Coltrane's Sound

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Author: Keith Raether
Date: Summer 2007
From: The Southern Review(Vol. 43, Issue 3)
Publisher: Louisiana State University
Document Type: Critical essay
Length: 5,796 words

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My father was late for dinner again, and I was grateful. There would be no tirade at the table, no rant about not being able to park his own car in his own garage because of my brother's drag racing projects. No frenzied straightening of my mother's desk, where she wrote her daily pleasure of letters, before he performed his ceremony of separation from the office: double scotch, splash of soda, twist. And no badgering of me, before the coping agent kicked in, because I'd given up baseball for war protests and general petulance. My mother and I could eat in peace. Or I could anyway. When it was just the two of us at the table, we usually listened to music of my choosing during dinner.

It was 1967, the year John Coltrane died, though I had no idea then who he was. As I track back now, it might have been the month of his death: July. School was out, Pasadena was suffocating in smog, and the Dodgers were already done for the season without Koufax.

Mom and I often had dinner by ourselves in those days. My sister was out of the house, married with two children of her own. My brother spent most of his waking hours with his cars, or with his girlfriend in one of his cars. And my father? Suffice it to say he was a stoic reflection of his times: post-Depression son, postwar dad for whom the Horatio Alger ethic seemed more commandment than choice. He'd long since established the office as his principal residence.

Music helped my mother and me get through dinner, even when the background sound was Hendrix or Cream. There were only so many silent spots that each of us could fill, night after night, and often what I had to say was ill-tempered, impatient, or contrary for the sake of contrariness. I vented often, deaf to the echo of my father in my harangue. I was fifteen.

We might have had roast beef that night, and German chocolate cake for dessert, but I don't remember it. If I can picture my mother at the table in a sleeveless white cotton blouse, locate an arrangement of bird-of-paradise on the sideboard, see the geometric pattern in her silverware, it's only because they were always there. I probably set the table for two without asking.

What I remember is this: a contrabass entering the silence, advancing through the room with low, resonant rumblings--the first notes to Coltrane's "Ol," I soon learned. My mother was in the midst of serving dinner. I'd dialed in what I thought was KPPC-FM, 106.7, Pasadena's "underground" rock station, on our Motorola hi-fi. Instead, I landed on the neighboring band: KBCA-FM, 105.1, L.A.'s all-jazz station.

I expected the usual acid metallica, heavily amplified. What I heard in its place was acoustic, buoyant, and altogether foreign. The bass line bobbed and weaved. Piano and drums joined the dance. A second double-bass added dots of counterpoint, like so many daubs of a pointillist's brush.

Soon a soprano saxophone arrived, low and coiled at the outset. But this was no snake charmer's refrain. At its core, the horn solo resembled a human cry--nasal, piercing, unalloyed--channeled through a twenty-four-inch cylinder of gold-lacquered brass. It was not a wailing lament. It sounded to me like a scream of free will and yearning, in part, I suspect, because the music had such a freeing effect on me.

Oddly perhaps, I thought of color and light as much as sound. Dawn in Constantinople, that strange and fabulous "Queen of Cities" from my Western civilization class. The quality of candlelight in our church.

"The Spanish tinge" was Jelly Roll Morton's descriptor for the irresistible Latin element found in so many jazz compositions, including "Ol." Though the tint in Morton's music was a modification of the African-inflected habanera, traditional Spanish-Arabic colorations infused many jazz recordings in the early sixties. Sketches of Spain , the pioneering Gil Evans-Miles Davis collaboration, was recorded in November 1959 and March 1960. "Ol" appeared less than two years after Sketches .

I knew none of this then. All I knew was the sound issuing from the Motorola--sound that moved like no other music I'd heard.

A flute rushed in, and then a trumpet. The music gathered momentum, each solo spiraling like a dervish relieved of gravity. The pianist built a five-minute improvisation from two chords. The drummer defied the basic laws of human mechanics, merging three independent rhythms into one time line. The saxophonist's solo could not have originated from a page of sheet music. Each phrase issued forth like language.

"Ol" is eighteen minutes and five seconds of trance music. The song occupies an entire side of the album Ol Coltrane , recorded May 25, 1961, for producer Nesuhi Ertegun's Atlantic Records. The record features trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, alto saxophonist and flutist Eric Dolphy (identified as George Lane on the album to circumvent Dolphy's contract with Prestige Records), pianist McCoy Tyner, drummer Elvin Jones, and bassists Reggie Workman and Art Davis.

