The Guide to Classic Recorded Jazz (73 page)

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Authors: Tom Piazza

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BOOK: The Guide to Classic Recorded Jazz
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everything in his path. On this one, check out the break he takes leading into his solo, a startling dive off the high board using several of the alternative-fingering tricks mentioned earlier. This set also includes the beautiful, unique Coltrane ballad composition "Central Park West" and his reworking of the standard "Body and Soul," which uses a piano vamp and substitute harmonies that have gone on to become standard equipment on the tune.
A Love Supreme
Beginning in the spring of 1961, Coltrane recorded for the new Impulse label, which was to become home for many of the farthest-out players of the 1960s avant-garde, including Archie Shepp, Marion Brown, and Albert Ayler. He was encouraged to take as many chances as he wanted, which he did, producing some of the most passionately driven and adventuresome music of the time. Much of Coltrane's music from this period provoked genuinely perplexed, even angry, responses from listeners. We can see why: his music was moving away from the straight-ahead, bebop-rooted music most listeners were accustomed to, with its harmonic and rhythmic structures that spoke of movement through time and eventual resolution, into forms that spoke of incantation, stasis, even trance, a true change in worldview, expressed through harmony and rhythm. His music was moving away from a style that said it was important to move ahead, to get somewhere, toward a style that said one should sit where one was and breathe. Yet he also produced several albums that include the most lyrical statements he ever made on standard popular tunes.
Before looking at the Impulse sets, two other albums must be mentioned. One is Coltrane's final session with Miles Davis's group,
Someday My Prince Will Come
(Columbia CK 40947), which contains two brilliant Coltrane solos-a stunningly melodic one on the title tune and a probing, intense one on the Spanish-flavored "Teo."
Olé
(Atlantic 1373-2) is Coltrane's last date for Atlantic; here he uses Eric Dolphy on flute and alto and Freddie Hubbard on trumpet, as well as Tyner, Elvin Jones, and both Art Davis and Reggie Workman on bass. This is a sort of bridge album, sounding more like his later Impulse sets; the title tune is eighteen minutes long (it took up a full side on the original LP) and is another two-chord, vamp-oriented piece, like "My Favorite Things." This one has an ominous, flamenco-like feeling about it. There's not quite as much Trane here as in many other sets because of the other horns; all in all, it's one of his lesser efforts.
Coltrane's first session for Impulse, available as
Africa/Brass
,
Volume 1 & 2
(MCA/Impulse MCAD-42001), is best known for the three tunes on the original
Affica/Brass
, "Africa," "Greensleeves," and ''Blues Minor." "Africa" features
 
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Coltrane wailing on tenor over an African-flavored vamp, occasionally accompanied by a large ensemble including Booker Little's trumpet and four French horns. This sixteen-and-a-half-minute performance took up an entire album side originally and maintains what Coltrane termed a "drone" effect in the background, over which the tenorist sends out a strong message. "Green-sleeves" is another drone- and vamp-based performance; Coltrane takes the beautiful folk melody for a long ride on soprano. And "Blues Minor" is a full-blown, up-tempo, minor-key blues, on which the rhythm section generates a fantastic drive.
Coltrane "Live" at the Village Vanguard
(MCA/Impulse MCAD-39136) was recorded in performance at the New York City nightclub in November 1961, and it offers three revealing looks at the live Coltrane of the time. "Spiritual" opens the album with a prayerful, out-of-tempo introduction, which leads into a sort of polyrhythmic waltz over a vamp/drone background from Tyner, Jones, and bassist Reggie Workman. Eric Dolphy joins the band for this track on bass clarinet. McCoy Tyner's solo here, and elsewhere in this set, shows just how much he had been absorbing Coltrane's manner of phrasing. After Tyner's solo, Trane comes back on soprano. This nearly fourteen-minute track shows how different this music must have sounded to an audience weaned on bebop.
"Softly as in a Morning Sunrise" is more conventional, couched in a traditional medium-up-tempo four-four groove, with Jones playing brushes behind Tyner's opening solo; he switches to sticks when Coltrane comes steaming in on soprano. But "Chasin' the Trane" is the prize of the set, an up-tempo blues, completely improvised, which Coltrane plays on tenor, a long patrol into a dense musical jungle, with Coltrane playing with five- and four-note motifs and other note groupings, twisting them back and forth in short bursts in a rhythmic counterpoint with Jones's fabulous drumming. (According to Stanley Crouch, Reggie Workman says that it is Jimmy Garrison keeping the strong bass pulse here, not Workman as the notes say. Tyner sits this one out.) You can hear some of Ornette Coleman's melodic influence in places, but nobody had ever played like this before; as Coltrane gets into the solo, he produces all kinds of unusual timbres from the horn, yodeling, squawking, constantly swinging. As the track progresses, he moves farther and farther out harmonically, rhythmically, and timbrally, with Jones on him all the way. This thrilling track has Coltrane blowing constantly for just over sixteen minutes and gives a sense of how compelling he must have been to see live.
Impressions
(MCA/Impulse MCAD-5887) has two tunes recorded a few days later at the same November 1961 Vanguard gig: "India," another vamp/drone-based piece, again featuring Dolphy, and the up-tempo, modal "Impressions"
 
