Search & Destroy: John Coltrane

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.

oh is that why haynes is on a couple coltrane records from then (newport?)? didn't know that. it is interesting to hear coltrane w/o jones.

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!