John Coltrane: The Translation of Energy into Sound

If each great musician presents us a thesis, an overarching idea that encompasses all of their work, the thesis behind John Coltrane, what he offers to those of us who listen, his great contribution to the world, is the transfer and translation of energy into sound.

Along with Miles Davis's various groups during the 1950s and 60s, the John Coltrane Quartet and its classic period from 1962-1965 is probably the most influential Jazz group of all time and, in a way, you could say that all Jazz since then has flowed from the influence of the groups formed by Miles and Coltrane. Like all of the Jazz from the Glory Years (the bop and hard bop), Trane's work stems from his contact with Charlie "Bird" Parker. As Trane said, "the first time I heard Bird play, it hit me right between the eyes."

Coltrane's canonical 1957 recording with Blue Note, Blue Train, could be the swingingest album of all time and should be in anybody's record collection, even non-Jazz fans. This period between 1957-1960 is incredibly busy and he plays on Miles Davis's album Kind of Blue (1959), which also should be in the record collection of any self-respecting music appreciator. Here we get some more impressionistic playing on a modal jazz based more on modes than chord changes. And in evidence is what jazz critics have called Coltrane's "sheets of sound" which feature him playing hundreds, almost thousands of notes per minute, streaming by like sheets of sound.

With Cannonball, Miles and Bill Evans recording Kind of Blue (1959)

The most prominent example of the sheets of sound is on Coltrane's album Giant Steps (1960). "Giant Steps" contains probably the most complex and difficult chord progressions of any Jazz composition and features what has become known as "Coltrane changes," which employ chromatic third relations and multi-tonic changes and use substitute chords over common jazz chord progressions. What we get with the sheets of sound is the translation of a mad energy into sound. The original recording from Atlantic records is hilarious because Trane just wails and takes us to another dimension with his sheets of sound and then we get to Tommy Flanagan's turn to solo on the piano and he just flails. He can't keep up with the blistering pace that Trane has set and he just about gives up midway through his chorus.

But to say that Trane stopped there would be selling us short, as he continually evolved these complex changes throughout his career and takes them out further and further until his death in 1967. For me, Coltrane really peaks in 1964 with albums like A Love Supreme, a spiritual about a love supreme for God and my personal favorite Crescent. 

Coltrane's work with the Classic Quartet (1962-65), with McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass and Elvin Jones on drums, really is the perfect blend of experimentation, of free jazz and anti-jazz but with a melodic and harmonic form that still gives the group a solid foundation. A Love Supreme is a culmination of his work and is an ode to faith and love for God. This spirituality would continue to influence his playing. The fourth movement of A Love Supreme is "Psalm" and is based on a poem Coltrane wrote to God, with exactly one note for each syllable of the poem, with the phrasing based on the actual words. The story I've heard, which I'm not sure if it's true, is that in 1957 Coltrane quit heroin by locking himself in a room for 3 weeks and just playing his horn. And this refuge  gave him an epiphany. And the way I see it an epiphany that lasted for 10 years until his death--a lucid clarity and sharpness that built on his formidable skills as a musician prior to quitting his addiction. He was already one of the best sax players of all time and then he takes it to a whole new level with the work that just builds and builds until his death. Coltrane found God and his music is a translation of that spiritual energy into sound.

Coltrane was later canonized by the African Orthodox Church as Saint John William Coltrane and I remember when I lived in San Francisco going to the St. John Coltrane Church and people would translate God's energy into sound and just blow on instruments. The translation of energy into sound in its purest form. Music is as close to the spiritual as I can get. Coltrane found God. And when you listen carefully, you can find God, too.

Like a lot of Jazz, Coltrane takes standards, reinterprets them in a way that is original and more complex than the original, in such a way that you get a richer appreciation for the composer. This is the case for how Coltrane interprets Rogers and Hammerstein's "My Favorite Things" from The Sound of Music. "My Favorite Things" is featured on a number of Coltrane albums and every time Coltrane takes it deeper and deeper, including an 18-minute version on Newport '63. The trance-like vamp Indian raga achieved by the quartet on the original recording is pulsating, haunting and is a perfect picture of a quartet in total lock-step--Jimmy Garrison propelling the group with a simple but smooth bass line, Elvin Jones quietly but energetically spurring the group on with quiet fills, and McCoy Tyner in the background, never taking over but directing the improvisation of Coltrane with a pulsating vamp that carries the group forward. The version on Live At The Village Vanguard Again! (1966), with wife Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders, goes into the ridiculous, hyper-kinetic explosive stuff that borders on the insane and clocks in at 26 minutes with a long intro.

