THE 'CHAMPION' OF JAZZ
COOK, BRUCE
On Music THE 'CHAMPION' OF JAZZ BY BRUCE COOK The critic, Allen Tate has remarked, is someone who conducts his education in public. The jazz improviser might similarly be called a composer...
...His solos not only held up well under repeated listenings, they practically demanded full attention...
...You can never capture it again...
...Davis then had a habit, as I assume he still does, of walking off the stage as soon as he finished his solo, leaving the rest of the band free to do as they wished...
...He may have been, but the word has become so debased from overuse and misuse that, for me at least, it has ceased to have much meaning...
...Coltrane started out as an admirer of Johnny Hodges for the obvious reasons-beautiful tone, sureness of technique, and so on...
...Coltrane became fascinated by modal scales, and through them went on to Eastern music...
...7.95...
...It was something that stayed with him on the later Atlantic releases...
...In its essentials, it is very much the story I had encountered in recent treatments of Charlie Parker and Bix Beiderbecke...
...He has talked to nearly everyone about him, and in Chasin' the Trane intersperses topical quotes from friends and associates with the text...
...In music, Coltrane pushed himself to master theory far beyond what his fairly rudimentary formal training could have prepared him to absorb...
...That is what Coltrane was-a prodigy of the will...
...The discography at the end of Chasin' the Trane covers more than 20 pages, filled mostly with long-playing records...
...Although the speed and the energy were there, one could also hear a quality of emotion, almost of tenderness, that had been virtually absent from his previous sessions...
...He recorded prolifically, both with his own groups and as a sideman on others...
...Listen to Alternate Takes and you will be able to perceive, I think, what a champion of jazz John Coltrane really was...
...Though two of the men were black and one was white, though they are identified with different eras, the frustrations and pressures of playing were largely the same for all three...
...Still, I knew that I was listening to one of the few truly original voices in jazz...
...In his last years, specifically in his final sessions for Impulse, he left me behind again...
...and better than anything else, I think, Thomas has managed to impart the mathematical, abstract quality of the man's mind...
...Yet he was introspective by nature, taciturn...
...It was confusing-too much, it seemed to me, to listen to properly...
...He died in 1967, at the age of 41, of cancer of the liver...
...The critic's mistakes often survive him because they are committed to print...
...I had never heard so many in so short a space of time...
...Other influences, too-chiefly Sun-Ra and his brand of musical occultism-appear to have done him more harm than good...
...My favorite John Coltrane records have always been those he made for Atlantic...
...They flew out of that tenor saxophone like machine gun bullets, covering the place with sound...
...Giant Steps," "Naima," and his up-tempo version of "Body and Soul" are surely as beautiful, in their different ways, as anything Coltrane recorded anywhere...
...perhaps because of the abstract nature of his intelligence, he often seemed emotionally unresponsive...
...The contrast between them was that extreme...
...In those days Coltrane was the perfect foil for the laconic Davis...
...As the title implies, these were performances recorded but unreleased: For reasons known best to himself, Coltrane chose to use other versions for the original albums...
...Thomas implies that Coltrane was a genius...
...Later, when I had the chance to hear him on records by Davis' group, I came to like what Coltrane was doing...
...By any measure he was a remarkable man, and if Thomas does not quite capture him, it is not from want of trying...
...Coltrane was attempting to integrate African music into his own, and I feel he never genuinely managed to pull it off...
...The jazz improviser might similarly be called a composer who conducts his experiments in public...
...He was the most conscious musician, keenly aware of his art's limitations...
...In personal terms, when he saw the effect his heroin addiction was having on him and on his work, he kicked the habit cold turkey...
...Jazz, for this reason, is basically tragic music...
...I remember the first time I heard him...
...As the late Eric Dolphy, a bold soloist and a venturous experimenter, once said: "When you hear music, after it's over, it's gone in the air...
...Actually, his reading may have done just that, for he gained enormous self-control...
...He was someone, after all, who lived for only one thing, to play his music...
...Davis, whose style was the very apotheosis of cool in those days, had played in his usual spare manner, not wasting a note, weighing each phrase judiciously...
...That night, after Davis had jogged off, and the dark, black-suited man with the tenor sax stepped forward and started to blow, a kind of collective gasp went out from the crowd...
...It was in Chicago in 1955, and he was playing with the Miles Davis group at the old Crown Propeller Lounge on 63rd Street on the black South Side...
...All this suggests why the lives of jazz musicians seem so much alike, something I couldn't help noticing as I read the new biography of tenor saxophonist John Coltrane, Chasin' the Trane, by J. C. Thomas (Doubleday, 252 pp...
...Then, inevitably, he fell under the influence of Charlie Parker, as did nearly every musician of Coltrane's generation...
...He was still with Miles Davis when he began recording for the company in 1959, yet he was already altering his approach-as was clearly the case with the first album he did on that label, Giant Steps...
...As the patterns emerged, what seemed baroque and overstated at first was revealed to be quite subtle...
...But Parker's was an influence that finally had to be exceeded...
...It helped when Coltrane switched from the alto sax, Parker's instrument, to the tenor...
...But Coltrane, in a single deep breath, laid out very nearly more notes than Davis had played during his entire solo...
...eventually, he had his teeth replaced...
...But he couldn't do that with his liver, which troubled him incessantly over the last years of his life...
...Of even greater help was the formal training in harmony and composition he undertook...
...I would, however, call John Coltrane a champion of jazz, with specific reference to Norman Mailer's dictum, "Champions are prodigies of the will...
...All seem to agree that Coltrane was an essentially decent, quite responsible person who was a constant striver after art, knowledge and wisdom...
...Both take chances, and are praised or blamed for shooting from the hip...
...In synthesizing all that and more, he became the most startling sax innovator to follow Parker...
...the jazz musician's finest improvisations are lost as soon as they are blown out the bell of his horn (unless he happens to be standing before a recording microphone...
...The real story of his life is contained in that music...
...An individual stretches his talent to the utmost, straining to achieve-what?, nothing more than passing instants of art...
...But he had to keep growing, for as the conscious artist, he was passionately dedicated to change, to the avant-garde notion of artistic Darwinism...
...Coltrane read ceaselessly through the standard works of Western philosophy and Eastern religions, as well as a mish-mash of occult junk, hoping this would bring him wisdom...
...Yet his playing on every track of Alternate Takes is superb-in no way could it be considered second-rate work...
...Davis' "Round About Midnight," for instance, would sound dead if Coltrane had not been there to inject his peculiar intensity into it, to raise the energy level just when it seemed to be sinking dangerously low...
...Right up to the very end he was the composer conducting his aural experiments in public...
...The company has recently issued a collection called John Coltrane: Alternate Takes (Atlantic 1668 0698...
...For years his bad teeth caused him such pain when he played that his saxophone mouthpieces had to be especially trimmed and adapted...
...He must have known it, for he supplied the energy that saved a few of the group's recorded performances...
...But the analogy can't be pressed too far...
...Coltrane's mighty volitional motor drove him on, even when his body was ready to give out...
...And frankly, I wasn't sure I liked what I heard...
...Yet Coltrane is, in many ways, the most interesting...
Vol. 58 • June 1975 • No. 13
