Coltrane: Both Directions At Once (lost album)

[JSngry]

regarding the chart position of this thing, are current "sales" still measured strictly by physical product? Wondering if maybe since young people allegedly don't buy physical product these days and since a lot of older people insist on it, maybe that's what's driving chart position? Older people getting physical product that strikes a chord and triggers purchase? Maybe, just a thought?

[Dan Gould]

Well it's older people who would see a full page ad in the NYT.

[JSngry]

yep

[Scott Dolan]

Maybe. 

I read a story last year about millennials picking up digital subscriptions at higher and higher rates the last few years. 

So who knows? The physical paper is dying, but younger folks are still seeing those ads. 

[JSngry]

I'm wondering if the Billboard charts track download sales, and if so, to what extent. Seriously, I do not know.

Also, not sure if digital advertising mirrors paper advertising, or if those are different accounts?

[felser]

2 hours ago, JSngry said:

I'm wondering if the Billboard charts track download sales, and if so, to what extent. Seriously, I do not know.

Also, not sure if digital advertising mirrors paper advertising, or if those are different accounts?

https://www.billboard.com/articles/business/8006673/billboard-charts-adjust-streaming-weighting-2018

[JSngry]

yeah, but streaming does not equate to purchasing a download, just as "sales" has never equated to "listens".  Gotta figure that for every purchase, there's X more listens.

I'm delighted that this release has had the success that it has, I'm just wondering what is actually driving the specifics of the numbers that are being reported. Maybe it's simply a matter of everybody who has purchased a Coltrane catalog item over the decades (and who's still alive) bought this one all at once. If that's the case, that makes sense, but it also means that the record should go OOP in a few years or so because it exhausted its deep catalog potential all at once, if that makes sense.

Or maybe people are hungry for something that they're not finding elsewhere. That's kind of an emo take on it though, and really, if they needed "it" that badly, they'd be making/finding it on their own.

Anyway...

[medjuck]

4 hours ago, JSngry said:

regarding the chart position of this thing, are current "sales" still measured strictly by physical product?  

Not for many years now.Also I think other charts take streaming into account so I presume that's true of the jazz chart too. 

[Scott Dolan]

17 hours ago, JSngry said:

I'm wondering if the Billboard charts track download sales, and if so, to what extent. Seriously, I do not know.

Also, not sure if digital advertising mirrors paper advertising, or if those are different accounts?

I have subscription to The Washington Post. I use it in their app called “the print edition” which is an exact digital copy of the print edition. Ads and all. 

The Christian Science Monitor app used to be the same way. 

I’ve never dne a digital version of the NYT, but I wouldn’t be shocked if they offered the same thing. 

As for your “all at once” theory, you’re probably right on the money. This happens everytime Jimmy Buffett releases a new album. The Parrotheads flock to the stores and send it soaring into the low single digits on the sales chart week one, and then it’s usually not even top 25 the following week. 

[Joe]

No endorsement of the author's positions intended here*, just posting this for anyone interested in reading "critical opinions" about this release (and Trane in general). https://www.weeklystandard.com/dominic-green/john-coltrane-and-the-end-of-jazz

* "The story goes that Coltrane was using LSD after 1965. If so, then the overreach and incoherence of his final music, and his mingling with admiring but inferior talents like Alice Coltrane, the Yoko Ono of jazz, suggest that Coltrane might be the sixties’ first and foremost acid casualty, flailing out rather than flaming out, the peak of his late style already behind him." WTF/GTFO

Edited August 27, 2018 by Joe

[John L]

"Jazz was in a sense always a late style, a timekeeper’s music out of time. In the 1920s, while jazz musicians were playing early show tunes and improvising with rudimentary harmony, the Second Viennese School was pushing ahead into total chromaticism and atonality, and Stravinsky, Milhaud, Prokofiev, and Ravel were experimenting with jazz’s musical signature—its fixed pulse, syncopated rhythm, and emphasis on flattened thirds and sevenths."

It makes my blood boil that people are still writing this kind of dribble, as if even Louis Armstrong wasn't doing anything new in the 20s, just "improvising with rudimentary harmony," 

This reminds me of an essay in the 'classic" The Musical Companion where the inferiority of jazz to classical music was explained.  It turns out that, contrary to popular belief,  jazz is not rhythmic at all, just "rigidly metrical."  Only in classical music are rhythms actually developed.  

