I’ve been listening to John Coltrane since college, when my pal Everett introduced me to the world of jazz. At first it sounded like a lot of squeaking and noise to my ear. After hearing a new piece, I’d jokingly ask if he was done tuning up.
Ev taught me to think of the jazz sax as a voice, a singer. He wanted me to listen to what Coltrane was saying, not playing.
It took a while to get it. I made a cassette with Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, and John Coltrane’s Love Supreme on the other side, and let it play over and over again.
In all these years, though, I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen John Coltrane play. There was no YouTube back then, just old albums with descriptive notes and rarely more than a single photo or two. He wasn’t alive and wasn’t performing by the time I heard of him, obviously. He was becoming history.
This footage has little information with it, but says it was from 1960, 1961, and 1965, There’s a live audience and a sparse TV-set stage. If I has to guess, I’d say this was Europe.
What a joy to find, too.
It comes to us in gorgeous , crisp, black and white, and gives a great look at masterful jazz musicians.
http://youtu.be/jj0HTcSKX1Q
'57 Carnegie Hall
Having heard Coltrane and Monk longer than I could remember,(I actually saw Monk at the Jazz Workshop in Boston about 1966) when the lost tape was found as part of the rerecording of stuff at the Smithsonian, I sent it to everyone of whom I could think. For me, these recordings remind me that there are things I regard as classic, and things that I like. I’m afraid this stuff makes it into only the former category. I can hum them, I am amused by Monk’s attempts to make you think that he just made a mistake and on and on but in the final analysis this stuff makes me mad. This kind of free form jazz seems to be for the purpose of proving that they can think up and play stuff along with the song chord changes that are too complicated for me to follow. And, they are right. And, I don’t care. It is unpleasant and not to me admirable. Cute, clever, mastery, wildly better than anything I could ever play or think up, it leaves me with this distaste for the esoteric. I’m to the place where I can hum what is essentially unhummable. Still I don’t like it. They didn’t want to include me and they didn’t. Zoot Sims, Al Cohn, Parker, Davis, Winton Kelly, Ornette Coleman, Wes Montgomery, Stan Kenton, Winton and other Marcellas’s, Bill Evans and on and on. I get to Mose Allison and go no further (on the continuum from tuney to esoteric). Even some of his stuff is beyond me. I don’t see why they would expect an audience (me) to support them in their disdain for the audience. Guess I’m sadly Philistine.
I used to think that….
but now I couldn’t disagree more. : )
These are masterful musicians, way beyond the ordinary. They can play your sweet, easy to sing songs anytime. Those are just starting places, though, to these musicians. They take them as a starting theme, then add to them.
Those aren’t mistakes you are hearing. It’s intentional. They do break a lot of rules, but they have to know those rules in order to break them.
I sat in on a master class with a jazz drummer years ago. He played something as you described… a wild, chaotic, seemingly disorderly and improvised piece, as if one of us sat down and just randomly pounded. Then he got up, went to the blackboard, and wrote it all out. “Here’s the first time change, here’s the next, do three bars of this, then do five bars of that”…. and so on.
Then he had the drummers in the room play it. What seemed chaotic and improvised was able to be written and he could both repeat it anytime, from any point in the piece, and could point out where others were getting it wrong.
I can recall when I used to think it wasn’t music and wasn’t listenable, too. Jazz loving friends taught me how to appreciate the more esoteric jazz. It is an acquired taste and takes some time.
And isn’t for everyone… : )
Moonlight in Vermont fans… there’s a version in this show, about 25 minutes in. Some white sax player joins Coltrane for it.
And I should add, whomever did the filming and lighting for this did an incredible job.
Perhaps it is a wave phenomenon
I wonder this about humor as well. Perhaps things get so bad that they are funny and then they get a little worse and they are tragic. Then if they get a little worse they are funny again. Could be the same with music I suppose. As you likely know, I had all kinds of lessons on several instruments and played for a while in the ’70’s so I don’t really say this as a criticism of the music but of me. If at some point I weren’t fascinated, I wouldn’t have learned to hum them. They are fabulous players and instrumentalists etc. Far beyond what I might ken. Still, I am left with the impression that they purposefully do this complexity thing. It may be that it is just aimed at the other musicians with which they play. I have heard many expound upon why the speed thing is always maxed out in classical playing. Think flight of the bumble bee in under a minute. Or, all the four year olds from China. I am never able to figure out if it is just one piece that they know but this would seem to argue against that. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omuYi2Vhgjo)It is fundamental, as you point out, that you must be able to repeat a set of sounds for it to be music, which is why computer generated stuff is regarded as random rather than musical.