Lewis Porter John Coltrane His Life and Music Review

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John Coltrane: His Life and Music

Lewis Porter

Univ of Michigan Press

ISBN: 0472101617

Thirty-ane years afterward John Coltrane died, just short of 40-ane years onetime, he remains an enigma, non to only to me but to the various persons who have attempted to capture his character in books. In that location are, with the publication of Lewis Porter's John Coltrane: His Life and Music, eight books in English nearly the homo. None of them, including Porter'southward, give you lot much insight into his personality.

If you are looking for a calorie-free read, skip this book. There is insufficiently little about his private life, and some of that is speculative.

The emphasis is entirely on the music, and I would suggest that you don't even pick up this book unless yous are a musician with considerable understanding of harmony and the ability the read musical notation. Merely if you are a musician, specially a jazz musician, hasten to your bookstore and become it, and prepare to spend not days, non weeks, but months studying it. Information technology is the finest musical assay of a jazz musician'southward art I accept ever read. Information technology is brilliantly done. In add-on to being a responsible scholar, Dr. Porter is associate professor of music at Rutgers University, he is a jazz musician. He is a pianist and for fifteen years he was a working saxophonist. This shows in every detail of his discussion of the work of a homo who was a great saxophonist, in some opinions the greatest of his generation.

I can't say that I knew Coltrane well because I'm non sure information technology was possible to know him well. We certainly were on cordial terms, and he would now and then come up to my home in Chicago for dinner during the years I was editor of Downwardly Beat magazine. I remember him as everyone Porter interviewed remembers him: gentle, clear when he chose to speak but usually very tranquillity, and astonishingly modest. It has always baffled me that the nigh mediocre musical talents ofttimes accept the biggest egos. But those of brilliant ability are inclined to exist unprepossessing. Mayhap it is considering they are e'er pushing to the outer periphery of their abilities, and the art itself makes them small-scale. John certainly was that fashion, and Porter quotes him a number of times equally asserting that he was searching and had not really establish what he sought, musically or philosophically. I remember listening to Bartok'southward Music for Strings, Percussion and Celeste with him. He hadn't heard that piece before, although he was very familiar with Stravinsky'due south music (equally most jazz musicians are). He listened in complete absorption while my son, then about iii, crawled up on his lap and made himself comfy. That is how I call back him: completely open to a little child, and gentle. Frankly, I somewhat adored John. He was a lovely person.

That he was a former heroin aficionado is widely known. He broke the addiction on his own, and early, though he began using (and this I did not know) LSD in the later years, possibly in search of that mystical experience he was seeking through music. John'south music was essentially a religious search, and he was fascinated, as Porter documents, past all the religions of the globe. He was by the same token interested in every kind of music he encountered. He named one of his children Ravi (himself an outstanding and underrecognized avant-garde saxophonist) after the great sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar, 1 of John's friends.

Coltrane emerged as a major jazz effigy in the late 1950s. Born in North Carolina, he adult every bit a musician in Philadelphia in company with another important saxophonist, Benny Golson, his lifelong friend. It was his membership with the Miles Davis group that pulled people's coats, to use an old jazz musician's phrase, to his emerging brilliance.

John was said to play with a difficult tone, and some referred to his playing as angry. This puzzled him. He said to me, "Why do they say my playing is angry? I'm not angry at anything." This bothered him enough that he said information technology to other'south also, co-ordinate to Dr. Porter's book. I thought John had an exceptionally pretty sound. I attended one of his record sessions entirely devoted to ballads; indeed I was in that location because John wanted me to write the liner notes for it, which I did. I call back that session (and the album documents my impression) for enthrallingly tender playing. It volition stay with me all my life. He also did an album with the late singer Johnny Hartman in which this aspect of his work is once more evident.

But he could play with incredible burn. He was, at least in his early on years, deeply interested in arpeggiated chords, and would give an impression of piling one chord on top of another (although that plain is technically incommunicable on the saxophone) with such rapidity that writer Ira Gitler chosen information technology "sheets of sound," a term that has stuck e'er since. He also played at enormous length, his solos lasting 15 minutes or more than. My Favorite Things, recorded at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1963, is 17 minutes 24 seconds long. This used to annoy Miles Davis, leading to a rather famous exchange: he told Miles that he'd sometimes get into a solo and wouldn't know how to get out of it. Miles reportedly replied, "Endeavor taking the horn out of your mouth."

John'due south religious quest continued to the terminate. He began to eschew the steady beat out of jazz for a freer approach, and information technology lost him some of his audition " and indeed some of his musicians. The magnificent and influential pianist McCoy Tyner left at the end of 1965 and and so bully Elvin Jones, his drummer for many years, left in 1966, both of them using the same phrase about the group in interviews, calling the group "a lot of noise."

When Coltrane came up, jazz was full of major and highly individual musicians. There is nothing to compare to this abundance of riches today, and many of its best- known younger practitioners are playing what some accept called retrojazz, mining the by. It may be that there is zero left to do. It is ten years short of a century since Arnold Schoenberg began writing music that avoided tonal centers; musicians may detect it interesting, but the public has retained an unshakable indifference to it. Plain at that place is so just so far the collective public ear volition follow the musician abroad from tonality.

Serious music of all kinds is in trouble. Classical radio stations in the U.s. are turning into a kind of loftier-class music, designed to soothe the nerves of those who grew upward on stone and know cypher else. There are fewer and fewer radio stations that play jazz in N America. In Los Angeles there isn't 1; in the mid- 1940s, there were forty such stations in that city. Major volume publishers take no interest in jazz or for that matter even classic pop song. Academy libraries, including that at Yale, are taking upward the slack. When the ASCAP Deems Taylor awards for books on music were made last fall, eight of the ten went to university presses. Dr. Porter's book is published by the University of Michigan Printing.

The Miles Davis group circa 1959 gestated three major jazz influences, Miles himself, Bill Evans, and John Coltrane. We have non seen their like once again, and we're not likely to. Though skillful jazz players will keep to emerge and struggle to make a living, there is a growing uneasy feeling in jazz circles that this music is at the end of its rich creative run: approximately lxx pct of CDs sold are reissues of music recorded decades ago. If it is over, Coltrane must exist viewed historically as one of its concluding peachy innovators.

And Dr. Porter's volume is a superb analysis of what made him so. Information technology belongs in every music school, and certainly every jazz musician should read "no, study!" it.

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