In the last three years of John Coltrane\u2019s life, he did a tremendous amount of work that testified to the importance of the avant-garde\/\u201cNew Thing\u201d movement in jazz. Almost none of it was as a musician, though. Instead, by using his fame and influence with his longtime label, Impulse! Records, he was able to secure a platform for other musicians who would go on to take jazz in fascinating directions for years to come, and none of whom would follow directly in Coltrane\u2019s footsteps.<\/p>\n
Because Coltrane had such a strong relationship with Impulse! producer Bob Thiele, his endorsement counted for a lot. Fellow tenor saxophonist Archie Shepp (whose avant-garde credentials were impeccable; he\u2019d worked with Bill Dixon and Cecil Taylor, and co-founded the New York Contemporary Five) had been struggling to get Thiele on the phone when he asked Coltrane to intercede on his behalf. Days later, the producer offered Shepp the opportunity to record for Impulse!\u2014on the condition that he make an album of Coltrane compositions.<\/p>\n
Four For Trane, adorned with a sleeve photo showing Coltrane looking beneficently at a seated Shepp, offered exactly what its title implied: re-arranged versions of \u201cNaima,\u201d \u201cMr. Syms,\u201d \u201cSyeeda\u2019s Song Flute,\u201d and \u201cCousin Mary,\u201d plus one Shepp original, the vividly titled \u201cRufus (Swung, His Face At Last To The Wind, Then His Neck Snapped).\u201d It was artistically and commercially successful enough that the younger man was able to ultimately make thirteen albums for the label over the next decade. His second Impulse! album, 1965\u2019s Fire Music, gave the whole New Thing movement one of its other notable sobriquets, even though the album itself contained versions of \u201cPrelude to a Kiss\u201d and \u201cThe Girl From Ipanema\u201d alongside the form-stretching, politically charged compositions \u201cHambone,\u201d \u201cLos Olvidados\u201d and \u201cMalcolm, Malcolm, Semper Malcolm.\u201d Other Shepp albums like Mama Too Tight and The Way Ahead turned his gravelly saxophone cries into just one element of a broad compositional palette that drew on blues and gospel with, at times, an almost Ellingtonian gravitas.<\/p>\n
Pharoah Sanders, meanwhile, was actually a member of Coltrane\u2019s band when Thiele signed him and produced his 1966 album Tauhid. The saxophonist had earned a reputation as one of the most blistering flamethrowers on the scene; onstage with Coltrane, the two men would throw shrieking, squalling lines back and forth for as much as an hour at a time. But Tauhid represented an entirely different vision of avant-garde jazz, one that imported melodic and rhythmic concepts from Africa and the Far East and laid down surprisingly mellow, trancelike grooves with contributions from multiple percussionists and guitarist Sonny Sharrock. Sanders even laid his tenor down in favor of the tiniest instrument possible, the piccolo. After 1969\u2019s Karma crossed over to hippie-rock audiences, he made nine more albums in five years, creating a unique and thrilling catalog that\u2019s foundational to what\u2019s now known as \u201cspiritual jazz.\u201d<\/p>\n
Alto saxophonist Marion Brown was another beneficiary of Coltrane\u2019s professional encouragement. His Impulse! debut, Three For Shepp, followed a similar model to Four For Trane; its A side featured three Brown tunes, while the B side featured three by Shepp, who was pictured alongside Brown on the cover. Later, after recording for Polydor, Calig, and ECM, Brown returned to Impulse! to make some of his best-known albums, including Geechee Recollections and Sweet Earth Flying.<\/p>\n
Coltrane was also a strong champion of Albert Ayler, sharing bills with the younger man at the Village Vanguard, bringing him onstage to sit in with his quartet, and helping Thiele sign him to Impulse! after multiple albums for the ESP-Disk\u2019 label. Ayler\u2019s first Impulse! appearance was on The New Wave In Jazz, a 1965 compilation of live recordings from a Village Gate concert that also featured Coltrane\u2019s and Shepp\u2019s groups. That was followed by In Greenwich Village, a collection of recordings with two different bands. During the three years that separated Coltrane\u2019s death and Ayler\u2019s passing in 1970, he made four studio albums for Impulse!, on which he gradually (and sometimes awkwardly) transitioned from the raucous, old-time-religion free jazz with which he\u2019d made his name to a more modern gospel- and R&B-infused style. Live recordings (not released by Impulse!) from the last few months of his life reveal that even at the end, he was breaking through into thrilling new realms; who knows where he might have ended up had he lived longer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the last three years of John Coltrane\u2019s life, he did a tremendous amount of work that testified…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":335682,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[1149,3458,3457,3459,3456,2878,98,3461,3462,100,99,3455,17,1117,3465,749,2538,9,3463,24,63,3460,3464,905],"class_list":["post-335681","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brooklyn","tag-art","tag-art-books","tag-art-critic","tag-art-reviews","tag-artists","tag-books","tag-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn-art","tag-brooklyn-culture","tag-brooklyn-headlines","tag-brooklyn-news","tag-contemporary-art","tag-culture","tag-dance","tag-fiction","tag-film","tag-music","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-art-scene","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-phong-bui","tag-poetry","tag-theater"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335681","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=335681"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335681\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/335682"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=335681"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=335681"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=335681"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}