 

 

Edited August 27, 2018 by John L

[Steve Reynolds]

36 minutes ago, Joe said:

No endorsement of the author's positions intended here*, just posting this for anyone interested in reading "critical opinions" about this release (and Trane in general). https://www.weeklystandard.com/dominic-green/john-coltrane-and-the-end-of-jazz

* "The story goes that Coltrane was using LSD after 1965. If so, then the overreach and incoherence of his final music, and his mingling with admiring but inferior talents like Alice Coltrane, the Yoko Ono of jazz, suggest that Coltrane might be the sixties’ first and foremost acid casualty, flailing out rather than flaming out, the peak of his late style already behind him." WTF/GTFO

I guess Rashied Ali was another inferior talent. Maybe Interstellar Space is “flailing out” or whatever the fuck that means. Another writer caught hopelessly in the past.

The economic health of Jazz may not be healthy but if one searches and is open, there is great music to be found in abundance. Some people are ignorant and others like this jerk goes out of his way to prove it publicly. 

[felser]

That seems like a critic who likes to hear himself talk.  Alice Coltrane was not McCoy Tyner, who was/is?   She was a one-of-a-kind talent who made some utterly stunning albums on Impulse on her own (and some of the work on WB was also wonderful), and was instantly recognizable on three different instruments.  Her harp playing was stunning, and she had a wonderful sense of composition and some unique (if sometimes overblown) arranging abilities.   I've never been sold on Ali, but would certainly never belittle something like 'Interstellar Space' by calling it 'Flailing About'.  Coltrane's 1966-67 albums didn't meet the standards of his 1964-1965 albums?  No, they certainly didn't, but neither do hardly any other albums ever made!    They were the next (and final) phase of the journey, not wholly successful, but wholly fascinating.

[Steve Reynolds]

29 minutes ago, felser said:

That seems like a critic who likes to hear himself talk.  Alice Coltrane was not McCoy Tyner, who was/is?   She was a one-of-a-kind talent who made some utterly stunning albums on Impulse on her own (and some of the work on WB was also wonderful), and was instantly recognizable on three different instruments.  Her harp playing was stunning, and she had a wonderful sense of composition and some unique (if sometimes overblown) arranging abilities.   I've never been sold on Ali, but would certainly never belittle something like 'Interstellar Space' by calling it 'Flailing About'.  Coltrane's 1966-67 albums didn't meet the standards of his 1964-1965 albums?  No, they certainly didn't, but neither do hardly any other albums ever made!    They were the next (and final) phase of the journey, not wholly successful, but wholly fascinating.

Plus it didn’t kill jazz - it has inspired countless musicians and listeners over the next 50 years. Nothing radical is ever wholly successful. I’m certainly not thrilled with the Live in Japan stuff and these days I’m not a big Coltrane listener (and havn’t been for a while - but I imagine I’ll be revisiting again one day), but much of the music that is of most interest to me today doesn’t exist if Coltrane doesn’t take those risks of those last years. Maybe Brotzmann does what he did in 67-68 but maybe not. Who knows what he was listening to. Maybe Ayler & Cecil built and inspired many but without Coltrane’s “flailing” (I thought this thinking was dead 30 years ago!) of his last years was inspiring in ways not understood at the time. 

What was dying was the mainstream. Look what was happening elsewhere. The experiments of the extremes brought life to jazz, not death. It inspired people like Mal Waldron, Joe Henderson and many others who never went down that path. 

[Rooster_Ties]

8 hours ago, Steve Reynolds said:

I’m certainly not thrilled with the Live in Japan stuff and these days I’m not a big Coltrane listener (and havn’t been for a while - but I imagine I’ll be revisiting again one day), but much of the music that is of most interest to me today doesn’t exist if Coltrane doesn’t take those risks of those last years.

It inspired people like Mal Waldron, Joe Henderson and many others who never went down that path. 

I've never gotten bitten hard by the Coltrane bug (though I have the utmost respect for him). I've said it before, but my Joe Henderson collection is 3x as big as everything I have by or with Trane (and that's including everything I have by Miles w/ Trane).

But *Billy Harper* is maybe my favorite living tenor player, and he comes all out of mid-to-late era Trane (inspirationally).  And then one of my other favorite tenorists, Gary Thomas, claims Harper as probably his biggest inspiration.

