Coltrane’s creative spirit

On this day, the September equinox, the jazz world celebrates the 84th birthday of John Coltrane, the iconoclastic tenor saxophonist who, arguably, has had the most profound impact on the development of jazz, African American classical music, in the past 50 years.

Prior to forming his own band in 1957, Coltrane spent his first eight years as a professional musician playing in a number of bands of the be-bop movement, most notably the Dizzy Gillespie big band and the various Johnny Hodges combos. But it was during his tenure in the tenor saxophone chair in the Miles Davis Quintet (1955-57 and in the expanded sextet during 1958-1960 incorporating Cannonball Adderley on alto saxophone) and those crucial six months of 1957 whilst at residency (at the New York’s Five Spot) with the compositional genius and pianist Thelonious Monk that the world began to take notice of who would soon be the most influential jazz saxophonist since Charlie Parker. At the time with Davis, Coltrane had moved from the standard be-bop scalar improvisation to begin to explore the possibilities embodied in chord variations of standard compositions – his “sheets of sound” phase as Ira Gitler has graphically described it. Giant Steps, one of Coltrane’s memorable 1957 albums as leader, typifies this shift.

Modes

Next, of course, was the Davis Sextet’s experimentation with modes with fewer chord changes, beginning with the 1958 Milestones to the exquisite Kind of Blue in 1959. Coltrane would use this experimentation on modal jazz as his launch pad for continuous melodic excavations to produce a range of albums in the subsequent five years, including the following landmark signatures: My Favorite Things, Coltrane Jazz, Coltrane’s Sound, Bye Bye Black Bird, Live at Birdland, The European Tour, Impressions, Live at the Village Vanguard, The Avant-Garde, Olé Coltrane, Africa/Brass, Afro-Blue Impressions, Crescent, Duke Ellington and John Coltrane and A Love Supreme.

Following A Love Supreme in 1964, Coltrane gave notice of his abandonment of most rules that had governed jazz compositions to date. Coinciding with the great African American freedom movement of the epoch, the free jazz interplays threaded stretched but interrupted melodic lines, entombed harmonic hubs, and pushed the saliency of the instantaneity that is often the hallmark of jazz creativity to the fore. Reflecting on the period, Coltrane told interviewers: “I’ve got to keep probing. There’s so much more to do … Change is inevitable in our music – Things change”. The albums he recorded during 1965-1967 attest to this change. These include: First Meditations (for quartet), Meditations, New Thing at Newport, Live at the Village Vanguard Again!, Ascension, Om, Live in Seattle, Creation, Brazilia, Cosmic Music, Live in Japan, Live in Antibes, Stella Regions, Kulu Sé Mama, Sun Ship, Interstellar Space, One Down, One Up: Live at The Half Note, Transition and Expression. Other brilliant composers and instrumentalists of free jazz include, particularly, Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, Charles Mingus, Cecil Taylor, Donald Ayler, Don Cherry, Ed Blackwell, Booker Little, Clifford Jordan, Scott La Faro, Tony Williams, Max Roach, Sunny Murray, Roswell Rudd, Charlie Haden, Gary Peacock, George Coleman, John Tchicai, Archie Shepp, Dewey Redman, Jimmy Garrison, Bobby Hutcherson, Grachan Moncur III, George Russell, Sun Ra, Andrew Hill, Jackie McLean, Eric Dolphy, Pharoah Sanders, Sam Rivers and Jaki Byard.

African-centredness

It should be stressed that the relevance of the three “phases” of Coltrane’s musical career just sketched lies more for its analytical import rather than any rigid ruptures in what is, on the whole, a clearly coherent testament of an odyssey. A continuing thread that runs through the inner workings of coltraneology is its preoccupation with African-centredness. While ill-health and sudden death in July 1967 denied Coltrane his well-advanced plan to visit and study in Africa, the motherland evoked, centrally, the musical imaginations and cathartic probes of his ten years (1957-1967) as band leader or leading soloist in other groups. In the 1957-59 period, Coltrane’s interpretations of African themes in two critical 1957 personal albums, as well as a couple of 1958 albums made by a sextet led by trumpeter Wilbur Harden are instructive. The Harden albums are appropriately entitled Dial Africa and Tanganyika Strut and the tracts therein have a telephonic urgency of an Africa continental-based directory: “Dial Africa”, “Oomba”, “Gold Coast” and “Tanganyika Strut”. The tracts “Dakar” and “Bakai” from Coltrane’s own albums complement these African references. None of these compositions is actually Coltrane’s but the tone colours and textures of his solos and exchanges with other personnel horns and the underlying rhythmic foundations of the music here are richly embellished with African ornamentation – evident in his conferencing with the dual baritone presence of Cecil Payne and Pepper Adams on “Dakar”; the enduring, alternating 2-cornered discourses with baritone saxophonist Sahib Shihab and trumpeter John Spawn on “Bakai”; the majestic interchanges with Harden and trombonist Curtis Fuller on those other entries in the Harden phonebooks.

