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John Coltrane Documentary coming to theaters everywhere.


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Here's a list of cities/venues/dates where it is going to be shown.  Week of April 28 here in DC, I'm sure I'll try and catch it...

http://www.coltranefilm.com/?page_id=1408

Be sure to click "load more" down at the bottom, as there are a couple more that don't display by default the first time.

Edited by Rooster_Ties
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1 hour ago, Hardbopjazz said:

Finding new music would be extremely rare. I think every possible source has been exhausted at this point. 

Au contraire:

<quote>

He’s also been handed the keys to the Radio France archives, and has dibs on a greater treasure than the fabled Ark of the Covenant: 12 hours of music by the artist many consider the best saxophonist of all time. Feldman’s not quite ready to name names, so let’s just say that any jazz fan would consider their release a giant step for humanity."

</quote>

 

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3 hours ago, Rooster_Ties said:

Here's a list of cities/venues/dates where it is going to be shown.  Week of April 28 here in DC, I'm sure I'll try and catch it...

http://www.coltranefilm.com/?page_id=1408

Be sure to click "load more" down at the bottom, as there are a couple more that don't display by default the first time.

Cool. Thanks for the link, Rooster.  It's showing for a week here in ATL. :D 

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3 hours ago, Rooster_Ties said:

Here's a list of cities/venues/dates where it is going to be shown.  Week of April 28 here in DC, I'm sure I'll try and catch it...

http://www.coltranefilm.com/?page_id=1408

Be sure to click "load more" down at the bottom, as there are a couple more that don't display by default the first time.

Yes Thanks. I will go and see this for sure.

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  • 1 month later...

Just came out of an11am showing here in DC. Very impressed, and enjoyed it thoroughly. I'm not as deep into Trane as many here, I'm sure, but - I thought - the portrait rang very true. Tons of great photos, and the silent footage of him at home and such, and snapshots by friends on the road, and personal photos presumably by the family, all made for a very meaningful experience.

It's been well over 15 years since I've seen any of the other Coltrane docs (aren't there two? - I vaguely remember more than one).

Anyway, highly recommended.

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  • 3 weeks later...

I'd not necessarily avoid Live In Japan, but I would definitely not make it my entry point into this particular world. And even then, go for the LP if you can do that. Scott calls it "bloated", I call it "dense", but either way...you know?

Might be an instructive back-to-back to do First Meditations For Quartet followed by the "actual" Meditations. Or not, ymmv.

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On 3/29/2017 at 9:37 AM, Dan Gould said:

Au contraire:

<quote>

He’s also been handed the keys to the Radio France archives, and has dibs on a greater treasure than the fabled Ark of the Covenant: 12 hours of music by the artist many consider the best saxophonist of all time. Feldman’s not quite ready to name names, so let’s just say that any jazz fan would consider their release a giant step for humanity."

</quote>

 

The main reason I'm skeptical is that it's hard to imagine recordings that exist in those archives that don't already circulate unofficially.

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Those are excellent points, Jim. 

As for the former, I can live with "dense". It's still just too messy to contend with, IMO. A 55 minute MFT simply has no redeeming qualities that I've ever found. There IS good music from that album (4CDs, IIRC), but it just seems like you have to wade through too much "filler" to get to it. Though, I will readily admit that it's been 16 or 17 years since I've sat down with it. Perhaps another spin is in order. God help me...

The latter is absolutely spot on. When I read that I shouted in my mind, "I coulda had a V8!!" Now, outside of The Father And The Son And The Holy Ghost which opens Meditations, the two aren't that radically different. Even with Pharaoh in tow. 

That said, your suggestion also brought to mind that Live In Seattle might also be a good "crossover" point. Closer to the late quintet than the Classic Quartet, but at least the fab four are all present for the dates. So there's a TON of tension there with all of the push/pull involved with Coltrane looking to break away while his rhythm section didn't seem all that eager to follow along. 

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Yeah, the Seattle stuff has grown on me over the years. There was a tree-d set of 3 CDs called Sweet Potato Pie which was 2.5 discs of 65 Half Note broadcasts (and everybody who takes Coltrane seriously as "pure music" needs to absorb that stuff, imo), and then, after a 22+ minute Half Note MFT, it shifts to, I think, the opening night broadcast from The Penthouse, and it's like, whoa, the Half Note shit was already ON it, right, but this is like, if your brain could talk like your voice did when you inhaled helium, this would be that, musically, Just...INSTANT New World, atoms being split Right Before Your Ears, Big Bang BOOM!!!! type stuff. It's the kind of thing that I, as somebody who essentially started with Transition and then went both ways with Trane as immediately as possible, needs to hear every once in a while to really get how...upset (in both senses) Coltrane and his bands were getting to people hearing it in real time,. Jesus, Ayler was such a breakthrough (and Trane knew it, embraced it, needed it for his own self), Cecil too, that quantum math, but Coltrane, it seems like he suddenly velocitized out from Extreme Newtonian to Raw Quantum without really knowing exactly how - or if - he was going to land this sucker. Or even if there was a place to land it at all.