As I listened to the piece, dinner sat cold on my plate. The only distraction I allowed was a moment, after each solo, to turn up the volume on the hi-fi. Mom didn't mind. Nor did she do anything to disrupt the spell. I think she was as flabbergasted, in her own way, as I was by what we heard.

She didn't understand the complex codes of theory and composition embedded in jazz. Neither of us had any idea. But she loved music, had perfect pitch, sang in two choirs, and played piano by ear. At the very least she sensed there was something extraordinary in the sound circling around us, binding us. As I look back now, I think she recognized in my discovery--of Coltrane and then of jazz in the main--that I was moved by something to a degree that she'd never witnessed. I had found something as vital to me as church hymns and American popular songs were to her.

Half a lifetime has passed since Coltrane entered the interior picture, long enough, certainly, for the obvious question to arise: Have I fallen into memory's trap? Have I romanticized my Coltrane moment and idealized my mother in the process? I wonder, too, if the vivid memory of that night is a convenient way to white-out my father, whose awareness of his children seemed to stir as much annoyance as understanding. Impossible to say, because I can't ask the person who would know best. Mom died seven years after Coltrane's passing.

But how bonded we seemed then. In our absorption, "Ol" came full circle. Coltrane's solo pooled into a restatement of the theme. Davis's bass pulsations returned. With a grazing blow to his Zildjian cymbal, Jones brought the sorcery to a close.

"I wonder where we can find that record," Mom said, after Jim Gosa, KBCA's evening deejay, identified the group and song.

Ol Coltrane has been in my record collection for thirty-nine years. The bold, Mediterranean-bright, Jagel & Slutzy-designed cover is fraying at the edges, and Phil Ramone, who recorded the session long before celebrity visited him, would be dismayed to hear how the vinyl hisses and pops after hundreds of brushes with a diamond needle. But the music Ramone captured is all there, dark and thrillingly deep, as modern now as it was then.

What was it about the music that fused me to it the first time I heard it? And what were the social odds of it happening at all? I grew up white, safe, and, until my first year in high school, narrow. Pasadena in the midsixties might have boasted the country's first progressive rock station, but Jan & Dean's 1964 pop trifle, "Little Old Lady From Pasadena," sprang from more than the imagination of two surfer dudes. Doting, well-to-do grandmothers inching down Colorado Boulevard in their vintage Studebakers and two-toned Chevrolets were part of the local landscape.

The most I knew of jazz practitioners before 1967 was "Satchmo"--Louis Armstrong--in Hollywood masquerade. (It wasn't until college that I heard the Louis Armstrong of Hot Five and Hot Seven genius.) All the music in our house was of little help. My father's idea of jazz began and ended with The Lawrence Welk Show .

Yet Welk's weekly program might well have been an odd germinal link in my discovery: The bandleader once featured alto saxophonist Johnny Hodges, one of Coltrane's early influences, on an album of standards. My parents watched the program largely because our next-door neighbor, Franklin Vilt, played trumpet in the Polka King's orchestra. The Welk formula never allowed his players to stray from the song charts, but practicing at home was another matter. Often the windows in Mr. Vilt's studio would be open, and after rehearsing the orchestra's material for the week, he'd usually work on his technique. One exercise invariably led to another, and soon our mild-mannered neighbor with the salt-and-pepper flattop would be deep into bohemia: single-note bebop flights at scalding tempos. I didn't know what to make of the trumpet chatter, except that there seemed to be patterns to it, like speech.

It's clear to me now that if Mr. Vilt wasn't versed in Clifford Brown, he must have heard, and possibly worked with, L.A. studio and ensemble players like Conte Candoli and Shorty Rogers. He probably fit the profile of hundreds of studio musicians in greater Los Angeles: a frustrated jazz player who, had the financial gods allowed it, would have chosen to play Brown's "Joy Spring" in a half-empty club over Welk's "Bubbles in the Wine" to the Geritol set at the Aragon Ballroom.