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(structured like Miles Davis's "So What" on
Kind of Blue
[Columbia CK 40579], which qualifies as the first tune recorded by the classic quartet, with Tyner, Jones, and bassist Jimmy Garrison. This is another of those extended tenor forays, like "Chasin' the Trane," on which Coltrane and Elvin Jones really go at it. The album is rounded out by a 1962 blues, which Tyner sits out, and a 1963 quartet ballad.
But it is with 1962's
Coltrane
(MCA/Impulse MCAD-5883) that we enter the era of the classic recordings by the John Coltrane Quartet. From the first notes of the vamp waltz "Out of This World," the sound is in place-Trane blowing full held notes, spelled by leaps into the upper register and rhythmic note clusters, Tyner backing him up with patented voicings that would influence pianists as definitively as Bud Powell's work did in the 1940s, Garrison playing a repeated vamp figure, varying it slightly according to what was going on around him, and, through it all, Jones's polyrhythmic fusillade. This is a classic small-group approach, rooted in the jazz tradition, but bringing something truly new to it.
The set's other tunes are no less remarkable; "Soul Eyes" is a fine, haunting ballad by pianist Mal Waldron, with Coltrane playing the melody at the top end of the tenor's range and returning after Tyner's solo for some searching improvisation; "The Inch Worm" is another vamp-based waltz, a bit slower than "Out of This World," a playful melody that Coltrane renders on soprano; "Tunji" is a meditative, drone-based piece (actually a blues) based on one Eastern-sounding scale; and "Miles' Mode'' is a medium-up-tempo modal swinger. The album is a major statement; Coltrane had figured out a new way to play jazz. He had made all his experimenting come together, and the next three years would be a kind of golden age for him.
My favorite album by the quartet is probably
Crescent
(MCA/Impulse MCAD-5889), from April 1964. By this time the group really thought with one mind and had digested many of the lessons of their new concept. The set has an extremely relaxed yet focused air about it. "Crescent," "Wise One," and "Lonnie's Lament" (mainly a feature for Tyner and Garrison) all open with meditative cadenzas, in which Coltrane's tenor is couched in out-of-tempo playing by the other three, before sliding into slightly different walking tempos. Coltrane here combines his rhythmic, note-cluster approach with a thoughtful, lyrical aspect that bespeaks a great strength. On "Crescent," Coltrane plays a solo that lays triplet accents over the relaxed, walking-tempo four-four pulse in an ingenious way, creating a built-in polyrhythmic melodic aspect for Elvin Jones to play against. Listen to the way, after Tyner drops out, that Jones keeps the tempo going on the ride cymbal while answering all of Coltrane's rhythmic figures with his other stick on the snare drum. "Wise
 
