When the Coltrane Left the Station

I suppose that it's human nature to feel bewildered when you get into a groove with a musician you love and then realize one day that his train has left the station, leaving you standing on the platform.

That happened to me in 1965 when saxophone virtuoso John Coltrane moved on from the harmonies that had rightfully elevated him into the pantheon of jazz greats and set out on an exploration of atonal Western music, Indian ragas and other eclectic musical forms that would end with his death at age 40 in 1967.

It was a period of enormous growth for Coltrane and difficulty for this fan. On the one hand, I felt that one of my main men had abandoned me by going off into some kind of a musicial trance consisting of honks and yowls, as opposed to his more static harmonies, but on the other hand I was mature enough musically even as a yon teen to know that his creative blast furnace had to be stoked and he most certainly did not need my approval to change course.

I eventually caught back up to Coltrane and today consider the final phase of his musical life to be every bit as extraordinary as the earlier phases. This phase included "Ascension," a 40-minute long piece with extended solos by Archie Shepp, Pharoah Sanders and Freddie Hubbard that I could not stand to listen to when it was released but I adore today.

This brings us to a new book -- Coltrane: The Story of a Sound by Ben Ratliff, the great New York Times music writer -- who discards the notions that Coltrane lapsed into preteniousness by "going modern" and that his later music was a reflection of black rage and explains why in the 40 years since his death he perhaps is more widely imitated than any other jazz figure.

Excerpts from the opening chapter:

From the outside, one keeps wondering which musician will take the next decisively evolutionary step, as all those who seem to be candidates repeat themselves, become hermetic or obvious, fail to write compelling original material, sell out in some form, or begin to bore their audiences. And then one wonders whether evolutionary models should be applied to jazz at all. It seems to be the case that jazz loops around, retrenches, makes tiny adjustments that don't alter the basic language. The problem, though, is that Coltrane certainly made it seem as if jazz were evolving. He barreled ahead, and others followed. Some are still following.

His career, especially the last ten years of it, was so unreasonably exceptional that when he became seen as the representative jazz musician, the general comprehension of how and why jazz works became changed; it also became jagged and dangerous with half-truths. Every half-truth needs a full explanation.

* * * * *

Coltrane loved structure in music, and the science and theory of harmony; one of the ways he is remembered is as the champion student of jazz. But insofar as Coltrane's music has some extraordinary properties — the power to make you change your consciousness a little bit — we ought to widen the focus beyond the constructs of his music, his compositions, and his intellectual conceits. Eventually we can come around to the music's overall sound: first how it feels in the ear and later how it feels in the memory, as mass and as metaphor. Musical structure, for instance, can't contain morality. But sound, somehow, can. Coltrane's large, direct, vibratoless sound transmitted his basic desire: "that I'm supposed to grow to the best good that I can get to."

What Coltrane accomplished, and how he connected with audiences for jazz around the world, seems to elude any possible career plan, and is remarkably separate from what we have come to understand as European-based, Western-culture artistic consciousness.

* * * * *

His work became unofficially annexed by the civil rights movement: its sound alone has become a metaphor for dignified perseverance. His art, nearly up to the end, was not insular, and kept signifying different things for different people of different cultures and races. His ugliest music (to a certain way of thinking) is widely suspected of possessing beauty beyond the listener's grasp, and the reverse goes for his prettiest music — that it is more properly understood as an expression of grave seriousness. There is more poetry written about him, I would guess, than about any other jazz musician. And his religious quests through Christianity, Buddhism, Kabbalah, and Sufism are now embedded, ex post facto, in his music. In pluralistic America, it has become hard not to hear Coltrane's modal music — in which an improviser, freed from chordal movement, becomes free to explore — as a metaphor for a personal religious search.

I can only add that John Coltrane has made a more honest listener out of me. What I mean by that is he forced me to reevaluate my own parochial approach to the most free of free-form music -- and music in general, as well.