Ralph J. Gleason: \u2018Cause you\u2019re an explorer, this is obvious, right?
John Coltrane: \u2026 ! don\u2019t know, man. I\u2019d like to \u2026 at the moment, I don\u2019t really know
– May, 1961 interview<\/p>\n
John Coltrane had essentially left the Miles Davis Quintet in 1959, but Miles asked him to join him for the 1960 tour. The two were already in conflict. Although the same age (Miles was born four months earlier), the trumpeter always seemed the older man, more experienced, more mature, more organized, with a better sense of direction, while Coltrane seemed to have an adolescent confusion and willfulness\u2014musically at least\u2014that came out in his playing as fervor and a kind of forgetfulness, like he was always just about to run away from the context of what the band was playing.<\/p>\n
The Final Tour, Bootleg Series, Volume 6, compilation shows this in vivid, even uncomfortable, detail. The Quintet swings into familiar material like \u201cAll of Me,\u201d \u201cSo What,\u201d and \u201cAll Blues,\u201d Miles plays a sharp solo, and then Coltrane just goes off in what can seem like endless, rapid arpeggiated explorations of the chord changes, his \u201csheets of sound\u201d style. Isolated from everything else, this is often exciting. But he wasn\u2019t playing solo concerts, he was in a band, and what he plays has almost nothing to do with the point of everything else the Quintet is laying out. The rhythm section often seems to just be impatient, because Coltrane is so disconnected from the group context that there\u2019s no way they can interact with him, and it doesn\u2019t seem like he\u2019s listening to anyone other than himself.<\/p>\n
Those records are musically unsatisfying, but also deeply fascinating and historically important. They are the start of Coltrane\u2019s 1960s, a decade in which he would be the dominant public figure in jazz while not seeing the end of it. He was a jazz star, and underneath and beyond this, what made him so compelling\u2014and what remains his posthumous aura in the public consciousness\u2014is that he was more than just a musician. He was a hero, and the sixties was his (unresolved) journey.<\/p>\n
Coltrane wasn\u2019t the first free jazz musician, and in an important sense he was never really a free jazz musician. His improvisations never left the idiom, and he never worked with absolute, indeterminate freedom. There is a common confusion that someone screaming through a saxophone is playing free, while Keith Jarrett using chords to build large scale forms over an hour is traditional\u2014but Jarrett never had any prepared material nor even any ideas in mind when he would sit at the piano and start playing in front of an audience. Freedom isn\u2019t a style, it\u2019s a practice.<\/p>\n
Coltrane was trying to break free, so he first presented a structure as a constructive antagonist. The Live Trane: The European Tours (Pablo) collection documents his quartet in 1961\u20131963 (Eric Dolphy joins on a few tracks). These are some of the best Coltrane recordings, the saxophonist pushing through standard language that comes out of harmonies and song forms. But he was always deeply embedded in harmony, working through chord changes and extensions and substitutions, still locked into vertical arrangements and tonal intervals. In a 1963 interview, Michel Delorme and Jean Clouzet of Jazz Hot magazine ask him, \u201cAfter your \u2018chordal\u2019 and \u2018modal\u2019 phases, you said you wanted to go further. Where are you at with this now?\u201d He answers:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ralph J. Gleason: \u2018Cause you\u2019re an explorer, this is obvious, right?John Coltrane: \u2026 ! don\u2019t know, man. I\u2019d…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":335958,"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-335957","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\/335957","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=335957"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335957\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/335958"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=335957"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=335957"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=335957"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}