When we think of Coltrane, we usually remember his blistering sheets of sound. But one of his great albums is simply titled Ballads (1963), which features standards like "Too Young to Go Steady," "You Don't Know What Love Is" and "Nancy (With the Laughing Face." Coltrane's energy shines through but in softer palettes and at much slower speeds. Coltrane achieved such a wonderful sound--too hard for some, but his playing on other ballads like "Naima" is even deeper, more energetic than the more up tempo tunes associated with him.

With the spiritual Eastern tinge that Coltrane found in the early sixties, McCoy Tyner quietly but elegantly keeps the spirit of John Coltrane's music alive with albums like The Real McCoy (1967), Fly with the Wind (1976) and Extensions (1970), all of which are five-star albums. Extensions features Alice Coltrane on harp and Fly with the Wind puts together unusual instrumentation with oboe and strings and some of the most smoking drumming by Billy Cobham. Coltrane's spirit lives on. His energy continues pulsing in smart, spiritual music that inspires and takes us further.

Coltrane, along with Miles and Duke Ellington, was one of our greatest American interpreters of music, and what we can do now is celebrate him by playing his music over and over again.

5-14-1974. Missoula, Montana. Dave's Pick 9: A Review

After missing gems like 11-17-1973 and 10-22-71 in the first 2 rounds of the Dave's Picks subscriptions series, I finally succumbed to ordering the third round of subscriptions. Yes, they're CDs. And CDs are dead as a media form. But who cares?

And the beauty is in the surprise. Like being at a concert and waiting for a particular tune and then they either play it or surprise you with something even better, it'll be like Christmas here the 4 times this year that a Dave's Pick, a selection from any one or a combination of the Grateful Dead's 2500+ shows, comes to my house. I'm really game for anything from any era. 60s Primal Dead, the Glory Years of 72-74, with the totally original blend of Americana and jazzy psychedelia, the almost perfectly perfect years of the late 70s, the sometimes off but really-on-when-they're-on shows of the mid-80s, there's always a surprise. I'll even take a pick from the 90s. There is so much to choose from with the huge body of work the Dead left us in their 2500+ shows. Some fans have complained that there is too much emphasis on the 70s with the Dave's Picks series, but there really is a deep, deep well to tap there.

Though I'm a fan of all eras of the Dead, let's be totally honest. I'm totally overjoyed that the first pick is from 1974 and features the Dead at the very peak of their jamming. If you believe in the dichotomy of songs versus jams or 1st set versus 2nd set tunes or warm-ups versus deep spacey space jazz hiatuses, 1974 is the year of some of the most powerful jams, which isn't to say the songs are bad. It's just that the jams are what make the year stand out. But this pick has both wonderful extended jams and tasty songs. 

And as a historical side note, the most recent pick represents the Dead's only show in Montana, which is surprising given that Montana, with its strange country vibe, seems like a very Dead kinda place.

Love the Moose and Dancing Bears here. Perfect for Missoula.

5-14-1974 from Missoula, Montana has arrived and it's time to dig into it a bit here, and here are my impressions after several listening sessions:

The first thing I need to mention about the show is its crystal clear sound. With 23 tons of equipment that took 12 hours to set up, the 459-speaker Wall of Sound wasn't about blasting people's eardrums away but making laser sharp clear sound, which is the case for all recordings from 1974, when the Dead were so ahead of their time in terms of sound. (Check out my post here about the Dead's revolutionary sound equipment.)  All fans of this era know that there is one slight defect with the tinny effect to the vocals. But that's a compromise to be made when there is the huge booming bass of Phil Lesh coming in full effect. I can think of no other time other than '73-'74 when Phil's bass shines so clearly and spectacularly. And I'm the type of guy that if I'm reading reviews of a show and someone chimes in with "Phil's dropping huge bass bombs on this one," then I'm in. And Missoula is no different. Phil explodes across both sets, and so do the rest of the band members. Sound: 5/5 stars.

Setting up the Wall of Sound. Sheer work of genius.

