The Guide to Classic Recorded Jazz (72 page)

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Authors: Tom Piazza

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BOOK: The Guide to Classic Recorded Jazz
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a very hot version of Tadd Dameron's "Our Delight" (listen to how Joyner, at the end of the first eight bars of Coltrane's solo, juggles the time slightly by sliding a few notes downward on the bass). Everyone gets a chance to stretch out throughout.
High Pressure
(Prestige/OJC-349) features a rolling, up-tempo, fourteen-minute version of the blues "Soft Winds," on which Garland, especially, shines, and a swinging "Two Bass Hit," on which Trane scores.
Dig It!
(Prestige/OJC-392) is the most ordinary of the three; a long (sixteen-minute), slow blues called "Lazy Mae'' dominates the set, which also features Trane wrapped in his sheets of sound for Charlie Parker's "Billie's Bounce," a short trio version of "Crazy Rhythm" sans Coltrane, and a fast run-through of Jimmy Heath's "C.T.A."
Lastly,
Lush Life
(Prestige/OJC-131) and
The Last Trane
(Prestige/OJC-394) are sets that combine material from several sessions.
Lush Life
is the more satisfying of the two, with its three trio tracks with bassist Earl May and drummer Art Taylor (including the excellent, self-descriptive "Trane's Slo Blues"), a gorgeous version of Billy Strayhorn's ballad "Lush Life," and the medium-up cooker "I Hear a Rhapsody."
The Last Trane
has not one but two long, slow blues, back-to-back, as well as a ballad ("Come Rain or Come Shine") and a blistering, up-tempo reading of "Lover." It's all fine, individually, but taken together it makes for an unbalanced set. Two 1958 Savoy sets issued under the joint leadership of Coltrane and trumpeter Wilbur Harden,
Countdown
(ZD 70529) and
Africa
(ZD 70818), contain plenty of good Coltrane (along with pianist Tommy Flanagan), but he has to split the solo duties with Harden, under whose leadership the sessions were originally recorded. They are nice but hardly the first Trane to jump on.
Two albums featuring Coltrane as a sideman are also worth mentioning. Pianist Sonny Clark's October 1957
Sonny's Crib
(Blue Note 46819) has some fine Trane in the company of Donald Byrd, trombonist Curtis Fuller, and the rhythm team of Paul Chambers and Art Taylor playing three standards and a couple of good Clark originals. And
Chambers' Music
(Blue Note 84437) contains some interesting earlier glimpses of Coltrane, from 1955 and 1956, in quartet and sextet sessions led by bassist Paul Chambers.
Kind of Blue
By January 1958 Coltrane was again a member of Miles Davis's band, now expanded to a sextet including altoist Julian "Cannonball" Adderley. Coltrane would remain with the band until mid-1960, when he would go on his own with epochal results. But the things he learned and worked out while with Davis during this second stint were to be of the utmost importance to him.
The first recording the new sextet made was the landmark
Milestones
 
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(Columbia CK 40837); it was also the last recording Davis would make with the Garland-Chambers-Jones rhythm section that had been in place since 1955. They definitely ended on a high note. It is discussed in the Miles Davis section of this book, along with the other Davis albums with Coltrane. Trane takes great solos throughout, but two things should be underlined here - his staggering, high-velocity exchanges with Adderley on Jackie McLean's "Dr. Jackie" (called "Dr. Jekyll" here) and his beautiful solo on the unforgettable "Miles," a first taste of the modal approach that would be explored fully a year later on
Kind of Blue
(Columbia CK 40579). In the summer of 1958 the sextet, with Bill Evans replacing Red Garland and Jimmy Cobb replacing Philly Joe Jones, appeared at the Newport Jazz Festival. Five tracks recorded at that appearance are available on
Miles and Coltrane
(Columbia CK 44052), along with two 1955 quintet tracks. The Newport items show the band in a hard-charging mood, a satisfying glimpse of them in actual performance.
But 1959 was the watershed year for Coltrane, a year in which he both explored the running-the-changes approach about as far as it could be explored and began to investigate a way out of that approach that would have a huge impact on the way young jazz players would sound for years to come. Before discussing these twin aspects of Coltrane's development, I should mention two albums he recorded as coleader at the beginning of that year,
Cannonball and Coltrane
(with Cannonball Adderley; EmArcy 834 588) and
Bags, & Trane
(with Milt Jackson; Atlantic 1368-2). The album with altoist Adderley, by the Miles Davis band without Davis, is discussed in the Adderley section of the
Guide
; it is full of good Coltrane in his
Milestones
bag.
Bags & Trane
is highly recommended; it includes some very swinging Coltrane (in the company of vibes player Jackson, one of the most swinging musicians in jazz, as well as a rhythm section of Hank Jones, Paul Chambers, and Connie Kay) on tasty versions of "Three Little Words," the medium-tempo "The Late, Late Blues," a very fast version of Dizzy Gillespie's "Bebop," and several other fine tracks.
But Miles Davis's
Kind of Blue
(Columbia CK 40579) and Coltrane's own
Giant Steps
(Atlantic 1311-2), recorded within a month of each other in the spring of 1959, are the seminal albums of this period, pointing to the exhaustion of one approach and the opening of another. The Ensembles section looks at this phase of Coltrane's career in some detail and discusses the significance of both sides of Trane's searching at this time.
Giant Steps
's title tune is an extension of the approach Coltrane took on
Blue Train
's "Moment's Notice": a rapid-fire steeplechase of changing harmonic terrain, only with much more unusual chord movement than in the earlier performance. Coltrane here is a volcano of ideas and swing; it is a startling, up-tempo workout that gives full exercise to Coltrane's peerless harmonic
 
