Search & Destroy: John Coltrane

man Baker was a junkie for a looooong time

Ooh, forgot about the Coltrane w/Haynes period

but when I say it's not surprising I just mean that in jazz heroin and booze were de rigeur (hey, who *didn't* have a junkie phase! Monk probably? Sun Ra lol)

i think Mingus skipped the junkie phase though he got into coke later on.

fwiw never much liked coltrane with haynes

yeah i mean coltrane and jones are pretty unbeatable, but I like the newport disc with haynes.

That one had the first versh of "My Favourite Things" I ever heard - pretty weird hearing Haynes discard most of the waltz-time aspects

I really like Haynes' playing with the quartet. In a way, it shouldn't work -- because so much of the volume and intensity was down to Jones -- but it's fascinating how it does.

listened to the original My Favorite Things LP last night -- sort of thing i should probably be tired of hearing but I never am.

^^ the tyner chords on that records are so huge.

it's weird to me how controversial the New Thing was, incl Coltrane's willingness to go with it. I'm listening to "Change of the Century" and the "Shape of Things to Come" now for instance, and on the surface they don't seem that far apart from other things going on at the time, sonically it's just not really that jarring to hear these right after "Kind of Blue", for example. I get that there were structural and performative differences that were pretty radical to jazz-heads at the time but with the benefit of hindsight these things seem more like logical progressions rather than radical transgressions. Granted once we get to "Free Jazz" or "Ascension" the differences become a bit more stark...

I sometimes wonder which aspect was more difficult to accept: Ornette's harmonic freedom or the free-time innovations of Sunny Murray or whoever

got to be the latter

yeah, if anything, Ornette was kind of the "pain-free dentist" of free jazz

The thing is, in the bop era, it was all about navigating insane chord changes in the blink of an eye. Once Ornette came along and said "enough of that," it was seen as a slap in the face to everything a lot of these musicians had spent their lives working on.

It's like Bill Dixon said: "Well, these guys, it's taken them years to learn how to pick out 'I Got Rhythm', on the piano and now, the new music comes along and undermines their entire career, which is built around understanding tunes based on it."

I think once metric time had been dispensed with, it wasn't quite as shocking, since by then conventional harmony, melody, phrasing, and tone had already been thrown out the window.

lol at pain-free dentist

Can anyone help me? I have a copy of Kulu Se Mama which turned up in a bunch of vinyl belonging to my parents. Neither are big free jazz fans but my grandfather liked a bit of jazz now and again so maybe it came from him.
Anyway i put it on the player and on side one, rather than being the title track I'm pretty sure it's actually playing 'Om', not Kulu Se Mama, so this must be some sort of misprint? Also it's on HMV/ EMI label, not Impulse or MCA. Can't find a trace of this being released on Discogs. So can anyone shine a light on what the heck this is?

Om takes up two sides of a record; does the second side fade in (and sound like the first side)?

"Om" begins with percussion (incl. kalimba) and bandmembers reciting in unison the speech that ends with "... I am he who awards to each the fruit of his action. I make all things clean. I am Om!", whereas "Kulu Se Mama" begins with a single drum and recitation in some African tongue, including the title phrase.

Oh hai I am the clarified butter

Yep, it's definitely Om on the first side, but the label and cover both say Kulu Se Mama. Not sure about the second side. A bit more digging threw up that this is a misprinted copy that got recalled, but I can only find one reference to it on the internet.

What, am I quids-in or what here?

Like Tarfumes said, both sides of "OM" basically sound the same. 2nd side of KSM would have two separate under-ten-minute tracks.

Om also ends with the same recitation it begins with.

Have you checked Popsike or collectorsfrenzy?

If you peel off the cover is there a picture of Coltrane in a butcher's smock with a cleaver and some bloody dolls?

^^ nice one!

Checked all the sites mentioned and there's little-to-no info.

can you post a short video with music from both sides?

yeah when i get home i shall do that.

Here go:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLminRDx5gw

Bump.

Having spoken to a few people, I'm kind of convinced this is most probably a rarity. But what to do with it? I'm not a very confident eBay user...

Side 2 is definitely the continuation/2nd part of Om.

This just sounds like half of a British vinyl version of this:

http://www.amazon.com/Major-Works-John-Coltrane-Selflessness/dp/B000003N6C

There are lots and lots of vinyl repackagings of Coltrane's stuff. Unless they contain material unavailable elsewhere, they're not generally worth very much at all.

WF, but it's not that - the label/cover is clearly Kulu Se Mama, but the music is Om.

Well, I'm guessing the market for mis-labelled British Coltrane issues of commonly available material is not especially fierce, but am happy to be proved wrong when you sell it for a mint on ebay.

haha, cool. i know next to nothing about how much stuff goes for, so i'm curious. don't expect to make a fortune but it's interesting all the same.

I started a thread on the Steve Hoffman forums asking about this. Only one reply so far, but it said that unless the music was previously unreleased, a mislabeled record isn't worth a lot (or at least, not appreciably more than an error-free copy of the same record).

So, depending on condition, probably around 30 pounds/$50.

Cheers. Well that's a fair bit to me.

good longread here: http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/06/03/an-absolute-truth-on-writing-a-life-of-coltrane/

This is a tremendous and fascinating story; thanks so much for posting!

i've never read that book, but really want to now. i thinnnk my library might have it? seems to be sort of hard to come by, even the reprint.

that's a really cool story

Yeah, great piece - thanks for the link!

All-day birthday broadcast today:
http://www.studentaffairs.columbia.edu/wkcr/story/john-coltrane-birthday-broadcast

I know it just came out today but anyone heard "Offering" yet? (wasn't Christian Vander's post-Magma band called Offering?) I have a boot of half the show but curious to hear anyone's heard the "new" thing.

Also, HBD JC

My work firewall seems to prevent me listening to WKCR's stream for some reason. Weird because I can always get FMU. Oh well.

Ugh, I know, I'm not able to get this at work, either.

One of the highlights will be an Evan Parker interview between 7-10 eastern tonight. That should be interesting.

I've had Offering for a couple of months. Considering it was recorded with a single microphone, it sounds amazing; the engineers recovered way more sound than I thought they'd have been able to, though you'll never be able to convince me there was actually a bassist present that night. Musically, it's really strong, though a couple of nobodies wander onstage and start soloing - and Coltrane lets them. Totally worth hearing if you're already a diehard, though not recommended for new fans.

Can't even listen on my phone w/ cell data.

Finally got the stream going, Marion Brown just finished his solo on "Ascension."

How much of the final Quintet is there recorded and released?
Looking forward to getting my hands on this Offering set but wondering what else is out there both studio and live. Cos I get the feeling they're greatly under-represented and I'm not sure if it's me or what is available by them.

Studio, there isn't much...in fact, strictly speaking, that quintet only made one studio record (Expression). Stellar Regions is also studio, but it's a quartet (no Pharoah).

There's a few live things, though: Live at the Village Vanguard Again!, Live In Japan, and The Olatuniji Concert.

I've only heard the boot of Offering, but it's tremendous, easily on par with Live In Japan, which itself has always been a high-water mark of this music for me.