Ben Ratliff: Coltrane, The Story of a Sound

[Lazaro Vega]

Ben Ratliff talks about his 2007 critical biography of John Coltrane this Sunday evening from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. over Blue Lake Public Radio. The entire three hour program will feature John Coltrane's recordings.

Please join Blue Lake Public Radio via http://www.bluelake.org/radio or http://bluelake.ncats.net/

For information on Ratliff's book, which was a finalist in the Book Critic Awards, please see:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/28/books/review/Mishra-t.html

Following Jazz From Blue Lake Sunday please stay with us at 10 p.m. for "Night Lights" with David Brent Johnson and "Dolphy '64."

Edited November 12, 2009 by Lazaro Vega

[Lazaro Vega]

"No jazz musician ever worked harder to master his craft than John Coltrane. When appearing in nightclubs, he retreated to his dressing room to practice between sets. He played his saxophone until his lips bled, then studied philosophy, international music and the finer points of music theory to develop a fuller understanding of his art. So why did such an intellectual musician exert such a strong... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) influence on, of all people, Iggy Pop, the shirtless, leather-lunged screamer whose proto-punk group, the Stooges, Ben Ratliff rightly describes as 'the wildest, loudest, even dumbest band going'?

That's part of the mystery that Ratliff, the erudite jazz critic of the New York Times, tries to unravel in his critical study of Coltrane's powerful, endlessly influential music. 'Coltrane: The Story of a Sound' is not a biography but an extended, deeply informed analysis of the qualities that make Coltrane and his music so meaningful to people today, four decades after his death.

Coltrane was only 40 when he died of cancer in 1967, but during the final 10 years of his life, he became the last great innovator in jazz. After him, the music has devolved into two opposing factions: antiquarian classicism and a squawking babel of noise. In some ways, both camps can trace their inspiration to Coltrane. 'Like all great artists, he embodied multiple, often contradictory, aspects,' Ratliff writes, hinting at a comparison to Walt Whitman that he elsewhere makes explicit.

By this somewhat strained formulation, the multitudes that Coltrane contains reach far beyond music and include — besides Iggy Pop, of course — such well-known jazz artists as John Wayne, Gary Cooper, Lou Gehrig and John Henry (the steel-driving man, not the owner of the Boston Red Sox). Ratliff claims to see in these disparate figures a confident but stoical American archetype that Coltrane embodied: someone 'who found ecstasy in his labor but otherwise was difficult to excite.'

Coltrane showed little emotion onstage, beyond the swirling, hurricane-force 'sheets of sound' that became his signature style. Ultimately, his playing reached an incantatory, trancelike state, with fervid solos that roared on for 45 minutes without pause, sending his more dedicated listeners into a delirious frenzy. It was this side of Coltrane, more than his masterly musical technique, that broadened his reputation beyond jazz. 'He helped people freak out,' as Ratliff pointedly, if inelegantly, puts it.

What Iggy Pop, the punk band the Minutemen and Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters so admired about Coltrane, it's safe to say, wasn't his inventive chord substitutions or his nuanced use of the Aeolian musical mode. It was the flurry of sound, the sheer, inexhaustible force of his presence and will. 'What I heard John Coltrane do with his horn,' Pop said, 'I tried to do physically.'

Coltrane's intensity came to be seen by many as an unfettered expression of the African American soul. His tune 'Alabama' was written in response to the bombings and strife of the civil rights movement and represented what Ratliff calls 'an accurate psychological portrait of a time, a complicated mood that nobody else could render so well.'

Some listeners attached religious significance to Coltrane and his music, making him 'a kind of martyr... a kind of seer,' as if he were shaking the walls of Jericho and breaking the shackles of bondage with the sound of his horn. But other onetime admirers began to complain that his music had grown opaque and self-indulgent, as Coltrane came to view his performances as sensory experiences that transcended mere music.

In trying to explain what made Coltrane so remarkable, Ratliff puffs his cheeks and blows as hard as he can. He pulls names at random off the cultural shelf, from Herman Melville and Susan Sontag to Gertrude Stein, Clint Eastwood, Waylon Jennings, Immanuel Kant and Wilt Chamberlain (who once scored 100 points in a basketball game, not 102, as Ratliff writes). And it's all too much.

This may be the most original book on jazz since Geoff Dyer's 'But Beautiful' in 1996, but like Dyer's half-fictional tour de force, 'Coltrane' can be a maddening thing to grasp. Ratliff can be exhilarating in one passage, baffling in the next — which, come to think of it, is not unlike Coltrane himself. In the end, I wish Ratliff had paid closer attention to Coltrane's ballads, which he played with a poignant delicacy that only Stan Getz came close to matching. A whisper, after all, is more interesting than a shout and reveals more of the human heart."

Reviewed by Matt Schudel, a Washington Post staff writer who often writes about jazz, Washington Post Book World

(Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)

[ghost of miles]

Sounds like another knockout show on the way, Lazaro. Hopefully our fund-drive will be over (scheduled to end by 5 p.m. that night if we make goal) and I can tune in from home on my laptop.

[Lazaro Vega]

Up for tonight. LV

[ghost of miles]

We're ending our fund-drive in about 10 minutes--I'll be listening tonight from my desk at home.

[Lazaro Vega]

How did your station do? We ended up 10,000 above what we did last fall which, given the state of the economy in Michigan, was a nice vote of confidence.

[ghost of miles]

How did your station do? We ended up 10,000 above what we did last fall which, given the state of the economy in Michigan, was a nice vote of confidence.

Same here--surprisingly well, will probably end up around $15,000 over goal.

Just tuned in and you're about to go to Ratliff.

[Lazaro Vega]

Well, given everything we talked about the program could have easily been a special on late Coltrane. Opting for his earlier music was more about the time of day the program was broadcast, Sunday night, than the narrative of the interview. About 10 minutes of me fact checking him was also left off the air. Plan to revisit the interview late night and dig deeper into, say, "The Night Has a Thousand Eyes" into "Venus," etc.