From the Family Closet, a New Coltrane Album

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October 11, 2005

From the Family Closet, a New Coltrane Album

By NATE CHINEN

At this summer's JVC Jazz Festival in Newport, R.I., Ravi Coltrane took on a potentially forbidding task: tenor and soprano saxophone duties with McCoy Tyner, the pianist and sole remaining member of the John Coltrane Quartet. Inevitably, the pairing stirred echoes of that epochal band, subjecting the younger Coltrane to an impossible standard. That he managed to acknowledge his father's saxophone influence without emulation was, in itself, a complex feat. "He's got a handle on the legacy," Mr. Tyner said later, "but he's not mimicking his father in any way."

But then, Mr. Coltrane, 40, has had time to refine his relationship to the family legacy. He became a saxophonist in his early 20's and gained his first major professional experience with Elvin Jones, his father's explosive drummer. In his solo career, which began on record only seven years ago, he has been careful to establish his own identity.

Yet he has also served, unassumingly, as a steward of his father's music, a background role that is both personal and increasingly public - as illustrated by the release today of the striking new John Coltrane album, "One Down, One Up: Live at the Half Note" (Impulse!) , featuring a pair of performances by the Coltrane Quartet in the spring of 1965.

"This Half Note material really comes at a summit," Mr. Coltrane said by phone recently from Rotterdam, the Netherlands, where he was on tour. "It's the high point of a sound that the band had been cultivating, basically, since 1961. The music that was recorded there comes at the strongest point of that band, playing that sound. Right after that, they start changing and going other places."

Fortunately for jazz fans, the Half Note album comes on the heels of more newly issued Coltrane: "Thelonious Monk With John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall," a 1957 concert recording discovered in the Library of Congress in February and issued on Blue Note Records a few weeks ago to wide critical acclaim. As a rare document of the saxophonist's most storied apprenticeship, the recording has been heralded as a missing link in the chain of modern jazz.

Mr. Coltrane was more temperate in his assessment of the Carnegie tapes, which he described as "beautiful music." (He made this sound almost like a criticism.) He was halfway through a European tour with his own quartet, which was responsible for one of this year's most cohesive new jazz albums, "In Flux" (Savoy).

His path to the Coltrane legacy was circuitous. Mr. Coltrane was 2 when his father died, so he was brought up in Los Angeles by his mother, Alice Coltrane, a pianist and accomplished artist in her own right. Even though music, including his father's, was ubiquitous in the household, he turned seriously to jazz only after his older brother, John Jr., died in a car accident in 1982. Ravi Coltrane, then in high school, was hit hard by the loss; he wandered for several years.

It was during this time that he began listening in earnest to his father's records; he was tired, he said, of being embarrassed by his ignorance. He was surprised by his connection to the music. It led him to recordings by Charlie Parker and Sonny Rollins - and to the saxophone.

Some of Mr. Coltrane's earliest playing was with his mother, who had quietly continued making music after withdrawing to form a Vedantic meditation center, in 1975. Last year he shepherded the release of her first studio effort in more than 25 years, the warmly meditative "Translinear Light" (Impulse!).

Mr. Coltrane first encountered the tapes that became the album "One Down, One Up" in 1991, in a closet in his mother's house. He has been angling for their release for 10 years, since the revival of the Impulse! label; the Verve Music Group, the label's corporate parent for seven of those years, has included some of Mr. Coltrane's smaller finds as bonus tracks on reissued CD's and will probably continue to do so.

The "One Down" performances, originally broadcast by the radio D.J. Alan Grant, mark the beginning of the final phase in his father's career, Mr. Coltrane said - emphatically celestial music marked by exploratory free improvisation, blistering atonality and, eventually, new musicians. By the start of 1966, McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones had both essentially decamped, less embittered than alienated. ("There's no gain without a little pain," Mr. Tyner said last week with a fond chuckle.) The permanent installment of Alice Coltrane on piano and Rashied Ali on drums usually delimits the saxophonist's final transition. "But his last period actually starts right in the middle of 1965," Mr. Coltrane suggested. "It starts with this group: with McCoy and Elvin and Jimmy Garrison."

The music supports his assertion. Tension crackles throughout the album's four songs, three of which approach or exceed the 20-minute mark. Mr. Tyner delivers a solo on "Afro Blue" that matches any in his career for expressive drama. The whole quartet strains for weightless transcendence with "Song of Praise."

The pièce de résistance is a 27-minute-long tenor saxophone exertion on the album's title track that seems to enfold the entirety of Coltrane's musical experience in its sinewy embrace. An athletic and intellectual marvel, the solo has circulated for years as a hallowed bootleg among tenor saxophonists like David Liebman and Michael Brecker; its influence has been unseen but surely felt.

Mr. Coltrane was born a few months after the second of these broadcasts, and still cites the "One Down, One Up" solo as his favorite John Coltrane Quartet recording. But one gets the sense that it is no longer needed as a conduit to the man he has known only through music.

"There was a period in my life, about a year, where I listened to it every day," he recalled. "I'd always have a cassette, or a mini-disc or a DAT; I'd keep one with me, no matter what. I always thought, If the plane starts going down, I'm going to put this on, because it's really the last thing I want to hear."

