[JPL] 'He took it further than anyone' John Fordham celebrates John Coltrane

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http://arts.guardian.co.uk/filmandmusic/story/0,,2124544,00.html

'He took it further than anyone'
It's 40 years since John Coltrane's untimely death. John Fordham celebrates
a jazz legend, while below saxophonists young and old chart his unrivalled
legacy

John Fordham 
Friday July 13, 2007
Guardian

The plumbing of a saxophone seemed like too cramped a channel for the river
of emotion John Coltrane sought to drive through it: he always sounded as if
he were trying to expand the metalwork with the sheer force of his feelings.
Coltrane's huge, yearning tone, sermonising intensity and revolutionary
technique allowed him to sound like several saxophonists rolled into one;
but for all that, he always sounded as if he was striving for what still lay
out of reach. It wasn't just the search for more music, or a different
music. It sounded like the search for another world, and another life -
which is why Coltrane is revered more than ever, inside and outside jazz, 40
years after his premature death from liver cancer at 40, on July 17 1967.
Marginalisation and both music-biz and high-art economics oblige jazz
musicians to be realists - often very funny ones - which is part of jazz
culture's downbeat appeal. But within that pragmatic climate, Coltrane was
perhaps the nearest thing to a guru or a saint the music has ever known. He
looked serious, soulful, sometimes haunted. He had profound religious
convictions. His sound could be witheringly beautiful, and the contrast of
his frantic urgency with the yielding delicacy of his ballads seemed to
encompass a very wide span of what it means to be human. He had spent much
of the 1950s battling addictions, and a combination of his faith and his
music - which he was convinced was a healing force - had been the route out.
Coltrane combined the cry of the blues with the social role and meditational
murmur of the Indian classical forms he studied as meticulously as he
studied European classical music and jazz. The chemistry worked so well
that, late in his short life, he briefly found himself both a guru and a pop
success. His classic, prayer-like 1964 album A Love Supreme made the charts,
influenced rock and fusion players and a very large number of hippies, and
earned Coltrane Grammy nominations for both composing and playing.

John Coltrane was born in Hamlet, North Carolina, on September 23 1926, and
moved with his family to Philadelphia after high school. He played alto sax
in pre-rock "jump" bands in the 1940s, joined Dizzy Gillespie and the
Ellington saxist Johnny Hodges' bands as a tenor player, and then Miles
Davis's legendary first quintet in 1955. Both Hodges and Davis had trouble
with the young Coltrane's heroin and booze addictions, but as a former user
himself, Davis cut him more slack. In the trumpeter's band, Coltrane
blossomed from a somewhat stiff-sounding hard-bop student of the leading
tenorists Dexter Gordon and Sonny Rollins into a saxophone visionary.

Frustrated - as Davis and Ornette Coleman were - by the limitations of
improvising over pop songs and Broadway hits, Coltrane sought an
alternative. Davis and Coleman looked for simplifications, more lyrical
melodies released by pared-down structures like simple modes or
spontaneously shifting tonal centres. Coltrane went the other way: harmonic
mazes like the hurtling Giant Steps that changed chords almost every beat;
multiphonic techniques that allowed Adolphe Sax's single-line instrument to
play several notes at once. It could have been an arid technical exercise.
But Coltrane's tireless practice regime was devoted to the guiding cause of
increasing the sax's intensity and emotional range.

With the almost telepathically sensitive partners he gathered around him
from 1961 to 1965 (pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Jimmy Garrison and drummer
Elvin Jones), Coltrane turned the jazz recital into something more like an
emotionally heated collective trance, often with headlong tenor-sax solos
that might continue unbroken on a single theme for an hour or more. Coltrane
also popularised the lighter, somewhat oboe-like soprano sax (mostly unused
since the days of the great New Orleans swinger Sidney Bechet), and the
breadth of his musical and cultural references widened the audience for
jazz.

As British saxophonist John Surman has pointed out, jazz was world music
right back at the beginning of the 20th century, when musicians from around
the globe crossed paths in the seaport of New Orleans. But its rapid early
developments soon hardened into styles, from which the music needed to be
rescued if its improvisers' spark was to stay alive. Coltrane heard that
need, and split the music open for new influences to pour in, as they still
are. A substantial slice of what's considered world music today might never
have happened without him.

Where would Coltrane have gone next?

Soweto Kinch
Saxophonist, rapper, composer

He was somebody with a rare amount of integrity and sincerity, which is
matched only by great leaders of that period such as Malcolm X and Martin
Luther King. One of the biggest losses of his passing was his ability to
influence people in a political sense, to enfranchise black people in
America in a particular way. I think he would have gone on to spawn a load
of new music - obviously jazz, but beyond that as well - and given people a
different sense of empowerment. We're feeling the loss even now of somebody
that great, somebody that iconic - especially now, actually. Just look at
the state of modern black American music.