Can't quite figure out how/why I've never connected super-deep with Trane either. I'm into everything Ornette ever did, and Tyrone Washington, and quite a lot of Sun Ra (though not his most extreme stuff). But oddly enough, it's Trane's sheets-of-sound approach for Prestige I like best (even if the actual material isn't as moving as more modal stuff later) -- which is doubly odd, because I have almost zero interest in Miles during those Prestige years.

Which is maybe to say that my preferred Trane might have been if he'd done his sheets-of-sound stuff more during his Atlantic years.

But thank goodness Trane tried so many different things, and was relatively commercially successful with so many of them -- allowing his followers to borrow and adapt Trane's language in their own ways.

Edited August 27, 2018 by Rooster_Ties

[felser]

36 minutes ago, Rooster_Ties said:

I've never gotten bitten hard by the Coltrane bug (though I have the utmost respect for him). I've said it before, but my Joe Henderson collection is 3x as big as everything I have by or with Trane (and that's including everything I have by Miles w/ Trane).

But *Billy Harper* is maybe my favorite living tenor player, and he comes all out of mid-to-late era Trane (inspirationally).  And then one of my other favorite tenorists, Gary Thomas, claims Harper as probably his biggest inspiration.

Can't quite figure out how/why I've never connected super-deep with Trane either. I'm into everything Ornette ever did, and Tyrone Washington, and quite a lot of Sun Ra (though not his most extreme stuff). But oddly enough, it's Trane's sheets-of-sound approach for Prestige I like best (even if the actual material isn't as moving as more modal stuff later) -- which is doubly odd, because I have almost zero interest in Miles during those Prestige years.

Which is maybe to say that my preferred Trane might have been if he'd done his sheets-of-sound stuff more during his Atlantic years.

But thank goodness Trane tried so many different things, and was relatively commercially successful with so many of them -- allowing his followers to borrow and adapt Trane's language in their own ways.

And don't forget the clear influence Coltrane had on my favorite trumpet players - Hubbard, Tolliver, and a certain Woody somebody!

[Rooster_Ties]

1 hour ago, felser said:

And don't forget the clear influence Coltrane had on my favorite trumpet players - Hubbard, Tolliver, and a certain Woody somebody!

OMG, yes, yes, yes!!!!

ALL my ultimate favorite trumpet-players are those that took a BIG influence from Trane.

That Woody guy, and Tolliver especially!! 

[JSngry]

4 hours ago, Rooster_Ties said:

But *Billy Harper* is maybe my favorite living tenor player, and he comes all out of mid-to-late era Trane (inspirationally).  And then one of my other favorite tenorists, Gary Thomas, claims Harper as probably his biggest inspiration.

And this is another place where the "Booker Ervin didn't influence anybody" line fails.

[felser]

1 hour ago, JSngry said:

And this is another place where the "Booker Ervin didn't influence anybody" line fails.

True that.

[Steve Reynolds]

2 hours ago, JSngry said:

And this is another place where the "Booker Ervin didn't influence anybody" line “flails”

“corrected”

[mjzee]

I don’t know whether LSD influenced Coltrane’s late period, but has anyone explored how much his knowledge of having liver cancer did?  The later music can be heard as signs of panic, rage, and working towards accepting the inevitable.

[Scott Dolan]

1 hour ago, mjzee said:

I don’t know whether LSD influenced Coltrane’s late period, but has anyone explored how much his knowledge of having liver cancer did?  The later music can be heard as signs of panic, rage, and working towards accepting the inevitable.

Quoted for motherfucking truth, at least in my eyes. 

Very insightful, and very nicely stated. 

Although I’d add one more word: fear. 

[JSngry]

Working from memory, but wasn’t the cancer not formally diagnosed until after they got back from Japan?

There’s definitely urgency, but when was there not?

I think it’s the Simpkins book(?) where it’s talked about that Trane was having all sorts of premonitions and omens and stuff like that a few years before he died. You don’t know if that was him hearing his body, him projecting on to his body, some, all, or none.

Ravi Shankar got worried at some point that Coltrane sounded like he was not doing well, in distress, or something like that

No matter what was driving it ( and to think that it was just any one thing is just too easy, IMO) the ultimate lesson for me is that you keep going until it’s gone, keep working, keep giving. That’s about as noble a lesson as one human can teach another, I think.

[Scott Dolan]

He knew something wasn’t right. How many times have we read that Coltrane held his side a lot those last two years? 

I fully believe the fear of him knowing something was wrong was a foundation for that output, whether a doctor had officially confired that or not.

[JSngry]

Fear and courage, no sense in having the one if you can't have the other.