After I found Coltrane, it was only a matter of time before the battles with my father included volleys from our respective record collections. He'd fire off a Haydn sonata. I'd counter with an Eric Dolphy fire waltz. The folly in our warfare, I see now, is that Dad would have appreciated some of the sound he summarily dismissed, had one or both of us budged from our stations to negotiate a peace. He, too, had sung in a choir, and his Sundays always began with Bach, one of the great improvising minds in western European music. He simply couldn't get past the cultural and racial implications of jazz, and because of this I wouldn't share any part of the music that might appeal to him. He knew Duke Ellington's popular songbook, but I silenced Ellington's sacred music and extended suites whenever my father was home. I withheld the Modern Jazz Quartet, Bill Evans's solo piano recordings, even Wes Montgomery set to strings.

"If you don't live jazz," Charlie Parker once said, "it won't come out of your horn." At sea as I might have been about life at that juncture, and ready as my father was to figure it out for me by shipping me off to Flintridge Prep or Brown Military Academy, I found a beacon when I heard Coltrane's sound for the first time. Something more than the music presented itself. I had found a new language, and in it a fresh directive. I saw a way out of my aimless adolescence and a way into daily experience as a kind of spontaneous composition, to borrow the performance mantra of Charles Mingus.

Suddenly I was spending weekends at Poobah Records, combing the bins to build my album collection. Onto the turntable went Andrew Hill's Point of Departure , Hank Mobley's No Room for Squares , Yusef Lateef's Psychicemotus . I slipped into clubs before I was legal, explored what once I was content to study, made trips to Mexico on the inspiration of Mingus's effervescent Tia Juana Moods . I found a mentor in my yearbook teacher, Walter Girdner, who introduced his staff to paella, African art, and Magnum photographers during planning sessions at his house. We listened to pianist Randy Weston and conga player Big Black while we worked. Smug in my new setting, I often imagined my dad's dinner getting cold at home.

In his book John Coltrane: His Life and Music , biographer Lewis Porter suggests that Coltrane's ballads more resemble hymns in their temper and articulation. When I first read this, a little light of recognition clicked on. It occurred to me that the spiritual quality I've always found in Coltrane's "Naima" and "Wise One" are traceable to the songs that filled the Sundays of my youth at First Lutheran Church. Ours was not the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in High Point, North Carolina, Coltrane's hometown; yet hymns like "Nearer My God to Thee" were part of our worship as well. I think, too, of Coltrane's popular repertory. Standards like Harold Arlen's "Out of This World" and Richard Rodgers's "My Favorite Things" staples of Coltrane's songbook in the early sixties, were regular requests when my mother entertained family or guests at the piano. Her renditions, which never strayed far from the melody, were planets apart from the saxophonist's interpretations. Yet their sound and structure were imprinted in my memory early on. They were the invisible framework by which I came to understand how and where Coltrane took a song from its point of origin.

More than anything, it was his sound--that Rico no. 4 reed signature Coltrane sound--that transported me then, as it does now. One phrase of a Coltrane solo was enough to identify the voice that articulated it. It was like the father's voice I may have wished for but rarely heard: commanding, not severe; loyal, not erratic; honest and immediate, not manipulative and premeditated. His tone was unlike that of any other saxophonist, enormous and deep and stripped of cloying vibrato. His expression could be searing or full of yearning, or both at once. But the yearning was for something far beyond romance, as were the furies of expression. Coltrane's music always seemed to be headed somewhere else, somewhere otherworldly.

He was constantly developing that sound, honing it, steering it into uncharted waters. He experimented constantly with different combinations of reeds and mouthpieces. When he found a mouthpiece he especially liked, he had a specialist fine-sand it to a different set of specifications, to the resonances he heard inside his head. In the sixties, Porter notes, Coltrane reportedly went so far as to have his dentist shape his upper teeth to conform exactly to the curve of his mouthpiece.

The deeper Coltrane's music took me, the more sense I made of the nature of jazz. I came to understand what trumpeter Bobby Bradford, who worked with Ornette Coleman and taught music in Pasadena, meant when he noted that "swing" after World War II leapt from noun to verb. With the advent of bebop in the mid-forties, the approach to rhythm changed dramatically, and the music moved as it never before had dared.

