Search & Destroy: John Coltrane

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.

The books I've read mention the constant LSD usage in his final years as a matter of fact but no one does actually come out and confirm it except anonymously. Said books do tend to gloss over the last years in general, though, as he kept a relatively low profile at the end. It seems pretty believable to me, heroin is quite a different substance in every possible way!

I can easily imagine him, a VERY enlightened and open minded dude, hearing about this new LSD thing, this supposedly spiritual/enlightening drug, trying it and when it worked more or less as advertised, continuing to use it from time to time... it's MUCH harder for me to imagine a hard-core heroin addict John than a John who does LSD sometimes!!

Happy birthday, John!

That's a tremendous record, though, yeah. One of my favorites of his. I had a cassette dub of the vinyl, which fades out on one side and fades in on the other for the longer pieces. When I was taping it I flipped over the wrong side (it was one of those sides 1 & 4, sides 2 & 3 dealies) and landed smack dab in the middle of the vocal screams. That was...jarring.

xxp

no doubt that heroin and LSD are very different drugs, but still, just seems like a dude who had been way down in the addiction hole wouldn't suddenly be just like "oh hey let's do this new drug!"

WKCR birthday broadcast:
http://www.studentaffairs.columbia.edu/wkcr/story/john-coltrane-birthday-broadcast-monday-september-23rd

Right now it sounds like the 1966 Temple University show, which I coincidentally listened to for the first time last night. Stands up favorably to the Japan recordings, and arguably superior to the Olatunji Center record (definitely superior soundwise).

Dunno why the 'trane-does-acid thing is so hard to believe. Ornette admitted taking it "several times" in Four Lives In The Bebop Business, and I once read somewhere his claim that it was Coltrane who introduced him to it.

is that right? i dunno, it's not like it's out of the realm of possibility, i was just reading all these things that referred to coltrane's "acid" period w/o really giving any actual quotes / references, just a lot of "supposedly"s and "allegedly"s. if ornette says he dropped acid w/ coltrane i believe him.

it's not bullshit, and it's not hearsay

“Trane took acid. No doubt about it,” shrugs his biographer Lewis Porter. “Plenty of people talked to me about his heroin and alcohol use, though all four who talked to me confirming his acid experience wanted it off the record. I don’t know why that’s so scary. JC Thomas [author of Chasin’ The Trane, the first published book-length biography] wrote that he was tripping either at the time or around the time that he recorded Om [6 October 1965]. Apparently he did a lot of LSD during the last period of his life. Some people have used that against him – that explains why his late music is so crazy.

from the Wire

not surprising to me at all that the jazz community at large would be cool with heroin/alcohol and not LSD

why do they want it off the record, i wonder? at this point, who cares?

xp
Also, LSD hadn't really been demonized at that time I don't think, so maybe he saw it as a legitimate consciousness-expanding tool.

why do they want it off the record, i wonder? at this point, who cares?

Porter doesn't name names there so it's hard to guess motivations - maybe they don't want to sully his post-junkie phase with the spectre of additional drug use, maybe they don't want whether or not LSD was in the picture to factor into how the music is received, maybe they just don't like LSD. I would think Alice would have spoken up about this at some point but I can't find any quotes.

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), they were part of the package/mystique from the beginning, going back to Charlie Parker and probably before that even (although I don't think Armstrong ever copped to anything stronger than weed). But LSD was different, a drug for white kids, just like that horrible rock music...

I can easily imagine him, a VERY enlightened and open minded dude, hearing about this new LSD thing, this supposedly spiritual/enlightening drug, trying it and when it worked more or less as advertised, continuing to use it from time to time... it's MUCH harder for me to imagine a hard-core heroin addict John than a John who does LSD sometimes!!

yea otm! my impression also is that LSD may not have really been seen as a drug the same way heroin was. LSD opened up your mind. it didn't bring down in a hole.

ditto for cannabis -- i feel like almost everybody in the sixties jazz world smoked cannabis? i don't have a whole lot of backing for either of these impressions though

I have no reason to doubt that it's true at this point, given Porter's quote. But yeah, this is key:

Some people have used that against him – that explains why his late music is so crazy.

For Trane admirers/late-period detractors like Crouch or Marsalis, acid is the most convenient explanation imaginable for why/how Trane went where he did (despite the trajectory of his work leading in that direction anyway).

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)

That was the thing about Trane going clean: beyond cleaning up, his playing went to another level altogether, and musicians who thought junk went hand-in-hand with being a great musician had to re-think that. There were few, if any, junkies among the leaders of the New Thing (I can't think of any off the top of my head), and it was largely due to Trane's example.

Didn't heroin in jazz disappear in general in the '60s?

Moved over to rock iirc

i dunno if it disappeared, but it probably became less the thing to do for the younger players. but i think bill evans was addicted for quite some time in the 60s.

Oh yeah, forgot about him. Chet Baker too prolly

and to bring it back to coltrane, i believe that elvin jones was a pretty major user for a while there too? might be misremembering.

He was, and part of that was while he was with Trane. I don't know when exactly he kicked, though.

Actually, wait, he probably kicked in '63, as that's when he was in the federal drug prison in Lexington, and Roy Haynes subbed for him.