He was somebody who explicitly realised the power of musical notes to
transform society and was busy on that as a project. He practised scales
based on ancient Vedic traditions and scholasticism, which could evoke
prosperity in somebody or, if they were sad, could bring them out of their
sadness into mirth and merriment. That very conscious and deliberate
understanding of the power of music is something really important. I think
he would have - almost like a Vedic medicine man or a West African griot -
been able to transform people's moods and sense of self-worth through the
music. I think we would have seen a lot more self-awareness on the part of
black Americans and the African diaspora.

Andy Sheppard
Saxophonist, composer

There was no stopping him. He's a total inspiration for all musicians. All
the stuff he was doing in the Giant Steps period, in those hard-bop bands,
it's extremely complex music, with the lightning ability to improvise in a
seemingly completely free way over ridiculously hard chord changes. He was a
spiritual force, his music was so intense.

He was going further and further out with his music towards the end, but I'm
sure [had he lived] he would have been writing for orchestra and performing
with contemporary classical musicians. He probably never had any time to
write. Those guys were working all the time because that was the way it
worked. They'd play every night in a club: to sit down and write some music
is not easy. Because he was becoming successful, he would have had more time
on his hands to compose.

Ingrid Laubrock
Saxophonist, composer

In a way he really screwed things up for all tenor players to come after
him. It was a bit like Bach in the baroque world. What do you do after that?
If you go in the same direction, you're just not going to get as good. It
still sounds so much deeper and so much more amazing than anything after.

Jason Yarde
Saxophonist, producer, composer

You could take just one aspect of Coltrane's music - Giant Steps or even
just a part of it - and that in itself could be a lifetime's study for the
average musician. It's quite feasible he would still be around playing. I
would hope that he could have got back into a more big-band kind of sound,
which then, I could imagine, would lead into orchestral things.

Finn Peters
Saxophonist, composer

It's a question of how much innovation he displayed as a sax player. He took
it further than anyone. People are still catching up with what he did - in
2007. He was using a lot of books to inform his playing, and he was bringing
other languages in that hadn't been used before; a lot of eastern modes and
Indian music. People hadn't really incorporated that into jazz before - the
whole modal thing and traditional folk melodies. He was like Bartok in that
sense.

Whatever he would have done next it would have been pioneering, leading the
way for other people - he was like that all through his life. I think it is
likely that he would have gone on to do something electronic - the sort of
stuff that he was already doing but adding electronic instruments.

John Surman
Saxophonist, composer

There's no one single factor that makes Coltrane so great. He did what all
pioneers do: broke boundaries. He changed the sound of the music, and that
in itself is quite extraordinary. The harmonic progressions he came up with
- no one had toyed with them, no one had even heard them. He was a master
craftsman and a ground-breaker but he was also an amazing communicator.

Everybody wanted to be around Coltrane. He was in the strange situation
where his music in the avant garde was selling hugely - it was popular
music. Finally, in his last works, he started to come back into the melodic
and clearer, simpler stuff. So it would indicate to me that he'd gone out on
a voyage of discovery and he would come back in and re-explore a lot of the
early work that he did. It happens to quite a few artists: they'll go out
there but then, later on, with maturity comes looking back - a retrospective
thing. But who knows? He may have gone on even greater leaps than Giant
Steps. He may have gone back and said, "That was quite good but I'm only
halfway there with that."

Lol Coxhill
Saxophonist, improviser

No one can know where he would have gone. If he'd carried on from where he
was, he would have developed that. I can't imagine any other direction
except him just growing and growing on that level. What he had was
perfection in itself, but he could have developed that area anyway. I don't
think he needed to go somewhere else. We just naturally develop, we don't
think about where we're going. We just keep going - and never arrive, I
hope.

Denys Baptiste
Saxophonist, composer

There's never really been anybody who has covered so much ground and made so
many developments within the music, particularly in such a short space of
time. In just 10 years, he made all those important stepping-stones in his
career. To be not only developing new ideas but mastering them and then
moving on to another idea, then mastering that - nobody's ever been able to
do that. Most musicians would be lucky to master one thing within their
entire career, never mind the number of innovations and developments he
managed to facilitate.

His journey through the last 10 years of his life was driven by one epiphany
in 1957 - a spiritual experience that made him want to give up drugs and
begin pursuing his career in that direction. He felt that God had charged
him with a mission. Given this motivation, I don't think he would have done
what Miles Davis did and got into electric music or become somebody chasing
those popular areas of jazz. I think he would have continued his spiritual
journey because he seemed so serious about it. As far as he was concerned,
music was a gift from God. God intended him to play music and communicate
through music.

All interviews by Daniel Spicer

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