Though "Bertha" is a great opening song, after my first listening I thought that the first set didn't really get cooking until the Dead do their rendition of Johnny Cash's "Big River," and in 1973-74 the Dead's version beats any Grand Ole Opry version--just smoking, it leaves the audience exuberant and the band also seems to take note of the high emotion they created in the crowd. The"Brown Eyed Women" that follows deserves multiple listens, as it doesn't have the long, sweet, smooth Jerry solos of versions from '77 or the more down home country feel of '72 versions, but the Dead are lock tight, playing on all cylinders, and this might be my new favorite version. When I listened to the first set again, I don't know what I was thinking on my first listen: just about every song here is cooking, starting with that "Bertha," one of my personal favorites "Me and My Uncle;" "Loser" is powerful, even "Mexicali Blues" is good. But I must have been sleeping on the new at that time "Scarlet Begonias"-->"It Must Have Been the Roses" played with energy and verve. Even the audience is singing a nice harmony with Jerry and Donna on "It Must Have Been the Roses." Great versions here, folks! 

The "Playing in the Band" that ends the first set is slow, introspective and at one point sloppy. There is a missed transition before the reprise, and because of  it we are treated to not just one but two Donna howls in the reprise of the melody. But the meat in the middle of the song is where it happens.When the drums stop for a bit, Phil, Bobby, Jerry, and even Keith take the spaceship out to the ninth dimension. Phil's bass is, as mentioned before, just booming and grooving, especially on this "Playing." And at no time I can think of is Bobby Weir's comping on rhythm guitar just so rhythmically and harmonically original. Nobody was doing what Bobby was doing. Bobby's big hands give him the ability to construct totally wacky, jazzy chords, and the best comparison I can think of is how his strange chords and heavily rhythmic playing are like those of McCoy Tyner, pianist in John Coltrane's quartet. Missoula is one of the best examples of this unique playing style and this version of "Playing" is just an absolute clinic on Bobby's totally original rhythm guitar strumming. 

"Playing" was always a vehicle for Jerry to display his rich grasp of American music in long solos, and you can identify the Jazz, Folk, Space Rock influences here, just like any of the other just marvelous versions of "Playing" that were consistently on display in the 72-74 period, but it's Phil and Bobby who are really cooking here.The unsung hero of this "Playing," who I do not praise nearly enough on this blog, is Billy, whose drumming is just masterful and defines the genre of Space Jazz drumming. Like a number of Dead songs, "Playing" has a strange time signature, 10/4, and Billy really kills it with hyperkinetic work on the cymbals, snare and high-hat, and really moves the band throughout most of the song. Great version at a slower tempo than the classic '72 versions, and if it weren't for the sloppy transition at the end, which gave the spaceship a bumpy landing, it would really reach into the canon of utter Dead greatness.

Jerry and Bobby circa 1974 in deep jam form

1st set: 5/5 stars

Another song that requires multiple listens to really appreciate is "Row Jimmy" in the second slot of the second set. Slow, tender, felt, you could miss it if you weren't paying attention, but it's subtle swaying beauty and Jerry's slide solo are a real treat. The band, once again, is lock tight with a shy groove.

Then we move into the real meat of the show: the spacey jam section. In a recent interview with Rolling Stone magazine, Bobby Weir mentions how songs grow and age and take on a life of their own. Songs are living things and this notion is especially true with the Dead, who play a song differently every night. Weir even mentions how some songs go to sleep for awhile. ""Dark Star" went to sleep for a long time and then came back," Weir said, referring to how the Dead stopped playing one of their most requested tunes between 1974 and 1978 (and at other times). 

The Dead only played "Dark Star" 4 times in 1974 and this version is as deep and as dark as they come during an era when the Dead were peaking in their ability to explore deep space with long jams. The Dead weren't just playing in paragraphs but long, detailed and textured novels. And the "Dark Star" from Missoula is an outstanding example of the Dead's ability to play novels. It comes in a wonderful sandwich squeezed between "Weather Report Suite" and "China Doll," so that we get just under 52 minutes of uninterrupted brilliance from the band at the peak of their abilities to extend long-winded improvisation together. "Weather Report Suite" just streams out of the mountains crystal clear, exploratory but tight and then the deep, dark pull of "Dark Star" pulls us out of the perfect Western landscape of the "Suite" and takes us, once again, way out to outer space. The "Weather Report Suite" is so good it almost made me cry on first listen and rivals the wonderful '73 Winterland versions of it, but the 6-28-74 version captured on Dick's Picks 12 and the 28-minute medley jam that follows it still might take the cake. The "Suite" builds and we have a quick transition into "Dark Star" that builds slowly but deliberately in the 12-minute prelude to the first verse and is filled with very intricate rhythm guitar work from Bobby and delicate, masterful soloing from Jerry and some polyrhythmic drumming from Billy. Minutes 10-12 are extraordinary with some subtle work by Phil who plays his bass like a cello or the tenor in the quartet: swift, in line with the guitars, rather than below them. Keith is quietly shining here, too, on the keys as he does in most of this show, standing out in his "Loser" fills, a "Big River" solo that cooks and at a few other moments, like the "Not Fade Away" that will come after the "Dark Star." 

