Jazz – Page 11 – Rock Salted

John Coltrane – Interstellar Space

John Coltrane – Interstellar Space ABC Impulse ASD-9277 (1974)

Coltrane’s Interstellar Space is like a soundtrack to Arthur Rimbaud’s Une Saison En Enfer [A Season in Hell], as Stellar Regions is for Rimbaud’s Les Illuminations [The Illuminations]. This is one of the more challenging Coltrane albums. It demands constant attention. But it is rewarding. Coltrane had added some of the layered approach of his wife Alice into his sound. His fiery forays here are as dazzling as they are ingenious. His passion perfectly matches his virtuosity.

Rashied Ali plays some remarkable non-linear rhythms on drums. Though he keeps time in a sense, it is a subjective time with no predetermined time signature. The music is of the moment, in the sense of having no need of time to progress. It is confusing, but the instantaneous possibility of the moment is supreme and Ali’s rhythms are presented as they are naturally. Instead of conforming to any external formula, Interstellar Space is spontaneously (and thereby simultaneously) composed, lived, and performed.

This is a remarkable effort in musical abstract expressionism. While totally true to the impulsiveness of free improvisation, this is also a strong statement of Coltrane’s (and Ali’s) struggle to resolve the inner self and the outer one in the most idealistic sense of reconciling a personal place in a harmonious social context. Whew, it is that and more. This is one of the great efforts to be a completely free individual in a world as great as imaginable.

Interstellar Space rebels against order and structure, in a sense, but only against falsehood. One of the basic contradictions of so-called “free jazz” was stated quite succinctly by pianist Paul Bley, talking to The Wire magazine in 2007 about the saxophonist Ornette Coleman:

“There was an article in Down Beat in something like 1954, in which I mentioned that jazz had reached a crisis and that AABA form had too many As, and not enough CDEFG. So I began working with groups where we would play totally free, and that led to a kind of dead end, because ‘totally free’ didn’t necessarily allow you to continue. A totally free piece is a totally free piece, end of concert. *** [But Ornette] suggested ABCDEFGHIJK, in which repetition was anathema *** It wasn’t totally free because totally free was A forever, metamorphosing. It was a form that took hold, because you could finally return to the written music, and the audience had something to hold on to.”

What might be added is the sort of complaint that the feminist Jo Freeman made about (so-called) structureless groups, which tend to have a de facto structure (tyranny) if there is no formal structure. These things are basically what Coltrane was working through on his own with recordings like those on Interstellar Space. The music wasn’t just a formless morass, metamorphosing, but neither was it music that was composed in advance according to a detailed score. It fell somewhere in the middle, loosely organized without that loose organization seeming like a constraint, able to go wherever and equally the product of the efforts of both Coltrane and Ali. The performers aren’t operating completely independent of one another, in some kind of purely horizontal relationship. But they are constantly negotiating the terms of how the music evolves. One might quote a political economist here:

“But is this anything other than picking up Rousseau’s classic idea that being free, in politics, does not mean living outside of all constraint, but living according to rules we have set for ourselves? That is, living according to verticality [that is, hierarchy,] such as we have chosen to institute it, in the form that we have chosen to give it.”

This is a particularly useful analogy, given that Rousseau favored small states, much as a sax/drums duo is the smallest possible “group”, meaning that the problem of negotiations between participants doesn’t face the problem of exponentially-increasing complexity that shackles larger groups. This isn’t to say that the horizontal vs. vertical question is entirely side-stepped, but rather the question of verticality is addressed in a sort of controlled laboratory setting, if you will. Rashied Ali just makes it deliciously apparent how much space a “sideman” has within the context of a Coltrane group, and by extension, how the role of a “star” soloist can be rethought within the free jazz movement.

Coltrane recorded Interstellar Space on February 22, 1967; he died on July 17, 1967. For a considerable time these were believed to be the last known studio recordings he made, though additional studio recordings were later discovered. “Venus: Second From the Sun; Love” (AKA “Dream Chant”) is, melodically, extremely similar to “Stellar Regions” from Stellar Regions, which was recorded a week before Interstellar Space but not released until 1995. Many of these recordings were unnamed and only later named by Alice Coltrane for release. Though posthumously released in album form, these songs do make up a coherent set of music. They all cohere around a common musical perspective.

