in the summer of 1957, with Ahmed-Abdul Malik on bass and Roy Haynes on drums in place of Wilbur Ware and Shadow Wilson, respectively.
The Thelonious Monk Quartet Featuring John Coltrane
-
 
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Live at the Five Spot: Discovery!
(Blue Note CDP 0777 7 99786 2 5) has fairly bad sound, but the music contained therein is tremendous, with Coltrane really roaring through five Monk standards (including another version of "Trinkle, Tinkle"). Coltrane rejoined Davis in 1958.
In 1957 Coltrane commenced a career as an amazingly prolific recording artist, along with his duties in the Davis and Monk bands. In 1957 and 1958 alone he made countless recordings both as a leader and a sideman for seemingly every label in existence. His playing from this period, during which he was evolving the sheets of sound technique, is brilliant, but Coltrane is depending more on the harmonic outline of the tunes than on their melodic nature for the shape of his improvisations - as opposed, say, to Sonny Rollins's playing, which took the tunes' melodic, rhythmic, and lyrical aspects into account during the improvisation.
Rollins's records of the time have radically different qualities; many of Coltrane's have a sort of sameness, which is partly due to the continuity in sidemen, often consisting of the Miles Davis rhythm team of Red Garland and Paul Chambers, with Art Taylor on drums. These records, most of which were made for Prestige, contain extraordinary music, but I will concentrate on what I consider to be the strongest and most representative and will only briefly outline what's on most of the rest.
One of the best recordings of this period, perhaps the very best, is
Blue Train
(Blue Note 46095), recorded in September 1957 with a fine band including Lee Morgan on trumpet, Curtis Fuller on trombone, and a rhythm section of Kenny Drew, Paul Chambers, and Philly Joe Jones. The session was obviously carefully worked out and consists of four Coltrane originals nicely arranged for the sextet and one standard ballad ("I'm Old Fashioned"). All the ingredients combined to form a session that loses none of its freshness with repeated playing.
The justly famous title track is a medium-tempo blues that evokes the classic blues subject of the train. The hauntingly voiced call-and-response theme gives way to one of Coltrane's greatest solos, in which he is abetted by an alert rhythm section that keeps the terrain interesting and, at one point, by a lonesome midnight train whistle background from Morgan and Fuller. Trane mixes up straight eighth notes with faster passages of sixteenth notes, which then give way to eighth notes again. The structures of phrases that he plays are the same, but in the passages where he plays faster, more information needs to be absorbed more quickly, sometimes so quickly that it nearly becomes a blur. The effect is similar to being on a train, watching buildings in the distance, then going through a small town at the same speed but where the buildings are much closer. Listen to the way, when the other horns first come in for their
 
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background riff, Trane (and Philly Joe, who has been playing a little double-time figure) downshifts, in effect, back into a brief passage of shorter phrases with more held notes, as if he has come out into open country again.
The rest of the album is great also. "Moment's Notice" was, at the time, the same kind of gauntlet to musicians that "Giant Steps" was to be a couple of years later - a rapidly shifting harmonic obstacle course in which the chords changed twice per measure for most of the tune, posing a real challenge to the musicians' presence of mind and harmonic knowledge, as if they were forced to play the bridge of "Cherokee" for an entire chorus. Still, the nature of the chord movement in ''Moment's Notice" was relatively conventional, whereas that in "Giant Steps" was very unusual for the time. "Moment's Notice" also incorporates breaks for each soloist at the beginning of choruses. Everyone plays beautifully on this, especially Coltrane, who takes the hurdles effortlessly, and Morgan, who leaps and runs, setting off firecrackers and sparklers along the way. "Lazy Bird" and "Locomotion" are both up-tempo Coltrane originals of unusual structure. Although the album notes call the latter a blues, it isn't, exactly; it is, rather, a forty-four-bar chorus made up of two twelve-bar blues "choruses," an eight-bar bridge, and another twelve bars in the blues form. And "I'm Old Fashioned" is a warm, reflective Coltrane ballad. All in all, a landmark album, essential to any jazz collection.
Probably the best balanced of all the quartet albums Coltrane recorded with the rhythm section of Red Garland, Paul Chambers, and Art Taylor is
Soultrane
(Prestige/OJC-021), from February 1958. Here Trane is at the beginning of his sheets of sound period; on the opener, a walking-tempo version of Tadd Dameron's "Good Bait," Trane is a whirlwind of mighty, searching, double- and triple-timed passages, involving a fabulous command of scales and breath control. "I Want to Talk about You" was a ballad associated with Billy Eckstine; Coltrane's version here shows off his beautiful tone and his soul. He returned to this tune over and over throughout his career. The other ballad, "Theme for Ernie," is dedicated to altoist Ernie Henry. "You Say You Care" is a dazzling, surging, medium-up-tempo performance on which Coltrane struts his stuff in grand style, moving back and forth between straight bebop tenor and the sheets of sound approach. "Russian Lullaby" is a punishingly fast ride on Irving Berlin's melody; Coltrane here defies gravity and the laws of physics. This album is programmed very intelligently, like a good set in a nightclub, the faster tunes spelled by the more relaxed items. If you like Coltrane, you will love this one.
Coltrane
(Prestige/OJC-020; not to be confused with the Impulse album of the same name) is an excellent, varied set including several tracks on which Coltrane is joined by trumpeter Johnny Splawn and baritonist Sahib Shihab,
 
