Search & Destroy: John Coltrane

latter is great just to hear coltrane in a different context -- pretty much the only time he really played with a guitarist, i think? some of it is straightforward late 50s hard bop, but really good straightforward late 50s hard bop. highlight is the coltrane/burrell duet on "why was i born" which is insanely pretty.

I listened to Bags & Trane for the first time tonight.... what an unrelenting set of performances. It's like they are trying to top each other with every new solo.

have never really given the ascension and later period a chance but it's on the list.

I remember always hearing about how Tyner and Jones didn't like the direction Coltrane was going in toward the end, and there's all this tension in the late quartet recordings that I think actually makes for amazing music. I wonder if there's something to that -- Money Jungle has a similar sense of tension and struggle. I also remember hearing about how Keith Jarrett hated playing the Rhodes in the beginning, and he sounds so great on it on Miles records.

latter is great just to hear coltrane in a different context -- pretty much the only time he really played with a guitarist, i think?
― tylerw

excellent will have to check. totally into my jazz guitarists at the mo, particularly sonny sharrock on the herbie mann album and john mclaughlin on the jack johnson sessions.

(not that i'm comparing kenny b. to the guitarists above of course)

ha, yeah, was gonna say -- don't expect that kind of stuff from the burrell/coltrane record!

Someone kinda touched on this upthread, but I"m curious...listening to Live At Birdland this afternoon and during Alabama, I swear I'm hearing a human voice muttering faintly in the background. Right around the 2 minute mark and goes on for like 30 seconds.

Is that Elvin Jones or McCoy Tyner giving instructions or something? Any jazzheads able to offer some insight?

...and now I'm hearing that same "sound" all over Your Lady. What am I hearing?!

crowd noise? or, elvin does grunt and vocalize a lot to himself when he's playing. i don't remember it coming through on that record, but haven't listened to it in a long time.

It sounds too consistent to be crowd noise. Also, these are the two studio tracks on the album. So I'm gonna pretend like it's Elvin for now. At least until I can put some headphones on and really listen.

These two songs, btw...is there anything better?!

I bizarrely worded Googs search sent me to this:
Jazz pianists who make weird humming noises during their improvisations

haha...

you can hear him doing it pretty clearly during the drum solo near the end of this (killer) duet w/richard davis, like around 7:10: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uMk0aKMpqQ

That's definitely similar to what I"m hearing on Alabama and Your Lady. Cool.

I always assumed that was Jimmy Garrison; you can hear him singing along with some of his solos.

Been meaning to check out the Elvin/Richard Davis collabo forever, thanks.

(Also will rep for this Richard Davis album
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_IyDZgXq8QH0/SzZFIOoRtfI/AAAAAAAADoc/vpwNkSUGRVc/s400/Richard+Davis+-+Now
although I don't think Jordan likes the drummer too much)

Need to read the other thread again, but the thing about the humming is, always wonder how loud does the source have to be and where does the microphone have to be placed and what pattern does it have to have for it to be so audible to the listener? Although maybe I already said that on other thread three years ago.

although I don't think Jordan likes the drummer too much)

really, did i say something against freddie waits at some point? honestly not too familiar with his playing, i only know it from this crazy live freddie hubbard record. nasheet is great though.

So... Ascension Edition I or II..?

Let's Save John Coltrane's House
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/03/opinion/sunday/03sun4.html?_r=2

Would Ravi Coltrane be worth seeing? He's coming to Toronto soon. I don't know any of his music, but the thought of seeing Coltrane's son is inherently powerful to me. (In a way that Julian Lennon and Jakob Dylan never were.) I didn't even know he had a son who was out there playing music.

I saw him a few years back and he was pretty good. He closed the show with a Giant Steps that he dedicated to his mother who had just died recently. And it was definitely powerful in a way.

Definitely go. Who is he playing with?

Christine Jensen Quartet. It's very tempting--I didn't realize it was coming up so fast, though.

http://performance.rcmusic.ca/event/ravi-coltrane-quintet-and-christine-jensen-quartet-featuring-ingrid-jensen

Definitely go. Ingrid Jensen is great too. I've seen her with Darcy James Argue's Secret Society. Haven't seen or heard her sister though.

Today's his birthday; 24-hour birthday broadcast today on WKCR.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/-/370773643959

if i had $115,000 ... i'd probably do something else with it. but pretty cool!

i wouldn't pay more than 85k for an alto wtf

Sun Ship: The Complete Session

!!!!!

great record...some of these alts showed up a little while back, but i'm sure this release will sound better: http://bigozine2.com/roio/?p=1205

the Big O boot definitely makes me want to hear the complete sessions.

I could listen to 20 takes of the title track.

Yeah, I dl'd those outtakes, love it.

Weirdly, this is being touted as the only complete session by the Quartet in existence. Did Impulse throw a bunch of stuff away that they shouldn't have?

just turned sun ship on. so killer. i think a lot of the impulse stuff was lost at some point? at least that's what they said, there seem to be new discoveries regularly.
lol at how incomplete the "complete classic quartet on impulse" box set is by now.

the end of "attaining" goes so deep.

