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An Interview with John Coltrane / interviewed by Frank Kofsky


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PRA Archive #: 
BC1266
Description: 

The Jazz musician discusses his art, the meaning of music in the human experience, and his particular spiritual approach.|AN INTERVIEW WITH JOHN COLTRANE / interviewed by Frank Kofsky. - The Jazz musician, John Coltrane, discusses his art, the meaning of music in human experience, and his particular spiritual approach. This rare interview was done less than a year before his death. - RECORDED: November 1966. BROADCAST: KPFK, 1 Jan. 1973.

58 minutes.  $17.95.  See: https://www.pacificaradioarchives.org/recording/bc1266

Noticed this while I was surfing the Web.  Haven't heard it.

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Have you read it? It's famous/infamous. Kofsky kept trying to push Coltrane into a pretty narrow/specific "political" box, and Trane just wasn't going for it, at least not like that.

By many accounts, Kofsky was a bit or more "off". But his book Black Nationalism and the Revolution In Music is an essential read, imo, just because that's where things were then.

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20 minutes ago, Rooster_Ties said:

 Politics how? Can anyone be more specific?

Kofsky was one of those ideologues who make everything political. Redundantly, joylessly, tirelessly political at the expense of whatever shared joyful humanity may be available. They come in all flavors, his was Marxist. He tried to get Trane to align himslef with the Black Power movement and the rad-lib anti-war movement, and of course Trane was sympathetic to all that, how could he not be, but Kofksy was just such a clodding sod that without realizing it, he was asking Trane questions that if answered as asked, would be contractive, and Trane was all about expansive.

In spite of all that, his book is essential reading, because yes - you don't have much American Black Jazz of the last 60 or so years without there being Malcolm X and John Coltrane in there, you just don't. And I've yet to see anybody rebut his opening chapter dealing with the open, thuggish repression of club economics, "playing ball" with the critics to keep your career going, record company politics, etcetcetc. If anything, time has only affirmed these realities.

Just because he was an obsessive asshole doesn't mean that he was wrong about everything. It just means that he was an obsessive asshole.

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On ‎9‎/‎18‎/‎2018 at 3:11 AM, The Magnificent Goldberg said:

 No music exists outside society, but much music exists outside one's own society.

And quite frequently we use the word "subculture", because very seldom does music exist entirely outside its "own" culture/society...whatever that is these days.

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Was this interview included in the collection of interviews that was published as "Coltrane on Coltrane"?

I came out of that book with the impression that JC was a saint.

Any interview on a Pacifica radio station is going to be heavily slanted towards the Left. I think they blew up the Pacifica station in Texas!:rolleyes:

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