While made up of archival recordings, Interstellar Space remains one of the most essential John Coltrane albums. Listeners should seek out a reissue that includes the excellent bonus track “Leo,” which was recorded at the same session as the other songs but left off the original LP due to space constraints (but previously released on The Mastery of John Coltrane, Vol. 3: Jupiter Variation), plus a “Jupiter Variation” false start track.

Coleman Hawkins – At Ease With Coleman Hawkins

Coleman Hawkins – At Ease With Coleman Hawkins Moodsville MVLP 7 (1961)

Mellow jazz leaning heavily on ballads. This is a precursor to Coltrane‘s John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman and Ballads. Good stuff.

John Coltrane – Transition

John Coltrane – Transition GRP GRD-124 (1970; 1993 reissue)

If this album was from anyone other than Coltrane, I might be tempted to praise it more. The performances here are all superb, and Coltrane is in his prime. Musically, it’s very similar to A Love Supreme, though without the same intense focus and unity of vision. At times, the performances here hint at what the group accomplished on Meditations. Perhaps the main drawback of the album is the fact that the second track “Welcome” is pretty weak by Coltrane standards and that totally disrupts the flow. But also Transition is an archival release that was tampered with on at least one reissue, which further hampers the allure of the album due to the fact that the added tracks had been previously released on another album (one of those being “Welcome”) and one of the original tracks (“Dear Lord”) has been omitted. Then again, those are petty concerns. In all, this is still a worthy and thoroughly enjoyable album, but I must admit that in terms of importance to both 1960s jazz and Coltrane’s discography it falls just shy of being essential.

John Coltrane – Meditations

John Coltrane – Meditations Impulse! AS-9110 (1966)

Meditations features one of the unusual line-ups of Coltrane’s post-Ascension recordings. Coltrane plays exclusively on the left channel with the talented Rashied Ali, a fiery and highly abstract drummer. The right channel features a young Pharoah Sanders blasting his aggressive and abrasive-but-warm saxophone, along with veteran Elvin Jones on drums. McCoy Tyner on piano and Jimmy Garrison on bass then bring balance to both channels.

John Coltrane had the most fully formed and beautiful tone of just about any saxophonist. His technical perfection was only surpassed by his unfathomable improvisational style. Coltrane could effortlessly assimilate any influence. More than simple imitation, Coltrane drew the very essences of these influences and developed them into new forms. Here, the abstract rhythms of Rashied Ali and the rough texture of Pharoah Sanders combine in this journey away from conventional structure. John Coltrane is generally the last word on anything he has attempted. Listening to him play reveals the all the joy and beauty of the universe. The limitless possibilities of a loving, peaceful existence unfold with the clarity of prophets. Here, he explores the most basic elements of humanity; however, he connects living elements to divine pursuit of Truths (yes, with a capital “T”), as explicated through his music.

“The Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost” sounds forced into unnecessary structure. The solos, particularly Coltrane’s, at times seem to lose sight of their original goals, and yet, the passion and faith never waiver. Coltrane had a gift for shrewd commentary. A serious and deeply spiritual person, he could reaffirm his faith while simultaneously criticizing the church (he believed in all religions).

“Love” begins the last three movements. The dissonance of Coltrane’s melodic line resolves to a three-note consonant line. Jimmy Garrison begins the song with a moving solo. Coltrane broke jazz conventions as he dove completely into free jazz. The first two songs are continuous performances, as are the last three. Songs begin with solos, only revealing a defined statement much later. On “Consequences,” the two saxophonists blur the beginnings and ends of their solos beyond identification.

Traditionalists generally jump ship after A Love Supreme (more precisely, before Ascension) and ignore all late-period Coltrane. Yet, the most rewarding material comes from his final years. Meditations features John Coltrane at his most intense (at his most passionate, Coltrane is not casual listening). It is a foolish thing indeed to attempt to explain what Coltrane achieved with this album.