There seems to be very little material by the final quintet, I thought there were several studio dates as well as some live stuff. Just not sure what & what is still available.
I have live in Japan & I think still Expression somewhere though not played it in years & used to have the 2nd Village Vanguard on vinyl.
So what is there & what actually worked out right?

Other than that I really like him around about '62 live. The material captured on Afro Blue Impressions was one of my introductions and seems to be pretty classic, by most standards if not his. Really expansive without being too noisy. Though some noise he made was pretty riveting

this is one of my fave studio things with that later quintet. dueling sanders/coltrane flutes!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_j0LON3AlQ

OMG WANT COMPLETE SUN SHIP SO BAD!!

Got RAVI Coltrane to autograph my Sun Ship vinyl when he played Toronto w/Elvin Jones back in '91!

would've been 87 today!
pretty good piece on the latter day recordings in the latest arthur magazine. one thing i've been sort of curious about -- this article (and others) talk about coltrane doing lots of LSD at some point, 65-66. but i've never read where that factoid comes from -- did band members confirm it, or ...? i dunno, i guess it just seems out of character for the former heroin addict to suddenly be dropping acid.

The only thing I'd read about Trane doing LSD was that he (and supposedly the rest of the band) dropped acid before/for the recording of Om. I think it's bullshit, myself. Trane would periodically do "cleanses" and not eat sometimes for days; someone that careful/health conscious was not likely to backslide (as he might have seen it) and do acid.

yeah i think it's that album and Live In Seattle (which were recorded right around the same time) that people say he and the band were dropping acid. wishful hippie thinking or something?
researching this important info, i came across this:

In July of 1996, the group Sun City Girls billed an upcoming show with the headline "Sun City Girls play John Coltrane's Live in Seattle". One third of the group, Alan Bishop, had this to say of the concert: "Charlie Gocher [SCG drummer] researched the place in Seattle where John Coltrane did the session for the making of that record and it ended up it was turned into an Indian restaurant. He asked the current owners if we could do a show there and the people agreed to it. In further research, by talking to the original engineer, we found out that Coltrane and the other musicians were tripping on acid for that show. So the place was packed and we appeared on stage holding our instruments. Before we hit a note we put the instruments down and went over to a record player and put on side 1 of the actual John Coltrane record, flipped it over to side 2 and then said goodnight. I didn't think it was deceiving - we just did exactly what we advertised."

which is pretty lol, but i guess they're saying the original engineer told them about the LSD intake.
here's a bit more:
Lavezzoli, Peter (April 2006). The Dawn of Indian Music in the West: Bhairavi. Continuum International Publishing Group. p. 285. "Coltrane had begun experimenting with LSD during this time, in order to inverstigate its ability to access new levels of consciousness. It has long been rumored that Coltrane was under the influence of the drug while recording Om, and while this has never fully been corroborated, it would almost make sense, as the recording sounds disjointed and hallucinatory, almost as though Coltrane is not in full control of his normal faculties... the opening chant is followed by some of the most dissonant and paint-peeling shrieks on any Coltrane recording. Whether or not Coltrane was on LSD when recording this piece, it is perhaps not the most suitable for listening while on LSD, as the music communicates an intense feeling of unrest."

Ha, I read about the Sun City Girls thing. But they only played half of it! It's a double record!

I dunno, though, I still don't really believe Trane dropped acid. There's no other reported instance of him taking it, and yet his playing still developed along the trajectory suggested by Live In Seattle/Om -- musically, those aren't isolated incidents, nor are they out of nowhere/without precedent in his catalog.

No one's ever claimed he was tripping on his 1966 Japanese tour, or during Ascension (which preceded Om) or Meditations or Interstellar Space.

yeah i don't really believe it either, especially if it's just hearsay -- like someone listened to Live In Seattle and was like "these dudes must've been on acid!" and now it's repeated as if a fact. can we get pharoah sanders to settle this?

Dude had co-top-billing on the original issue!
http://w.mawebcenters.com/static/ecommerce/84/84222/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/5e06319eda06f020e43594a9c230972d/c/o/coltraneseattlefront.jpg

nice. that record is pretty nuts, lsd or not.
coltrane is a mysterious dude though... reading any interviews with him, it's hard to reconcile this mellow, un-pretentious dude with some of the music he made. maybe he played up some of the aw shucks stuff when talking to the press.

I think he felt a little burned by the press ("anti-jazz," "hate music" and such) and probably saw interviews as something of a chore/necessary evil, depending on the interviewer. He seemed to open up slightly more to Frank Kofsky, though.

I studied with one of Coltrane's contemporaries who knew John a little. Apparently John never had a single negative word to say about any other musician, and was sometimes impossibly stoic in the face of things like a drunken Elvin Jones ranting backstage about not getting paid for a benefit show and calling Coltrane several kinds of motherfucker loudly and to his face.