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knowledge. His sound had never been as open and forceful as it is on this album, which consists entirely of his own compositions. Aside from the title tune (and "Countdown," which involves a similar, complex harmonic plan), the set includes several tunes with harmonic and rhythmic devices that point up Coltrane's harmonic development. The ballad "Naima" uses suspended chords and pedal tones; both devices make the harmonic destination ambiguous, allowing the soloist to take a number of different routes rather than the single tortuous one prescribed in such obstacle courses as "Giant Steps." "Spiral'' also uses a pedal-tone device over a vamp, which alternates with swing rhythm. Another highlight of this landmark set is the minor blues "Mr. P.C.," on which Coltrane tears off sixteen thrilling choruses of furiously swinging tenor over a surging background laid down by Tommy Flanagan, Paul Chambers, and Art Taylor. He returns at the end for some really exciting exchanges with Taylor.
In the two months before most of
Giant Steps
was recorded, Coltrane was in the Columbia studios with the Davis band recording the historic
Kind of Blue
, which popularized the modal approach to improvising that certain musicians were beginning to explore, in which one would play only over one or two scales for long stretches of a tune rather than negotiating a harmonic obstacle course. The sound the Davis band got here, on "So What," "Freddie Freeloader," "Blue in Green," "All Blues," and "Flamenco Sketches," is like a blast of crisp air, and the techniques involved pointed a way for Coltrane out of his, by this time, obsessive mining of the ore in every possible twist and turn of the classic bebop approach. His solos on all the tunes on this album find him playing with an unprecedented lyricism and sensitivity.
Throughout his career, however (until, perhaps, the very end), Coltrane was never locked into one approach; his modal experiments went hand-in-hand with new ways of exploring chord changes, and his most searching playing almost always left room for lighter-hearted work in a more lyrical or swinging vein.
Coltrane Jazz
(Atlantic 1354-2), recorded at the end of 1959, is a very listenable combination of approaches and an excellent introduction to Coltrane's playing. It includes the straight-ahead swingers "My Shining Hour" and "Little Old Lady," as well as "Fifth House," which, like
Giant Steps
's "Spiral," moves between a pedal-point vamp and swing, and the unique "Harmonique," a blues waltz, the melody of which finds Coltrane using the saxophone's natural harmonics to produce more than one note at a time (he uses the same technique at the end of "Fifth House"). The accompanying group is, for the most part, a quartet consisting of Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers, and Jimmy Cobb, the rhythm section from the Miles Davis band, of which Coltrane was still a member.
 