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the standout of which is probably a churning version of trumpeter Cal Massey's "Bakai." "Time Was" is a medium-up swinger, on which Trane peels off chorus after chorus of solid bebop tenor. He was especially good at this kind of thing, as he also showed on ''I Hear a Rhapsody," recorded at the same session and included on
Lush Life
(Prestige/OJC-131), and "My Shining Hour" on
Coltrane Jazz
(Atlantic 1354-2). Another standout here is "While My Lady Sleeps," with its mysterioso, late-night groove.
The rest of the Prestige titles are, for the most part, more workaday affairs, often with a somewhat thrown-together feeling about them. Still, they all contain good playing. The following titles feature Trane backed by the Garland-Chambers-Taylor rhythm section.
Black Pearls
(Prestige/OJC-352), from May 1958, which also features trumpeter Donald Byrd, is probably most notable for "Sweet Sapphire Blues," an example of the sheets of sound technique taken to its extreme, a blur of scalar passages played with utmost facility. Listen to the rhythm section play away in time-honored rock-the-joint fashion, while Coltrane speeds past our ears like a train speeding past a building too near to focus on.
Settin' the Pace
(Prestige/OJC-078), from March 1958, contains a good ballad, I See Your Face Before Me," and a racehorse run on "Rise and Shine," but Coltrane plays his best on Jackie McLean's "Little Melonae," on which the soloists play mainly on one scale rather than a set of chord changes. Trane builds a powerful solo here out of motifs which he turns, turns again, double times, plays in different registers and different places in the scale, before transmuting them or countering them with different motifs.
Traneing In
(Prestige/OJC-189), recorded in August 1957, has very strong Trane on the title track, a rocking, medium-tempo blues on which the tenorist plays a solo that grows in complexity as it proceeds. "You Leave Me Breathless" is a fine ballad on which Coltrane shows great control of the horn's upper reaches, and "Soft Lights and Sweet Music" is another ultra-fast set of standard changes, through which Coltrane makes his way seemingly effortlessly.
Bahia
(Prestige/OJC-415), from December 1958, has two great tracks: the title tune, on which Coltrane plays some very strong stuff over a mambo vamp that occasionally, teasingly, slides into swing, and "Goldsboro Express," a tenor-bass-drums outing that consists almost entirely of rapid-fire exchanges between Coltrane and Art Taylor, prefiguring Trane's later high-energy duets with Elvin Jones.
Three albums recorded late in 1957 and early in 1958 under Red Garland's name feature Coltrane and Donald Byrd, with George Joyner (later known as Jamil Nasser) replacing Paul Chambers on bass.
All Mornin' Long
(Prestige/OJC-293) is probably the best, with its long, walking-tempo blues title track (once recorded by Sir Charles Thompson, with Charlie Parker guesting, as "20th Century Blues"), a relaxed "They Can't Take That Away from Me," and

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