Coltrane

Through the inspired craftsmanship of Japanese electronic engineering I can hear, between sharp intakes of breath, the saxophone’s long-alienated apprenticeship with ragged Philadelphia rhythm and blues, effervescent against the sparse, intellectual understatement of the trumpet. Coltrane, intertwined with Miles, on a flight of fancy spontaneously conceived and expressed at Newport in 1958, but now, over half a century later, them both dead, originating in a beam of laser light bouncing off microscopic bumps, on the underside of a plastic disc.

The Dionysian howls, wild, unrestrained sensuality, are perfectly balanced by orderly, rational, self-disciplined, Apollonian grace-notes, slipping into essential melody notes and taking precisely half their time value.

The bass player momentarily abandons his walking line to reinforce two drum kicks, then imitates a third immediately after hearing it. In response, the drummer plays on-beat punches that reinforce the bass player’s return to a walking pattern. One part’s subtle phrasing shift, from an even eighth-note feeling to a triplet swing feeling, resulting in a near simultaneous fleeting shift in the other part. An intensified feeling of swing in the drummer’s part leads to comparable intensification in the bass part that progresses from straight to swing patterns and, finally, to triplet figures.

Coltrane always puts an aura of excitement in the air. Elvin Jones is, of course, central to this. He creates the collage of percussive sound fragments, linked by intuition to the tune. His infectiously swinging ride cymbal implies the basic time so strongly that he doesn’t need to state it explicitly. He just throws himself into the most dangerous musical situations, somehow managing to land safely and solidly back on the beat in the following bar, never without nuance, but so powerfully, so elementally, like a force of nature.

And on top, in between, and underneath this molten rhythm, the cries that come to the mind and the viscera, the horn as an extension of the self, the totality of commitment, the excavation of emotion, is the thrust of the imperious imagination of John Coltrane.

Don’t accuse me of hyperbole. Even these words are not strong enough to describe the feelings. Listen to the resilience, the risk-taking, and the sheer ingenuity of his playing; the intense probing into things far off, unknown and mysterious.

Think about the endless hour after hour of his practising, and the hour after hour of his thinking about the wholeness of the universe and of the ways in which one could become part of that wholeness through music. Conviction, dedication, spirituality, the excitement of discovery, the revelation of greatness, a substance so rich and full of unbounded beauty and fire, a musical power so incredibly strong, that no one could have imagined that all that probing and contemplation could often, and paradoxically, lead to what at first sounds like a primal scream.

But no, hear him pushing at the edges of a familiar tune, like My Favourite Things. The aggression and fury of his style, as he mows mercilessly through rain drops on roses and kittens with whiskers and snowflakes that stay on my nose and eye lashes, could only have been brought to a halt by liver cancer.

It puts things into a larger context if you remember that he was, at the time, a junkie. He kicked heroin by using alcohol as a crutch, only to become an alcoholic. Eased out of the Davis quintet, he dried out and found God. the last ten years of his life featured an ongoing but intermittent addiction to junk food with fat and svelte sets of clothes, to cycle through the binge and health-nut phases.