I began to understand why musicians said Coltrane's drummer, Elvin Jones, always thought in "threes" when he played. One reason was Jones's abiding love of waltz time, or 3/4 meter. Another was his polyrhythmic approach, which allowed him to be in three places rhythmically at the same moment in time. I spent long, keyed-up nights absorbing the patterns. Lights out, headphones sealing the music inside the cortex, I'd lock into the travel of Jones's timekeeping, marveling at the drummer's ability to surround the rhythm of a composition and swing furiously on the beat at the same time. I couldn't have slept if I had wanted to.

I also began to hear how McCoy Tyner supplied Coltrane with the essential harmonic palette with which the saxophonist layered his improvisations of genius. The pianist had developed a particular type of voicing--whether dictated by Coltrane or not, it reflected the saxophonist's influence--that employed so-called fourth chords favored by modern classical composers like Paul Hindemith. Unlike the safe, conventional triads that characterize so much of American popular song, fourth chords are sonorous, dark, and abstract. They take the music "out," send it to mysterious, unconscious places. Whenever I heard Tyner in the context of the John Coltrane Quartet of the early-to-mid sixties, I seemed to visit one of those places.

But why all this rhapsodizing about an awakening nearly four decades past? Transformative moments aren't unique, nor are musical icons proprietary. Coltrane's music affected countless listeners and generations of musicians. And here I sit, unable even to play an instrument. No matter. Soon after hearing "Ol," I realized that not even my own hypersensitivity could paralyze me whenever I was inside that one thing: jazz. Nothing else offered me that assurance, fueled me with such direction. Then and still, it is enough.

To put it in Luther's own hymnic words--words that made my mother laugh when I first said them facetiously--jazz became my mighty fortress. My dad snorted in scorn, but the irony of the idea wasn't lost on Morn. "Do the quiet songs remind you of vespers?" she once asked me, when I took her to hear Bill Evans for the first time. Jazz became an antidote to life. It cut through the uncertainty, the fear, the regret. Most of all, it tapped a spiritual core, a foundation that both my mother and father fostered, unknowingly, in their Missouri Synod way. I fled First Lutheran after junior high school but didn't stop going to church. I found a new liturgy in Coltrane's music, in compositions like "Dear Lord" and "After the Rain," and in recordings like Meditations , Ascension , and A Love Supreme . As Amiri Baraka (then Leroi Jones) wrote in his liner notes to Coltrane's Live at Birdland :


   ... after riding a subway through New York's bowels, and that
   subway full of all the things any man should expect to find in some
   thing's bowels, and then coming upstairs, to the street, and
   walking slowly, head down, through the traffic and failure ... and
   then entering "The Jazz Corner of the World," and then finally
   amidst that noise and glare to hear a man destroy all of it,
   completely, like Sodom, with just the first few notes of his horn,
   your "critical" sense can be erased completely, and that experience
   can place you somewhere a long way off from anything ugly. 

Pasadena cultivated its own offensiveness under the surface of manicured lawns, kidney-shaped pools, and deep portfolios. We moved there from Chicago in 1954, when I was two. In the sixties, the city was overwhelmingly white and aggressively protective. Blacks were isolated in northwest Pasadena and neighboring Altadena; Hispanics were largely confined to the central district. Our church, though marginally integrated, encouraged a community of God, not a community of people. My father, I remember, always bristled when he had to count offerings with Mr. Kearney, a black elder. It was Mr. Kearney's pace, his "dawdling," that made things "impossible." The problem went much deeper, of course. I imagine it traced to my dad's own teenage years, when he left Copper Harbor, Michigan, an outpost of northern Europeans, to go to work as a bank courier in integrated, downtown Detroit and attend the University of Michigan.

I was as white, culturally, as the next suburban Southern California kid in the late fifties and sixties. Yet some noncompliant gene, coupled with my mother's example of community service, steered me away from the social protocol of a generally uptight, overtly prejudiced population. Beyond that, I knew, after hearing Coltrane I was on to something foreign to 99 percent of other white kids I encountered. Something new and outr . In the beginning, whether I understood the music technically wasn't the issue. What mattered was that I could drop the names of Coltrane and Sonny Rollins and Miles Davis and Phineas Newborn Jr. at parties in Sierra Madre Canyon. "Phineas who ?" friends would ask. Even now, saying "Thelonious Sphere Monk" sends a certain shiver of delicious cool through me. The name still sounds like code: mysterious, poetic, rhythmic, core.