John Coltrane – Stellar Regions

John Coltrane – Stellar Regions Impulse! IMPD-169 (1995)

Stellar Regions was recorded on February 15, 1967. The recording masters were kept by Alice Coltrane for decades before release. What makes Stellar Regions an essential ‘Trane disc (it is phenomenal, perhaps the better of even A Love Supreme) is the dramatic changes evident in his music. His vibrato shifts from the wide style of John Gilmore and Albert Ayler to a quicker, gushy style resembling Ben Webster. He jumps from a rumbling low register to a smooth, clear higher one, like the vocals of Rev. Claude Jeter. Of course, tempos of the songs are much slower than as heard on Interstellar Space, recorded slightly earlier. In a sense, it is clear on hearing these recordings that Coltrane was dying. But this is without sadness. Coltrane’s music is completely at peace. While in his music he perhaps sees in the distance some great horizon yet uncrossed, there is also a total acceptance of what is within his reach. Jimmy Garrison is at his peak on “Jimmy’s Mode” with a solo tender but hip, questioning but aware, fluid but crisp. His solo finds where a delicate swing fits into Coltrane’s vision. As an artist, Coltrane was still in motion. As his battle alternated from confidence to uncertainty he added new perspective. He used every defilement to see clearly, and from there collected his many views and assembled, regrouped for further toils. This is the start of a new life. It is complete rebirth. Such a thing seems possible here. Stellar Regions is like a musical accompaniment to Arthur Rimbaud’s Les Illuminations [The Illuminations]. It is a spiritual recognition of the vast possibility beyond that grasped in the present. Yes, Stellar Regions communicates about all that needed be said before Coltrane went silent upon his July 17, 1967 death. This album is, along with Interstellar Space, Music. By that I mean this is the culmination of everything music — and Coltrane — was and is. What a wonderful thing.

Albert Ayler – New Grass

Albert Ayler – New Grass Impulse! A-9175 (1968)

A divisive album from a figure who seemed divisive in other ways from the start. Ayler rose to some level of renown among jazz heads as a pioneer of free jazz. But he got his start in R&B bands, and New Grass is an early attempt, of sorts, at jazz/R&B fusion. The album opens with typical Ayler free jazz wailing, then a brief spoken introduction, in which he states with radical earnestness that he hopes listeners like the album, and then it is on to the real surprise: R&B tunes laced through with solos far more skronky than any sort of King Curtis or The 5th Dimension mainstream R&B/soul track. The real problem with the album is how it gets going. “Message From Albert/New Grass” implies the album is something other that what it turns out to be — some kind of misguided attempt to ease listeners expecting “conventional” free jazz into the album. But “New Generation” and “Sun Watcher” really do get the album going, with great grooves, shimmering keyboards (on the latter), and what are actually smoking performances on sax by Ayler. Everything finishes strong with the sublime rave-up “Free at Last” too. But it is hard not to think that the album would have been much improved by dropping the first track and squeezing in the outtake “Thank God for Women” (posthumously released on the Holy Ghost box set). Anyway, while the album sequencing is too awkward to be entirely successful, this album deserves much credit for its radical concept alone. Jazz, and free jazz especially, was generally a pretty elitist musical form by the late 1960s, while lite R&B/soul was on the complete opposite side of the spectrum, with more plebeian appeal. Ayler throws them together without any regard for the social distinctions erected between those highbrow/lowbrow genres. While Miles Davis gets more credit for his approach to jazz/rock fusion, it is worth keeping in mind the way Miles leaned on esoteric and elitist forms of rock (not to mention the work of avant garde European composers). So, while some people saw this album as Ayler selling out to commercial tastes, a different, perhaps better, way to look at it is as an attempt to transcend the social confinement represented by narrow genre categories. And Ayler approaches that challenge with his usual open-hearted, emotive, and guileless version of what everybody typically expects to be purely cerebral, technically and conceptually challenging virtuoso performance. Contrary to its reputation, New Grass is slowly gaining more currency as a pretty decent album. It isn’t Ayler’s best. Yet it works. Anyone who does dig this should also check out Archie Shepp‘s similar effort For Losers.

