Here’s to Another 80 Years

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

There’s a poem I was forced to read in high school that always makes me think of the saxophonist and composer John Coltrane (1926–67), whose 80th birthday is being commemorated in numerous celebrations across the city this month. In “Ithaca,” the Greek poet Constantine P. Cavafy wrote, “When you set out on your journey to Ithaca/pray that the road may be long/full of adventures/full of knowledge.”

Cavafy’s point was that one should enjoy life’s journey without worrying about the destination. That’s especially relevant to Coltrane, who died long before he could have reached whatever final destination he might have had in mind for himself. His life and music were a continual, unending voyage of discovery.

Cavafy encouraged his fellow travelers to stop frequently and smell the roses, so to speak, but Coltrane, in his life as in his marathon saxophone solos, never even stopped for air. He was continually refining his sound and changing his approach; every time you turned around, he was coming out with something new. Better not blink or you might miss his next innovation, his next revelation.

Alas, Coltrane’s road was not particularly long. He didn’t get started until comparatively late, then left us very young. Coltrane was 28 when he joined the Miles Davis Quintet in 1955. He and Davis were both born in 1926, but Davis had long been a major name in the jazz world by that point. Although Coltrane had worked in his 20s with such prominent figures as Dizzy Gillespie and Johnny Hodges, practically nobody had heard of him until he teamed up with Miles. A scant 12 years later, Coltrane was dead from liver cancer, undoubtedly exacerbated by the substance abuse that plagued him as a young man.

Coltrane left the world so much music in such a short time that it’s almost as if he knew he wouldn’t be around very long. It’s typical to think of his work in terms of musical phases — a bebop period, a modal period, an avantgarde period, what Ira Gitler called his “sheets-of-sound” period, what Whitney Balliett called his “blowing-the-tenor-sax-apart” period.

From another perspective, Coltrane’s evolution was one of taking his music further and further out, from his mainstream bop of the mid-1950s to the screaming, almost unlistenable (in the ears of many) music of the 1960s. Yet his musical journey can’t be described as a straight-ahead progression from “inside” to “outside.”

Coltrane recorded some of his harshest, most “difficult” music in 1961, at what would become his most famous extended gig as a leader, at the Village Vanguard. Then, a year later, he surprised fans not by going further out but, but by recording his most popular and “accessible” album, “Ballads,” a remarkable demonstration of what could still be done with the American Songbook; within a few months he produced his equally brilliant collaborations with Duke Ellington and Johnny Hartman.

But at his most compulsive, Coltrane often appeared determined to play anything and everything at the same time; what he perfected as a vertical, harmonically driven approach to improvising seemed derived from a desire to play more than the tenor saxophone was capable of playing. One note at a time wasn’t enough; he wanted to play the horn like a piano, piling chords on top of chords simultaneously.

Coltrane’s importance to music as a composer was no less crucial than his work as an instrumentalist, but the two functions were inextricably connected in that his writing was a direct extension of his playing.Many of his most memorable compositions were the result of constantly playing them on his horns and refining them to the point that he liked them: “Liberia,” for instance, was his adaptation of Dizzy Gillespie’s “Night in Tunisia,” while “Impressions” used a more obscure point of departure: “Pavanne,” a light classical composition by Morton Gould. Coltrane’s signature performances of pop tunes, most famously Richard Rodgers’s “My Favorite Things” and Frank Loesser’s “The Inch Worm” were so different from their sources that Coltrane could probably have gotten away with changing their names. In both cases, he made them his own by streamlining and simplifying tunes that were essentially sophisticated children’s songs — eliminating, for the most part, the bridge in Rodgers’s waltz and the first melody of Loesser’s showtune.

If you could take every note that John Coltrane ever played, even the zillions that were never recorded, and somehow feed them all into a giant computer, it would probably reveal some profound secret about the place of man and God in the Universe. For all of his continual transformations, the quality of his music was remarkably consistent. In the end, the key relationship in his improvisations is perhaps not to the harmony or the melody or even to the rhythm section, but to the solos themselves. Every Coltrane solo sounds in some way like a direct continuation of the one that came before it, like they were all chapters in a larger story. Everything he played was a stop along the metaphysical and musical journey to Ithaca. “Full of adventures, full of knowledge … with intense pleasure and joy.”

Coltrane Celebrations

Jazz At Lincoln Center, Rose Hall
September 14–16, 8 p.m.

For those who liked Wynton Marsalis’s big band arrangement of “A Love Supreme,” the trumpeter and bandleader has promised more stylishly old-school treatments of Coltrane classics for the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra.

Jazz at Lincoln Center, Allen Room
September 15–16, 7:30 p.m. & 9:30 p.m.

Jazz At Lincoln Center’s second Coltrane tribute honors one of the tenor titan’s most beloved recordings: his 1963 meeting with the great baritone-balladeer Johnny Hartman. Former Wyntonite Todd Coolman and the distinguished singer Kevin Mahogany take the lead roles.

Birdland
September 20–23, 9 p.m. & 11 p.m.

Contemporary tenor giant Joe Lovano has demonstrated in other contexts how well he knows Coltrane’s music, and it will be a treat to here him play it in the company of a rhythm section of players from Coltrane’s own generation. The group features Steve Kuhn on piano, Andrew Cyrille on drums, and Lonnie Plaxico on bass. A special guest, the bassist Henry Grimes, will join the celebration on 9/22 & 9/23.

The Blue Note
September 19–24, 9 p.m. & 11 p.m.

McCoy Tyner and Coltrane acolyte Pharoah Sanders have only worked together on a few occasions since the mid-1960s, when both were in Coltrane’s transitional and increasingly “free” small groups. To hear either one is a delight; to hear them together will be a true gift.


The New York Sun

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