There was also a romantic character to the music that located me as much as it attracted me. The popular songs that Coltrane transformed--chestnuts like "Softly, As in a Morning Sunrise," "Every Time We Say Goodbye," "Body and Soul"--were the same tunes I so often heard my mother play. "Out of This World," the long-lined Arlen ballad without a lyric, was a particular favorite. Coltrane loved its misterioso mood and modal feel. "I'll say it's out of this world!" she remarked, after hearing the saxophonist's first recorded version of the song.

Sometimes Morn and I would sit at the piano together and follow along with simpler Coltrane compositions, like "Equinox" from the saxophonist's 1960 recording Coltrane's Sound . One of us would carry the bass line in the lower register while the other tried out little improvisational fragments under the dramatic tension of Coltrane's solo. But that was as much as my mother nudged me and as much as I pushed myself to play what I heard. Too little too late, I tell myself now, though that is hardly the whole story. The truth of it is that I feared--or realistically assessed--I wouldn't be able to play the music the way it must be played. To rephrase Ellington's famous truism about jazz: If it doesn't swing, the music won't mean much of anything.

Those who don't play, listen. Some years ago the jazz writer Bob Blumenthal recalled a night when he heard Coltrane's quartet at the Jazz Workshop in Boston. After his first solo, Coltrane left the bandstand and went to the men's room, but not for the usual reason. While the rest of the quartet--Tyner, Jones, and bassist Jimmy Garrison--took their own solos, Coltrane played passage after passage in the solitude of the bathroom. He reemerged, finished the song with the group, and moved directly into the next tune. He practiced again through the intermission and observed the same ritual through the second set that he'd followed in the first. Over a span of four hours he played virtually without pause, his focus unbroken.

I remember a night of similar intensity at the Jazz Workshop when Jones was leading his own group. It was the fall of 1971; I was in my junior year at Boston University. Four years had passed since Coltrane's death, but none of the fervor for the music that he and Jones shared had evanesced in the drummer. Jones was leading a quintet that featured not one but two saxophonists to come out of the Coltrane school: David Liebman and Steve Grossman. Like Coltrane, both players doubled on soprano saxophone, and both played with a similar urgency. From the first song of the band's first set, it was clear that Jones had chosen these two young lions for his front line because they echoed the sound and embodied the fury of Coltrane.

Jones's own irrepressible approach spurred Liebman and Grossman to more and more inspired playing. In turn, the Trane-trance and sheer velocity of their solos sent Jones into sustained volcanic disturbance. The exchange reminded me of the stories I'd heard of Coltrane and Jones at work in the legendary quartet. Often the two would play on their own for thirty or forty minutes at a stretch while Tyner and Garrison laid out and listened. Jones once told me of a three-hour Sunday matinee in Philadelphia that the group performed without a pause. He and Coltrane played half of the session as a duo.

Near the end of the drummer's first set at the Workshop, in the midst of a tensile, up-tempo composition called "New Breed," Jones punctuated a bar line on his crash cymbal with such ferocity that the better part of a Gretsch drumstick--appropriately, the Elvin Jones model--landed on my front-row table. Unfazed, he whisked another stick from his kit bag without losing any of the ride in his time.

Captured in that moment, I realized, was the essential truth of the music. Jazz was more than an expenditure of enormous energy. It was a commitment of tremendous discipline. It was an art form that required full focus on the moment--the immediate, imaginative instant where, in Whitney Balliett's words, the "sound of surprise" resides. And that wasn't all of it. The same demands made of the jazz player also applied to the listener if he, too, hoped to get inside the music.

Ralph J. Gleason, the late jazz writer, once joked to Miles Davis that the trumpeter needed five tenor saxophonists to do justice to the complexity of his band's sound in the late sixties. Gleason made the remark after Davis broke from tradition to explore plugged-in, atmospheric jazz fusion. Davis, he recalled, "shot those eyes at me and growled, 'I had five tenor players once.'" By that, Davis meant he had five tenor players at once , all with the same name: Coltrane.

For his part, Coltrane constantly worried that he played too long and communicated too little. "I don't know how to stop," he once told Davis when he worked with him. "Try taking the horn oucha mouth," the trumpeter replied. A close listening to the end of Coltrane's "Impressions" from a live Village Vanguard session recorded in 1961 reveals muffled words from a voice that sounds distinctly like Coltrane's: "I may not say a thing." Another voice, presumably that of a band member, is heard to say, "Stay the same."