Matana Roberts – Coin Coin Chapter One: Gens de couleur libres

Matana Roberts – Coin Coin Chapter One: Gens de couleur libres Constellation CST079-2 (2011)

Well, this might well be the epitome of how identity politics represents a dead end. Coin Coin Chapter One is a concept album that develops a stigmatizing identity of the oppressed that (here’s the rub) polarizes others into either racist oppressors or friendly consumers of exotic otherness made possible by an enriching sense of difference (though primarily directed to the latter as an audience). It shuts the door to universality. It also pines for a false authenticity. Rather than working to create a kind of genuine, material emancipation in the present, this music dwells on the loss of the past and the wounds of history. Set aside slavery, and weren’t white women routinely oppressed in the antebellum era too? Aside from the obviously horrible brutality of human bondage, the problem of slavery was not the denial of the rights on the basis of skin color but the vacuousness of the “free” people who accepted (or even tolerated) oppression and considered themselves society’s “betters” under such circumstances. And does this all overlook how the cultures destroyed by chattel slavery (as much as any others) were meaningless, arbitrary human constructs? And isn’t condemning slavery kind of an easy thing in modern times? Even if it does still exist today in the dark corners, who really openly argues for it? Today the more appropriate question is to ask why more resources are not devoted to completely eradicating such an acknowledged evil — or why consensual activity is conflated with “human trafficking” to artificially inflate the numbers. More broadly, the task is to struggle to make concrete the freedoms everyone acknowledges as essential but are hypocritically denied in fact in so many ways. Short of those specifics, even looking to the “free your mind and your ass will follow” approach, what is needed, as Alejandro Jodorowsky once wrote, is “to undergo a mental cataclysm that causes our worldview, our psychic stance, and any sort of self-concept to crumble, precipitating us into the void — a void that engenders us, enabling us to be reborn freer than before and, for the first time, to be in the world as it is instead of as we have learned it is.” This is not accomplished by Coin Coin Chapter One. In fact, it pursues something quite the opposite — isn’t at some level this commercially released album a way of profiting off (the history of) slavery and oppression? Is the past not being called up to reinforce a feeling of victimhood status as the essential element of a lasting identity? Give that some thought.

Anyway, the album itself is part free jazz part hard bop jazz, part singing and part spoken word, all rendered in a dramatic way. In fact, a useful reference point would be the “audiodramas” of Julius Hemphill (Roi Boyé & the Gotham Minstrels, etc.) — to a lesser extent also the jazz operas of Fred Ho. The thing is, those things have been done, and, even including her specific performance styles that look to other influences, Roberts is merely approximating styles of her forebears. So in spite of the generally excellent execution, this album is a giant, smug pat on the back to the friendly consumers of exotic otherness who pride themselves on endorsing freedom and such feel-good principles — the same approach taken by groups like Sweet Honey in the Rock, The Carolina Chocolate Drops, etc. Coin Coin Chapter One isn’t a failure, entirely or exactly, but it is appropriately a compromised, self-contradictory mess, and in many ways presents a seductive trap of suggesting that all that is possible is to feel sorry about the wrongs of the past (from a rather insular and singular perspective) to eliminate only the very worst atrocities, quietly shutting the door to opportunities to provide and expand more general emancipation today (in the sense of Fanon). This has a Foucault-ian, historicist, fundamentalist, neoliberal, “there is no alternative” kind of vibe lurking just outside its own frame. So, strangely, this is an album that feels like it wins every battle, song by song and note by note, yet loses the war — because it fights the wrong war, one that is totally inadequate.