The Japan music...I can listen to it, but I have to be really ready to go there for that long...the band sure was, so...I get the argument that sometimes playing "for yourself" is not always the best that you can do, but if there's a few people I will not question them so doing (and there are a few), Trane is definitely one of them. And if I had been there, in the room, on those days, I would no doubt have gone apeshit (one way or the other). But 4 CDs of fully in the moment music...there is, legitimately, a reason for user disconnect here between performance and consumption/listening dynamics. There's like, zero room for interruption if you're going to lock into this, and the last time I had that much zero interruption was...I can't remember.

I don't know that I've ever taken in all 4 CDs in a single listen, ever. Not that that should be an expectation, really, it's 2 CDs each from 2 different nights, almost two weeks apart. So not even the band itself could have made all that music at once. Well. maybe they could have. But they didn't. And there were no CD listenings when they made any of it, you were there, they were there, they did it there, and then it was over. Then everybody left and went somewhere else to do something else.

In the meantime...in hindsight, it seems inevitable that this (Half Note 65 again) was not going to be the end for Coltrane, but god, if it would have been, it would have still been a case of ending at a unbelievably high point. But no, this was a booster rocket for the next stage. Faith, trust, naivete,whatever it was...most people just do not do this type of thing, not just musically, but as life, period. Ever.

 

 

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The problem, as I see it, is that the Japan set was simply asking too much of the listener. 

"Hey, man. We've got some serious shit to work out, iffin you don't mind". Sure, I don't mind. And had I been there to witness it in person, as you stated, fuck man, I would have sung the praises of the religious experience it was to this very day. 

But, I wasn't. And that disconnect is simply too jarring to overcome. At least in my mind. 

Cool story, and all. But how about you boil all that sonic spiritual searching down to a single "best of" disc? The set, as it stands, seems like completist material to me. And that's not really a good thing. Being a completist is a choice. Let's not make it compulsory. 

Thanks in advance. 

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The "best of" disc for the Japan material would be the original LP release (2 LPs, think it might all fit on one CD?). Plus, the LP artwork inside and outside is gorgeously of it's time, full color, art, you know, not just photographs. Alice drove that bus, bless her for that.

Pas that, though, the notion of completism is a pet peeve of mine, or it has come to be as I've confronted it and, hopefully conquered it even as I still find myself drawn to its visceral temptations and tickles (ok, restrained it, not conquered it). Really, it's a fallacious consumer-centric reductionist construct. The 4-CD set is, like two concerts, not even a third of a real-time 24 hour day. Hardly a "complete" anything, except for, probably, those two concerts. But there was more music on that tour, there were more music from that band, hell, there was more music in those lives, there was more life in those people than just the music that was played. Complete? Complete what, exactly?

The only way to be a true completist with any music is to live it in real time, not just hear all the Bird airshots, but to be with Bird when he shot up, or when he met Chan, or when he hoboed on that train. That's the life, and the life is what makes the music. And you know, all the real-time lives that made this particular music are dead except for Pharoah. so...nobody is ever going to get the "complete" John Coltrane, not even this small part of John Coltrane. Nobody. Dead or alive. That kind of "complete" is not for us to have except with ourselves, and the idea of selling the idea that it is otherwise so...that is not something I buy into these days except as self-entertainment, a OCD-ish hobby, a lot more "necessary" than it is real, you know?

The temptation, the lure, the goddamned hook, is that the more you hear, the more you can learn, and that is true, but only up to a point. Once you start believing that the more complete your collection gets, then the closer you come to "completely getting it", that's when it becomes a delusion. Because you can't. Not you not me, not even anybody who has every record ever made in the history of all worlds, known or unknown. That just ain't there.

Now, having said that, I am certainly a consumer, and I certainly choose to listen to a lot of people I really get reached by, Trane (and Bird) being among them. In that sense, I aspire to "completism". But the reality is that "completism" is, at best, a scaled-down facsimile of reality, it's not life, it's a representational symbol of other lives. And in that realization, there is (or can be)  liberation. There is absolutely no real experiencing the "complete" anything, so, you know, if it's fun or rewarding, proceed accordingly, grow, have fun with it. But if it ain't...don't feel that you're less complete about it. Whatever emptiness might be there ain't gonna be filled by records. Music, maybe, probably, definitely. But music ain't records.