"The intensity that was generated [in Coltrane's music] was absolutely unbelievable," jazz historian Dan Morgenstern said, after hearing the saxophonist in the early sixties. "It was unlike any other feeling within the music we call jazz.... It carried you away. If you let yourself be carried by it, it was an absolutely ecstatic feeling. And I think that kind of ecstasy was something that Coltrane was looking for in his music."

What Coltrane found beyond ecstasy, I think, was truth--his interior truth. And he conveyed it in equal measure. "Coltrane was such an honest musician," jazz critic Gary Giddins observed, "that he was always playing what he felt emotionally, mentally and physically. All of that goes into [his music]." And yet the saxophonist invariably felt he'd fallen short. "I tell you one thing," Coltrane allowed to Gleason in an interview excerpted in the liner notes to Ol ; "I have done so much work from within [that] now what I've got to do is go out and look around me ... and then I'll be able to say I've got to do some work on this or on that."

If one thing escaped Coltrane in his quest, it was an awareness of the impact his music--and presence--had on audiences. Valerie Wilmer, who photographed the saxophonist throughout his career, noted after his death that "it was precisely through ... [hearing and] meeting a man such as Coltrane that I began to discover a new way of looking at the world as well as the music." After discovering "Ol," I saw something under my surfaces, too.

Was it the spirituality at the center of Coltrane's music that connected me so completely to it? An intimation of the unknown still visits me whenever I listen to "Ol." Similarly in Coltrane's late recordings, there is a condition of furious, abstract expression that has no time for temporality. How to say it without sounding like a New Age proselyte? There is something authentically mystical in Coltrane's fully realized work, dense and demanding as his final recordings are. Giddins has speculated that Coltrane knew he was living on borrowed time years before his liver cancer was diagnosed in May 1967, three months before his death. "I think he was trying to make the loudest sound he could make in those last moments," Giddins noted in an interview in 2002. "Clearly, there was a greater and greater accent on a kind of religious, cosmic, thematic undercurrent." Whether Coltrane was aware that his days were numbered, it was as if he had glimpsed the void and each solo were a vision of it.

Alice Coltrane, the saxophonist's second wife, often remarked that Coltrane's spiritual pursuit through music knew no bounds. "[John] investigated all the musics of the world, because he knew that everyone had something [spiritual to say]," she recalled in an interview with Robert Palmer for the documentary The World According to John Coltrane . "Music from Buddhist temples, the bells from their temple worship ... Japanese music ... the shakuhachi and koto ... music from Africa and the classical music of Brazil."

Coltrane was particularly enamored of Indian music and its spellbinding properties--the same aspect one finds in "Ol" or "India" from Impressions, or "The Promise" from Live at Birdland . A year after he recorded Ol Coltrane , the saxophonist began to listen to sitar player Ravi Shankar and soon wanted to record with him. (They met in late 1961 but never worked together.) "It's this universal aspect of music that interests me and attracts me," Cohrane explained. "That's what I'm aiming for."

Evidence of Coltrane's larger purpose surfaces most of all in his late period, an extraordinary output of at least a dozen studio albums made in the last three years of his life. Arguably the freest expression is Om , recorded in an impromptu session on October 1, 1965, in Lynwood, Washington, a suburb of Seattle. The title track is a twenty-nine-minute sonic gust that literally shrieks with saxophones and voices (Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, and Donald Rafael Garrett in astral travel). Music writer David Wild characterized the collective sound as "cathartic, acid-etched," My father, I imagine, would have called it chaos or something worse, possibly with a modifier. "Put them out of their misery," he'd often say in reaction to anything I played of Coltrane that wasn't a ballad.

In a certain sense, I've listened for nearly forty years to Coltrane's sound, and jazz in general, as if my life depended on it. And maybe it has. Away at school, I made the music my elective education, day and night--in clubs, in my apartment, in the library with headphones. After I graduated, it was part of my profession as a writer for newspapers, magazines, and assorted journals. Jazz became a daily practice, another kind of church attendance. In truth, the mythology surrounding Live in Seattle and Om was part of the impetus that drew me, in 1987, to Seattle to live and work.