Prince – The Rainbow Children

Prince – The Rainbow Children NPG 70004-2 (2001)

Kind of a forgotten Prince disc, unfairly, because The Rainbow Children is really one of the best from his later years. With the exception of some weird concluding outtro tracks sequenced strangely on the CD and perhaps the novelty song “Wedding Feast,” this is an album that is solid all the way through. The musicianship is top shelf, without succumbing to pandering or self-indulgent showiness. To the extent this was the launch of a more mature sound for Prince, it succeeds completely. Although it is fair to call this contemporary R&B/soul, much of this follows a kind of light soul jazz/jazz-funk approach (reference, for example, Dave Douglas‘ Live at the Jazz Standard from a few years later). It also leans toward gospel-style vocals, which is a big bonus. Of course, there is more than just that here. “1+1+1 Is 3” is very much a throwback to Prince’s iconic style of the mid-1980s, done quite convincingly. It highlights just how versatile his guitar playing is across the album. When people speak, generally, about what a talented performer Prince was, the evidence is right here. This album is kind of like being at the best possible intimate, private concert you cold imagine from Prince around the turn of the Millennium. It was around this time too that Prince appeared on “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno” on May 3, 2001 and played a couple songs, including “The Work, Part 1” from this album and a great version of his classic “The Ballad of Dorothy Parker” (originally on Sign “O” the Times) with many jazzy keyboard flourishes. The album as a whole is close to the sound of that televised performance. He came back in December of 2002 to perform “The Everlasting Now” on the show too. Now, some people don’t seem to like the album, often because of the religious content. But, really, that is only on a few songs (“The Everlasting Now” etc.) and unless you focus on lyrics to the exclusion of almost everything else, the few religious messages are general enough that they don’t hold this back much. Songs like “Family Name” — one of the funkiest on the album — are political/social commentary anyway. The real reason this isn’t better known is that it wasn’t heavily marketed and was independently distributed. It did set up material for the tour that produced One Nite Alone…Live! Nonetheless, this might be the single most overlooked Prince album.

Cecil Taylor – Live in the Black Forest

Cecil Taylor – Live in the Black Forest MPS 0068.220 (1979)

One of many live Cecil Taylor recordings from the 1970s, Live in the Black Forest was recorded less than two weeks prior to One Too Many Salty Swift and Not Goodbye with the same Cecil Taylor Unit band. Frankly, this is not as good as some of the others of that era. There are two side-long tracks. “Sperichill on Calling” is great, with an especially strong showing from Ramsey Ameen on violin, and generally more separation between the players. “The Eel Pot” on side one is fine, but the sometimes unrelentingly chaotic performance kind of runs together after a while. If the entire recording is analogized to a debate, then “The Eel Pot” is a bit combative, and “Sperichill on Calling” has more sympathetic goading and expansion of argument. While listeners can’t really go wrong with any Taylor recordings of this era, Live in the Black Forest might be reserved until after some of the others.

Sun Ra – Live at the Hackney Empire

Sun Ra and The Year 2000 Myth Science Arkestra – Live at the Hackney Empire Leo Records LR 214/215 (1994)

Live at the Hackney Empire was recorded in London just a few weeks before a series of strokes severely curtailed Sun Ra’s ability to perform. That makes it the last great Sun Ra album. The most challenging material is up front, with the bulk of the rest of the album focusing on back catalog favorites and standards (many of which, like “Prelude to a Kiss,” “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” and “Yeah, Man!,” had become regular features in concerts). There is overlap in the set list with other live recordings from the group’s late period (compare Live at Praxis ’84 and Cosmo Omnibus Imagiable Illusion: Live at Pit-Inn Tokyo, Japan, 8,8,1988). But the length of this set, and the wonderfully warm and effortless performances still make it stand out. A few guest appearances — Talvin Singh, India Cooke, Elson Dos Santos Nascimento — might also be of interest. Although some late period records sound like they were made by a band ready for retirement, there is no indication of that here. Certainly, this only occasionally reaches for the more abrasive sounds the band was known to utilize. That is hardly a concern. Even in the mellower moments the performers sound thrilled to be making music. This might not be a bad place to get your feet wet with Sun Ra and his Arkestra, and longtime fans will probably find this stands in the top tier of the many seemingly similar live albums out there. It is simply great music with nothing to prove. If it is autumnal work, it manages to be that in the best possible way.