[Michael Fitzgerald]

Ravi Coltrane may have first encountered the tapes in 1991, but the rest of the Coltrane fans and scholars have known about this stuff for ages (it's been issued on bootlegs) - and in more complete form. Are we getting shafted with an incomplete release because that's all that was in the closet??

Mike

[Stefan Wood]

Well where did the more complete recordings come from? FM broadcasts or ?

[Guy Berger]

Well where did the more complete recordings come from?  FM broadcasts or ?

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That's what I have. FWIW, does this Verve release (and the tapes in Ravi's closet) also come from the FM broadcasts?

Guy

[Michael Fitzgerald]

Yes - see http://home.att.net/~dawild/jcdisc65.htm

Mike

Sorry - my Yes is to Stefan, not Guy. Not having been in the closet with Ravi, I don't know the source.

Edited October 11, 2005 by Michael Fitzgerald

[Stefan Wood]

Yes - see http://home.att.net/~dawild/jcdisc65.htm

Mike

Sorry - my Yes is to Stefan, not Guy. Not having been in the closet with Ravi, I don't know the source.

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Thanks! Well then it is a shame it isn't complete.

[Soul Stream]

So what's the sound quality of this?

[WD45]

So what's the sound quality of this?

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Since we are not getting all of the material, what we do get had better be f'ing pristine.

[Michael Fitzgerald]

The impulse! propaganda I received says:

"The 1965 Half Note recordings, taken from late-night radio broadcasts and until now available only as inferior-quality bootlegs, have long had legendary status among aficionados - especially the extended performance of 'One Down, One Up,' regarded by many as one of Coltrane's greatest recorded improvisations."

So, they're using the collectors to bolster the music's reputation, but they're slapping them in the face by issuing only PART of what the 'aficionados' elevated to legendary status.

And if I interpret this correctly, the new set is still aircheck sourced, not linecheck (and I believe there is no pre-broadcast source on these). But I won't put money on that.

Mike

[bertrand]

Just got the new Downbeat (November issue), and this is reviewed by Ethan Iverson (the Bad Plus guy, I assume).

In the last paragraph, Iverson also talks about his frustration with the material that isn't there. He states that 'there's a lot more music from the Half Note that does not apparently exist in master form in the Coltrane estate' and he proceeds to list some of the private tapes that he has in his collection! I hope for his sake that the Coltrane estate does not have the same lawyer as the Miles estate.

Bertrand.

Edited October 12, 2005 by bertrand

[mikeweil]

Would any of you mind listing available (if admittedly bootleg) CDs of the material not included on the new Impulse release? Thanks!

[John L]

The impulse! propaganda I received says:

"The 1965 Half Note recordings, taken from late-night radio broadcasts and until now available only as inferior-quality bootlegs, have long had legendary status among aficionados - especially the extended performance of 'One Down, One Up,' regarded by many as one of Coltrane's greatest recorded improvisations."

So, they're using the collectors to bolster the music's reputation, but they're slapping them in the face by issuing only PART of what the 'aficionados' elevated to legendary status.

And if I interpret this correctly, the new set is still aircheck sourced, not linecheck (and I believe there is no pre-broadcast source on these). But I won't put money on that.

Mike

←

Well, this is good news for me. I have Half Note recordings on two Magnetic bootlegs. But what is listed as "One Down, One Up" on one of those discs is actually "One Up, One Down," recorded at Birdland on 2/23/63!

Edited October 12, 2005 by John L

[skeith]

this thread should probably be moved to New Releases if we are going to get into a discussion of the cd as opposed to the newspaper article.

that said, I picked this up yesterday and I find the sound quality very good, superior to the recent Monk/Trane and Parker/Gillespie live recordings. There are some glitches - I think the word is "drop-outs"- in one or both channels at least on the famous One Down, One Up ("ODOU") track.

My big issue is maybe the build up for this thing is too much, because while I think the band sounds great, I have a hard time accepting that so many think that ODOU, clocking in at over 20 minutes, is the greatest or even one of the greatest Trane solos.

Upon just an initial listen I felt the ghost of Miles Davis whispering in my ear, just take the horn out of your mouth Trane.

Just my two cents.

Edited October 12, 2005 by skeith

[JSngry]

I agree that Impulse! is not to be commended for its handling of this reissue. But then again, maybe they legitimately (in their minds, anyway) determined that the market would not tolerate a larger issue (the whole of the material easily fits on 2 1/2 CDs, and, as I received it, the third was filled out with a cut from The Penthouse, in Seattle, from 9-30-65 with Pharoah on boord and an intensely different vibe).

But - I made a pact with myself (and either god or the devil, never can be too sure about which is which when it come to making pacts and such...) a long time ago that whenever I obtained bootleg material that I really dug, I would buy it if and when it was legitmately released.

A deal's a deal, so I'm buying this, as well as the perhaps inevitable Volume 2. But only once, and not necessarily at full retail price. A deal ain't a deal without a loophole or two...

[jazzbo]

I have this on the way from cduniverse, though I have the material in the format you do Jim. . .and I think another format! But I want to buy this for similar reasons. . . and will enjoy it I know. It will probably sound better, which is a plus. And it's authorized.

I don't think this is the greatest Coltrane since sliced bread, but it sure is a spirited bunch of performances by this quartet!

[Cali]

So what's the sound quality of this?

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From a reliable source, the sound is a major improvement over the bootlegs.