In the 1960-67 period, African themes become more programmatic in the Coltrane trajectory. Coltrane reels off several compositions that focus on identifiable African places, persons, personages and events: “Africa”, “Liberia”, “Ogunde”, “Dahomey Dance”, “Tunji” and “Kulu Sé Mama”. No doubt the 1961 big band (15 members) performance of Africa/Brass, with the breadth-taking orchestration and arrangement by his friend and multiintrumentalist Eric Dolphy, is a dress rehearsal of the Africanised spiritual music which we referred to earlier and which would be most pronounced in Coltrane’s output in the last three years of his life, beginning with the December 1964 A Love Supreme and continuing with the eschatological treatise called Stella Regions which was initially recorded in February 1967 but released posthumously in 1995 – 28 years later!

Stella tracts such as “Seraphic Light”, “Sun Star”, “Configuration”, “Tranesonic” and “Stella Region” itself underline the exploratory, and quite often incantatory, transcendental African spirituality which, all along, defines Coltrane’s music but particularly in the last three years of his life beginning with that much discussed, much reflected upon, and most expressive rendering for the gods called A Love Supreme (Coltrane would return to the studios within a year with yet more offerings, Meditations, this time adding two more voices [tenor saxophone and drums] to the original quartet that performed on Supreme and First Meditations).

Interstellar Space, which was recorded a week after Stella Regions (and also released posthumously – 1974), is a duo performance with Rashied Ali on drums. This provides Coltrane with the space to evoke and configure the tapestry of sound that elucidates the planetary references to “Mars”, “Venus”, “Jupiter”, “Saturn” and “Leo”. The proceedings in Stella Regions are executed more conventionally in the quartet mode that had charted and encapsulated most of his work until lately: the master on tenor saxophone; Alice Coltrane, piano; Jimmy Garrison, bass, and Ali, drums. The outcome is nonetheless the same. The interrogative tension and quest in “Seraphic Light”, “Sun Star”, or “Tranesonic” are not too dissimilar to the throbbing and exhilarating escapades in “Mars” nor “The Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost” first movement in Meditations nor the transfigurative and triumphant 11-member ensemble, 40-minute brainstorming workshop in Ascension (2 trumpets, 2 alto saxophones, 3 tenor saxophones, piano, 2 bases, drums). The palpable serenity that prevails in “Venus” is as evocative as the sketch of “Iris” in Stella Regions or “Equinox” (a 1960-recorded blues dedicated to the saxophonist’s birthday) in Coltrane’s Sound or “Serenity” in Meditations or indeed “Psalm” in A Love Supreme. Coltrane’s staggeringly ingenious 27-minute long tenor saxophone solo on “One Down, One Up” in his classic quartet’s March and May 1965-recorded live performances in New York is a compulsory reference for anyone researching the state of the African American freedom struggle as at the first half of 1965 (personnel at the date: Coltrane, tenor and soprano saxophones; McCoy Tyner, piano; Garrison, bass; Elvin Jones, drums; New York’s The Half Note, music not released until October 2005 – One Down, One Up: Live at the Half Note).

The point is that whatever the personnel line up, Coltrane’s music has an integrative spiritual coherence about which is easily traceable to his upbringing in North Carolina (US) in the 1930s where his maternal grandfather was a politically conscious and active minister of St Stephen’s African Episcopal Zion Church in Hamlet. Consequently, the themes on Africa, African Essences and African Reality, become the propelling force in Coltrane’s seminal musical quest for life’s meaning and in his enduring contribution to the great African freedom projects on both sides of the Atlantic.