Late Period Coltrane

[Librarian]

I posted this on my music blog, but I thought I'd toss it out here to see if we could get a discussion going about John Coltrane's later period recordings.

I remember when I was first getting interested in jazz I found a record (or tape, the memory is a little hazy) of John Coltrane's called Transition. Cool, I thought, this is the guy who did My Favorite Things and played on those Miles Davis records I'd been taking out of the library.

Well, needless to say, I wasn't prepared for the intensity of the music and was really confused about what was going on. This wasn't the lyrical music of MFT or the cool feeling of Kind of Blue but the sound of someone who was seemingly in pain.

A few years later, when I knew more about the music and Coltrane's development I was able to understand the music better and come to enjoy most of it. The pain that I heard in that first record was real; it was the pain of the spiritual search that Coltrane was going through: reading different religious texts as well as books on physics and astronomy in an attempt to understand the universe in which he was living. Also the all to real pain of being in a racist society and the ongoing civil rights movement played a large part in his musical development as did the more tangible advances of free jazz pioneers like Ornette Coleman and Albert Ayler.

Now I thinkt that Transition is one of the easier late period records to come to grips with... it truly is a transition between the classic quartet and the new band that he would put together with Pharaoh Sanders and Rashied Ali. Other favorites from this period for me are The John Coltrane Quartet Plays and Meditations. The live records are still tough for me... I love Pharoah Sanders' playing on his own records, especially the drone based music of his 60's and 70's Impulse! Recordings, but his recordings with Coltrane are so harsh and unforgiving musically that it makes the music hard to warm up to.

[jav]

I personally find Pharoah Sanders screeching sound to be an interesting contrast to Coltrane in the later recordings. My first reaction to Coltrane of this period was that it did not even sound like music, but now many years and many, many albums and cds later, I find this music fascinating. I find it interesting that this jazz icon often performed live to near empty clubs while creating this music and also find it interesting that so many Coltrane boosters seem to gloss over or outright ignore this stage of his career. John Coltrane was definitely a seeker, and one can only wonder what ground would have been left for him had he lived on. jav

[Bill Barton]

He did what he did, you do what you do. Simple as that. Appreciate it or not, it's there. And - with luck - it will still be there years and years from now. Seek. Hear. Listen.

[Tom K]

The transition phase which is recorded on the 1965 tracks, especially the late Quartet recordings, is, to me, the most interesting phase in Coltrane's career. The Quartet reached some unprecedented heights of intensity then - just listen to "One Down, One Up", and on the other hand the calm, intensive beauty on "In Transition". - 1965 really marked the climax of a long development as well as the discarding of old clothes and setting out for new territory.

[walkin]

I love the late Coltrane era.Transition is one of the best albums I agree.I also like Coltrane Quartet Plays,Ascension,Om,Sun Ship,and Live In Japan.Interstellar Space I find less interesting but it`s not bad.I still have`nt heard Meditations(I have heard First Meditations though).

[Louis Schwartz]

This is also one of my favorite of the later period (kind of a gateway to the later period, actually). I've always thought that "Vigil" was one of the most successful of Coltrane's later performances. I like it better than the duets with Ali (although I like those too). There's just something flat-out riviting about this duet!

"Transition" (at least the CD), if I'm not mistaken, is a product of an attempt to reconstruct Contrane's Impulse catalogue along the lines of actual sessions rather than the track lists of the original releases. What is the status of the record right now, in the present reissue series? I think "Vigil," for example, originally appeared on "Kulu Se Mama." Does anyone know the full release history of the material on the Impulse/GRP CD?

Other favorite later Cotrane: the version of "Afro Blue" on "Live in Japan," "The Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost" on "Meditations."

For what it's worth, I don't experience this music as painful or as expresive of pain at all. I find it intense and expressive of a yearing for transcendence. There is desire and striving in it, some feeling of lamentation over the limitations one encounters in physical life, but not pain exactly--or not centrally pain. Sucessful or not it's about striving to push beyond limits of various kinds (including the aesthetic restraints of particular music forms and genres), and I think it works primarly by confning all its discipline to one area of musical production (away from formal concerns, esp. harmnic ones) and toward the production of sound itself, sometimes melodic or rhythmic, but never constrained by a particular melodic form or rhythm. And with a very free movemnt across the boundary between tones (that is, identifiable music notes in, say, a given scale) and noise. All of it expressive of a forward or upward drive away from anything mundane or predictable.

The big problem this music always faces is, ironically, how to avoid monotony. Once you've moved away from one set of conventions, it's very easy to find that your means of avoiding them have themselves turned into a new set of conventions. Coltrane didn't work in this idiom long enough to find out if he was going to reach that end-game (he died all too soon), but while he was playing this music he certainly avoided monotony, and I think he did it by the sheer force and drama of his inventiveness. He was still expanding and developing his new musical vocabulary right up to the end, finding new variations, new shades and timbers, new noises, etc. And this later vocabulary has become a permanent part both of the wider jazz vocabulary (one resource even for many mainstream players) and, of course, it's still central to the avant-garde (which is no longer really all that "avant," though still outside the commercial mainstream and still to some extent a critique of it).

I think late Coltrane is among the most powerful music of this century. I don't listen to it everyday, but I seldom go more than a week or two without feeling the need for its particularly purging fire.

L.