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Coltrane Plays the Blues
(Atlantic 1382-2), recorded late in 1960, is an important album in many respects, not the least of which is that Coltrane by this time had his classic quartet of the early 1960s almost entirely in place. He had left Miles Davis's band and now used McCoy Tyner on piano and Elvin Jones on drums, both of whom would remain with him for the next few years; bassist Steve Davis would be replaced before too long by Jimmy Garrison. This set, consisting of a number of different approaches to blues-based material, finds Coltrane further exploring his use of what sound like Moorish, West African, and Indian scalar patterns, as well as other ways of overlaying different scales on the basic tonality of the piece, as in the fast, pianoless "Blues to You," on which he switches keys like an express train switching tracks at a moment's notice, going farther and farther from the tonal center but building on what has come before and never becoming indecipherable. He is exploring the horns's technical side, too, inserting false or alternate fingerings into his long lines, playing the same note twice with slightly different sounds.
His rhythmic sense is becoming more defined as well; he breaks up his lines into different groupings of notes. Whereas most bop-rooted players tended to play phrases that were fairly closely tied to the multiple-of-four pattern suggested by the four-four beat characteristic of the music, Coltrane had started breaking up his lines into three- and five-note groupings as often as the more standard patterns. This gave his melodies polyrhythmic implications that fit in perfectly with Elvin Jones's way of accenting. Often, a kind of six-eight beat was implied against the four-four, a technique that Coltrane would develop more and more. Coltrane also plays soprano saxophone on several titles.
Listen to the subtle distinctions, too, that are made in tempo here. The first two slow blues, "Blues to Elvin" and "Blues to Bechet," are very close in tempo, but the second is ever-so-slightly faster, contributing to its different mood (as does Coltrane's choice of different saxophones, of course). This kind of attention to detail was to set Coltrane apart over the next few years. Harmonically, the band explores the suspensions, pedal tones, and incantatory vamp forms that Coltrane had been increasingly attracted to (especially on the hypnotic "Mr. Knight," another tune, like "Fifth House" and "Spiral,'' in which vamps and swing trade off with each other). This tendency was encouraged by the presence of McCoy Tyner, whose ideas ran along the same lines and whose chord voicings were often suspended, open chords that were harmonically ambiguous. His touch reminds me of Wynton Kelly's, the notes popping out, but his work was leading to a different place. All in all, this is an important set that showed clearly where Coltrane was heading. Incredibly, the same week in October 1960 in which Coltrane recorded
Coltrane Plays the
 
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Blues
, he recorded two other classic sets,
My Favorite Things
(Atlantic 1361-2), one of his most popular albums, and
Coltrane's Sound
(Atlantic 1419-2).
My Favorite Things
consists of extended treatments of four popular tunes: Rodgers and Hammerstein's "My Favorite Things," Cole Porter's "Everytime We Say Goodbye," and George Gershwin's ''Summertime" and "But Not for Me." All of them are radically transformed by Coltrane's emerging harmonic, rhythmic, and group-organization concept, in a fresh version of the kind of appropriation that jazz always has worked at its best. In this set we can see, with even more focus than in
Coltrane Plays the Blues
, how Coltrane's sensibility was developing in the direction of an incantatory approach. The title tune gives perhaps the best evidence; Coltrane's higher-pitched soprano plays the melody over a swirling six-eight background, with a two-chord harmonic base from Tyner and Davis. The two-chord base has the effect of a breath in and a breath out; consequently, the tune has a much more static feeling than the standard bebop chord-progression, four-four rhythm performance. Instead of a series of lines leading forward in time, the effect of this track is of waves rippling outward from a central source. Coltrane's increasing interest in Eastern religion and African culture seems to have echoed and reinforced a view of things that was based not on progress and forward, or linear, horizontal movement but on stasis and upward, or vertical, movement. Coltrane's emerging spiritual orientation is implicit in the musical choices he was making at the time.
"Everytime We Say Goodbye" and "Summertime" reflect the same techniques and preoccupations in their own way; in the former, the harmony is such that bassist Steve Davis can use the same pedal note for much of the tune, as Tyner, especially, lays various shifting suspended chords on top of it. The effect builds a tension that is then released as the group moves away from that tonal center. "Summertime" is taken on tenor at a swinging, medium-up tempo, which alternates with another pedal-tone vamp; Trane's solo here is in his wailing, sheets of sound bag. Finally, Gershwin's "But Not for Me" is treated to a complete reharmonization and played in swing tempo. One of the essential jazz sets.
Coltrane's Sound
is a somewhat less cohesive album, a more conventional set than the other two, yet it may be my personal favorite of the three. It has perhaps the strongest, most aggressively rhythmic Coltrane blowing of the three, as well as a couple of classic ballads. The opener, a powerhouse version of "The Night Has a Thousand Eyes," follows the by now familiar pedaltone-vamp-and-suspended-chords-alternating-with-swing format, but Coltrane really roars here, as he does on "Liberia," with its out-of-tempo intro that evolves into a churning, rhythmic foray with Coltrane sweeping away

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