20030924

Today is September 23.

Today would have been the 77th birthday of John William Coltrane.

I think that I first became aware of this person when I flipped through CDs in the High Street record stores in Columbus. Many times, at least when I was a freshman or sophomore, I wouldn't buy anything; I'd just thumb through the bins taking in all the names, thinking that this... or this... might be interesting, but I didn't know what it was about.

Never occurred to me to go to the library. But oh well.

It was one afternoon at Gem City Records in Dayton when I finally bought a Coltrane recording: The Art of John Coltrane, a two-LP set on Atlantic. This featured many jazz standards and some of what I would later learn was his emergent style. I can't recall what I heard in this or how I reacted to it, but I know that I played the records often (along with Art Blakey, one or two of the Miles Davis albums I had from my father, and random jazz LPs I bought over time). The seed had germinated.

Let's say that was '93. Ramesh gave me his copy of Coltrane Plays the Blues in '95. That was another Atlantic recording, with a more contextual flow (since the songs were done at the same time). Now this was when the seed began to sprout. I played that album a lot -- hours of repeat play -- but then I did the same with a number of recording at time, notably Pavement's Watery, Domestic; Orbus Terrarum by The Orb; and ISDN by Future Sound of London.

The next purchase was the Impulse! 3-CD Coltrane Retrospective (which had just been issued, I think... no, '92). Anyhow, this was the entry into the progressive sound of Coltrane; the seedling had rooted. Here were the works of the classic quartet with Coltrane on tenor saxophone, McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass, and Elvin Jones on the drums. I'm listening to the album Crescent at this moment -- "Wise One" -- selections from which are on the Retrospective. What I have to remark on is that the music conveys no aspect of datedness. The space and texture is as embracing and vivid now as it was in '95 and '96, when I'd be listening at 1 in the morning... and probably as enchanting as it was to those who heard it in '63 and '64 when those pieces were recorded.

That's the remarkable thing about this music: It's the singular sincerity and narrative quality of what was created by these four men. Even before I began to read more about what Coltrane was driven by, the intensity with which he tried to take human emotion and spiritual yearning and transfigure them into sound (or "sheets of sound"), I knew that this music was altering my perception or ability to perceive. And not just in terms of what I could hear, but the ability to delve into myself and my mind.

That was happening anyway, though often not in the best way. I moved on, in space and in music, and went west. I lived in San Francisco for a bit, where I was fortunate to attend the service at the "Church of Coltrane" in its former location on Divisadero. That was a pivotal experience, because, basically, it elicited hope and and a sense of belonging that I hadn't had in a long time. And to read what Coltrane had to say -- to find out that there were lyrics to "Psalm" on A Love Supreme -- it was a joyous and enriching couple of hours. I was moved. And soon afterward, my father died... and I remember going back after the funeral and not wanting to accept the same message.

Eventually I went back to New Mexico, ending up near Santa Fe in 1999. There was a cool store, Rare Bear, that unfortunately went out of business soon after I arrived. On the day that this closure was announced, I was browsing the racks... and ended up in a photo on B1 of The New Mexican, looking at a copy of Sun Ship.

The headline under the photo read, "A rare find lost," which I believed said something about me at the time.

Anyhow... this was the period during which I took in more of the latter-day Coltrane sound, the avant garde (or atrocious, depending on who wrote the review) stylings that featured frenetic and powerful works. These recordings featured Alice Coltrane on piano and harp, Rashied Ali on drums, and Pharoah Sanders on tenor sax. When I first listened to Interstellar Space, I ended up with a headache... I was trying to write or read and had headphones on while listening to the rapid-fire bangs and bleats of Coltrane and Ali playing in duet. I'd been interested in this album by its name and design for years, but after that listen I wasn't so sure...

What I've come to understand is that my progression with Coltrane has been a mirror of my own receptivity in terms or understanding, emotion, awareness and relative peace of mind. I was in an unsettled and averse mode of thought and life when I first listened to Interstellar Space, and I heard that reflected back at me. Listening to it today -- the track "Mars," coincidentally enough* -- I see-hear the energy of amibition and yearning and drive and engagement, which is probably why the song has the subtitle "The battlefield of the cosmic giants."

This album, along with Stellar Regions, Meditations, OM (recorded in Lynnwood WA?!), Kulu Se Mama, Ascension and Selflessness, was produced during the last two years of Coltrane's life**, before he died from liver cancer on July 17, 1967. One of the reissue liners -- or perhaps it was the biography I bought some time ago -- said that he must have known he was gravely ill at some point, but he kept on playing in spite of frequent pain.

"This was a man who, as Jimmy Garrison said, had discovered what he was on Earth to do: and because he had so clear and urgent a sense of the reason for his being, he was able to focus all his energies on that reason, by contrast with the scattered use most of the rest of us make of our capacities. Together, of course, with the formidable nature and scope of his musicianship, it was the compression of energy made possible by so complete a commitment that resulted in the nonpareil albums and personal appearances by Coltrane in recent years.

This last album (Expression) is not titled as a memorial album or as an album in tribute because it was titled by Coltrane himself the Friday before his death on Monday, July 17, 1967. He and (producer) Bob Thiele were considering words that might apply to the sense of his album, and finally Coltrane said, 'Expression. That's what it is.'" -- Net Hentoff in his liner notes for Expression

I've used the same word (instead of art, or work) as a label for what I show or create, whether the means of expression are photos, fractals, words, flowers or any combination from that group. This is what I know I'm supposed to do, what I want to do, and what I will continue to do, despite -- or perhaps expressly against -- convention or expectation or what makes sense. I have seen and been shown aspects of a deeper, richer nature to existence and I want to continue to express this for as long as I can.

"There is never any end. There are always new sounds to imagine, new feelings to get at. And always, there is the need to keep purifying these feelings ad sounds so that we can really see what we've discovered in its pure state. So that we can see more and more clearly what we are. In that way, we can give those who listen to the essence the best of what we are. But to do that, at each stage, we have to keep on cleaning the mirror." -- Coltrane's liner notes for Meditations



* The summer of 1999 was when I became aware and took in the sight of the periodic "close encounter" between Earth and Mars, which also made a beautiful (and personally poignant) conjunction with the star Antares ("rival of Mars"). And here we are in the time of another Mars-Earth conjunction...

**This list should also include A Love Supreme, which was recorded in December 1964.

Today is September 23.
mr damon 04:50