All of which is to say, I don't listen to the Japan stuff that much either. But I have fun knowing it's there when I want to go to it. The line between heavy recreational user and outright addict is a fine one indeed, perhaps an illusory line that one becomes convinced of in the interest of percieved self-preservation. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. :g

(But nevertheless, the 65 Half Note stuff...if you really want to "know" Coltrane musically, technically, how he did got to this one point, this cumulative point, and then why he went from there to where he went...on "Creation" I swear it sounds like he's needing to break the fucking tenor because the tenor is not capable of giving him all of what he wants to get...no, one does not need to hear "all" of it (because again, there ain't no such thing as "all" of it). But if one is seeking those particular answers, they are,to be found here about as vividly as they are anywhere. 65 Trane is deep, period. But this Half Note shit is...raw nerve music)

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On later Trane, after first listen,  I tend to  skip over the Garrison, Ali, and  Pharoah solos, and just listen to the Coltrane's solos and the the ensemble sections.  Only way I can bear it.  I really like Pharoah Sanders, but not what he was doing in that context.  I'm not a fan of the Seattle recordings at all, though I  haven't listened in years and maybe should go back.  And that recording was done the night before the bad acid trip which is 'Om'.   Tyner and Elvin already sound like they'd given up the ghost to me at that point.  'Meditations' is, to me, an utter miracle given the chaos of what was occurring three weeks earlier on the aforementioned recordings.  But as far as I can tell,  that was the last of Elvin and Tyner in the group.  I like Alice Coltrane a lot, and she was a better match for Trane going forward than a disheartened McCoy Tyner, but I've never "gotten" Ali, and find the Sanders work with Coltrane to be horrifying (perhaps intentionally so?).

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Very interesting observations. I'm with you on much of what you've stated, with a couple of caveats:

1. I actually didn't mind Pharaoh with Trane. Would I have been perfectly content had he not been in the group? Absolutely. But I didn't find his playing "horrifying". Perhaps a little much, but...

2. Like you, I most DEFINITELY did NOT like Ali when he played with Coltrane. It's the primary reason why I have absolutely no love for Interstellar Space, an album many Coltrane fans cite as one of his best. But, I DID love Ali's style later in his career. Like Rings Of Saturn later...

Speaking of McCoy and Elvin checking out, I've often wondered just how much Garrison actually liked what the late quintet was playing. He always remained in the background on most of those recordings. Was he truly into it, or did he trust Coltrane so much that he knew something truly spectacular was lying ahead, and didn't want to miss out? 

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I love Pharaoh with Trane, especially from a saxophonistical standpoint. I know a lot of people hear just "screaming" and, but jesus, it's actually very, very methodical (in the process way), the things he plays. all the talk about him and Trane being obsessed with mouthpieces and stuff like that, these are guys using mechanics as means to an end, perhaps unlike Ayler who already had an end and then set about finding the means to it. Emotionally, make of it what you will, and it can be wearying if it's not a zone you wish to visit (or even if you are...), but from an objective saxophone standpoint, there's no mistakes, no randomness, no undisciplined rapturing, It's totally disciplined from that angle, as was Trane.

Truthfully, I think Phaorah came down a notch after leaving Trane and, on record anyway, it took him a while to get back. I was not particularly enthralled by the later impulse! nor the earlier Theresa stuff, it seemed like a guy with not as much compulsion as before. But hear him back in that zone on Franklin Kiermyer's Solomon's Daughter...jeeeesus!

This is a guy who heard it as it happened, understood the hows and whys of all of it, and, I guess, just didn't feel it important to always go there. But if you got this in reserve, and the world changes so much around you, maybe you pick your spots.

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I like Ali with Trane. I confess it's possibly because I identify with that "pulse" drumming as it was the plateau I was beginning to travel when I was last playing drums on my own and just drumming for an hour or so whatever entered my mind and heart. I never played that way with others, but years after I stopped playing with others. I like that style of drumming and I saw Trane working it. 

But Elveen. . . sheesh. Still I don't think Elveen was willing to go where Trane was going and knew it.

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I don't know if you can ever really go beyond yourself, hell where can you be if you go there and you're not there? :g

Seriously, I hear you. Trane needed to keep expanding himself, even if he didn't know where exactly it was going to go. Neither Elvin nor McCoy really went "beyond" what they did with Trane. McCoy certainly refitted it in many delightful ways, but Elvin seems to have just said fuck it. I'm Elvin, tha's enough, gimme a bassis and how many ever tenor players I can afford and let's DO this thing. And ok, hell yeah, that's Elvin Jones, what else could it be?

More Pharoah w/Kiermeyer...there would be ways beyond ways to object to this if not for Pharoah just bringing it so damn REAL!

 

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