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One"'s undulating, almost bossa-nova-like rhythmic feel brings out a very warm side of Coltrane. "Bessie's Blues" is a happy, up-tempo blues on which Coltrane gradually moves farther and farther out as Tyner stops playing, going head-to-head with Jones before cueing the rest of the band to come back in. A relatively short tune, this is a gem. In all, this is one of the most satisfying sets Coltrane ever recorded.
The John Coltrane Quartet Plays
(MCA/Impulse MCAD-33110) is another outing in which the probing, polyrhythmic side of the group comes out. The selections include a version of the popular song "Chim Chim Cheree," which Coltrane plays on soprano. By this time, early 1965, a change had begun to take place in Coltrane's sound; an emotionally high-pitched, somewhat choked element had entered, and the foundations of his playing were shifting away from a concern with swing and blues tonality. This is, to me, one of the quartet's least satisfying Impulse recordings.
A perennial favorite set by the quartet is the exquisite
Ballads
(MCA/Impulse MCAD-5885), from 1962, certainly one of the greatest mood albums ever recorded. Coltrane and the others play with ultimate lyricism and sensitivity on eight of the best standard ballads, such as "It's Easy to Remember," "Nancy (With the Laughing Face)," and "You Don't Know What Love Is.'' These performances are short, as Coltrane's work from this period goes; only one track is over five minutes. His assignment here was to play melody, to sing on his horn, which he does with consummate grace, producing an album as serene and reflective as
"Live" at the Village Vanguard
is searching and relentless. This is one of those sets that everyone ought to own.
Much the same might be said for Coltrane's March 1963 collaboration with singer Johnny Hartman, called, simply,
John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman
(MCA/Impulse MCAD-5661 JVC-466). This is, if anything, an even greater mood album than
Ballads
, although there is somewhat less from the saxophonist here, proportionately, since he shares the spotlight with Hartman's smooth-as-brandy baritone. The tunes, "They Say It's Wonderful," "Dedicated to You," "My One and Only Love," Billy Strayhorn's "Lush Life" (probably the best version ever recorded of this unique ballad), "You Are Too Beautiful," and "Autumn Serenade," are a well-chosen lot of popular standards, played here at slow, romantic tempos. But the album never drags, never bogs down; it's a marvel of strength and delicacy. Highest recommendation.
Coltrane Live at Birdland
(MCA/Impulse MCAD-33109) is another of the quartet's best, recorded live (except for two added studio cuts) in extremely good sound at the famous nightclub in 1963. Everyone is in great shape here; Tyner gets a long workout on "Afro-Blue," a real chance to hear the trio on an extended outing before Coltrane comes back in on soprano. The version of
 
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the old ballad associated with Billy Eckstine, "I Want to Talk about You," one of Trane's favorites, is extremely revealing, with Coltrane's closing unaccompanied tenor cadenza one of his most dazzling statements. "Alabama," one of the two studio performances, is a dirge full of deep sadness, written after a racially motivated bombing at a Birmingham, Alabama, church left four young girls dead.
Dear Old Stockholm
(GRP/Impulse GRD-120) is interesting for its glimpse of what the quartet might have sounded like had Elvin Jones not been available. Roy Haynes takes over the drums for these five tracks, two of which are from 1963, the remainder from 1965. Haynes is one of jazz's most unjustly neglected drummers, among the public, at least. Here he lights his own kind of fire under the band, especially in the swinging title track and the go-for-broke "One Down, One Up." This is a very enjoyable set, a refreshing change of pace for those who already know the classic Impulse albums backward and forward.
Duke Ellington and John Coltrane
(MCA/Impulse MCAD-39103) is a historic 1962 meeting between jazz's greatest composer and the music's foremost avant-gardist. Many at the time were surprised that the meeting came off so well. They needn't have been; Coltrane had served a full apprenticeship in the music and had built his innovations solidly on what he knew of the music's full sweep. Likewise, it should be no surprise to anyone that Ellington's piano sounds as fresh and "modern" as Tyner's, or anyone's, could. His essentially percussive, rhythmic accompanying style fits in perfectly in these quartet performances that use different combinations of Garrison and Jones and Ellington's bassist, Aaron Bell, and drummer, Sam Woodyard. The program consists of Ellington and Coltrane originals (as well as one by Billy Strayhorn), including a brilliantly arranged "In a Sentimental Mood," the charging "Take the Coltrane,'' and the happy, Latin-tinged "Angelica." But every tune here could be singled out; this was a one-time experiment of the sort that often doesn't satisfy expectations. This time, though, it really worked out. Highly recommended.
One of Coltrane's most famous recordings is certainly the overtly spiritual
A Love Supreme
(MCA/Impulse MCAD-5660 JVC-467), a suite in four parts titled "Acknowledgement," "Resolution," "Pursuance," and "Psalm." Recorded in December 1964, this, too, presents the quartet as a single organism that breathes and thinks together; Jimmy Garrison sets things rolling on "Acknowledgement" by intoning the album's signature four-note melody like a heartbeat. On top of it, Jones, Tyner, and Coltrane play with an extraordinary degree of ordered freedom. This is, obviously, something other than good-time music; it is music that draws on jazz's fundamentals to make a serious devotional statement. And yet, no one can deny the overwhelming swing of

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