Jan Kurtis was the recording engineer for both sessions. Live in Seattle , released as a two-record set, was captured the night before Om at a club called the Penthouse off Pioneer Square. It featured a twenty-four-minute version of "Out of This World" and a thirty-six-minute Coltrane composition called "Evolution" that filled nearly two sides of vinyl.

I knew I wouldn't find the Penthouse when I came to Seattle--the club closed in 1968--but I had a hunch the city's burgeoning music scene had kept Kurtis in the area. Once settled in, I immediately looked him up. The Penthouse sessions were tame compared to Om , he told me. There were no stage lights in Kurtis's backyard studio, no show times or set length, and no audience save for Kurtis. Coltrane and his band were "absolutely free" to do as they pleased. "He seemed to be thinking about a lot of things that morning," Kurtis said. "He didn't say a lot. There must have been an enormous amount of music going on inside of him."

I remember feeling a sudden elation--"Ol" at the dinner table all over again--as Kurtis reconstructed the recording session that day. It was as though I were sitting in. I could picture Jones, eyes like magnified protons, all crazed concentration, setting up his drum kit behind barriers, or "splays" that absorbed in three inches of insulation his voluminous percussion. I imagined Garrison and Garrett tucked into their own cubbyholes to get the maximum clarity and resonance from their basses. I located Tyner, Sanders, and Joe Brazil, who played flute on the date, near the center of the studio, as Kurtis had positioned them. And I saw Coltrane sitting quietly in a corner of the room, in a universe of his own, contemplating what was to come.

"I was in a kind of Oz," Kurtis recalled. Then he described the deluge of music, the flood of sound from horns, basses, drums, voices--even bottles filled to various levels with water. Suddenly Coltrane, Sanders, and Garrett were chanting from the Bhagavad Gita , the great religious poem of Hinduism. The ensemble invocation bled into a sea of improvised sound. Eventually, the screams and cries, human and instrumental, led back to "Om," Hindu for the spirit that set the universe in motion. Finally, Coltrane and several other players broke into a unison chant: "I, the oblation and I the flame into which it is offered ... I make all things clean. I am ... Om ... OM ... OM ... OM! ..."

The day after Kurtis and I spoke, I called him with a question I'd forgotten to ask. Were the bottles part of Jones's traveling kit? And why the water? He laughed. Jones, he explained, had spent a good portion of the morning rummaging through Kurtis's kitchen, banging on cast-iron skillets, tapping on stainless steel pans, gathering glass--searching for new sound. He "tuned" the bottles to complementary pitches by filling them with different volumes of water.

How easy it was to imagine Jones and his glorious, toothy grin, making music on heavy culinary metal in service of Coltrane's conception of sound. Then something even sweeter registered. I remembered my own exploratory noodlings with a set of drumsticks. I saw the lid of my mother's silver centerpiece that resided on the dining room table, a table once set for Coltrane. Before my ears were finetuned to jazz, particularly to the resonances of percussion, I'd never regarded the sound of the lid. Then one day it hit me: the ring that the lid produced when my mother set it on top of the centerpiece. Suddenly, the timbre of the silver was all I could think about. In a handsome heirloom I heard my own Zildjian ride cymbal, and before I realized what I'd done, there it stood: a flat, sterling silver moon suspended on a makeshift stand. The sound it sent out was bright and true. It was as if a distant bell had rung, a tintinnabulation from church, a carillon chime from college: a reminder of the moment that I first heard Coltrane's horn and the disaffection began to dissolve under my skin.

"Jazz relieves you of a lot of burdens," Jones once told me on a tour stop in Seattle. "It saves you from the fatigue of life." We were in his hotel suite at the time, several years after I'd relived the Om session with Kurtis. Jones's wife, Keiko, was serving green tea and sushi. The drummer was wearing black lounging pajamas and Caribbean blue bedroom slippers. His face--I see it so vividly now--was radiant and relaxed, serene even. And then, after considering the full measure of his words, it was one great grin.

"When you're inside the music, the rest just drops away," he said, gesturing as he spoke. His smile seemed as broad as his arms were stretched wide.

In the same instant I heard another glad voice, saw another sunny, slightly mischievous face. Where we can find that record?

"It's like taking off an overcoat," Jones was saying.

Like shedding skin, I thought.

Source Citation

Source Citation   

Gale Document Number: GALE|A181857448