At about 19 minutes into the "Dark Star," we hear Jerry's fingers going warp speed across the fretboard, taking us to one of the weirdest sounds I've heard since the wild droning of the space rocket engines taking off in the middle of the "Other One" jam from 12-19-73, which is quite literally the most interesting sound I've ever heard in my life and is something I can only listen to about once or twice a year because the sound makes my bones tingle in such a strange way. This is the most out I have ever heard the Dead play and is really not for the uninitiated. The sounds made in minutes 19-21 of the "Dark Star" are about as weird as they come. 

The last 4 minutes of this "Dark Star" come at a blustering pace--hyperkinetic, polyrhythmic, explosive, this is the Dead taking music and sound to another level--and then suddenly, magically, we transition into the quietest, prettiest moment of the show as "China Doll" begins. One wonders what hand signals or musical cues are given between the band members because this switch between wild, chaotic, exuberant playing to a quiet, clear "China Doll" happens so smoothly and quickly and really reveals the band playing as a collective unit--beyond telepathic, one mind, completely focused.

What's hilarious is how a reviewer of the concert from the Missoulian just didn't get what the Dead were all about and wrote of this section: "But the night was not all roses. One incoherent jam in the four-hour concert rambled on for 40 minutes." Just listening to the recording of this "Dark Star" 40 years later is frightening, but it must have been truly mind-bending at the show, and easily impossible to grasp for the uninitiated. Had I been there, I might have run out of the building screaming in absolute fear. The ethereal quality of a well-played "Dark Star" can be almost too much to handle. But really that's what the Dead were really about: Taking music to places it had never been before. And as much as I love this version of "Dark Star," and the wonderful places it can take the listener, it's the Dead's ability to follow the seeming "rambling incoherence" of a deeply spacey "Dark Star" with a song that is so crystal clear, so pristine, so focused with such rich poignant purpose in "China Doll" that does it. The Dead could go from the ninth dimension of a universe far, far away to a deeply rooted laudanum-laden country western tale about a pistol play gone bad told with an absolute precision at the turn of a dime. 

Missoula's version of "Dark Star," by the way, belongs in the canon of 2/27/69, 2/13/70, 10/31/71, 8/27/72, 9/21/72, and 11/11/73 "Dark Stars," all perfect but different. We can see a natural progression over the years and the growth of the song over time. And wow did it grow. It's nearly impossible for me to pick a favorite from these--lately I've been partial to 11/11/73, but re-listening to this Missoula version and especially the last 5 minutes shows the total progression of the Dead and their dedication to each other and to improvisation. Absolutely spellbinding. Each "Dark Star" shows a deep development and this one fits into the progression. 

What's crazy is that after 50 of the most intensely serious minutes of music, we get a rousing, barn-burning, totally un-serious version of Chuck Berry's 1964 "Promised Land," which is just a warm-up for a "Not Fade Away"-->"Going Down the Road Feeling Bad" that knocks the socks off. If Jerry was at an 11 for the earlier part of the show, following the logic of Nigel in the mockumentary "This is Spinal Tap" (check this link to watch the discussion of amps going to 11), Jerry goes to 13 during both Buddy Holly's "Not Fade Away" and Woody Guthrie's "Going Down the Road Feeling Bad." He really knocks it out of the park here, folks! What's amazing is that after the spacey section of the second set, we go from Chuck Berry to Buddy Holly to Woody Guthrie, 3 of the most important American composers I can think of. Second set: 7 out of 5 stars.

It's this sort of versatility displayed in the "Weather Report Suite"-->"Dark Star"-->"China Doll" collective stream of consciousness that makes me believe that the Dead probably had/have the richest repertoire in American music. Their songwriting is genius in its storytelling abilities, both in a musical and a lyrical way, as Hunter's lyrics tell the story of the nomadic West in a way that is poignant but leaves so much up to the imagination. It's not just their songwriting but their interpretation of other American classics, like those of Buddy Holly, Woody Guthrie and Chuck Berry.The Dead took their songs and made them their own. They were deliberately apolitical and the power of their message was so palpable because it didn't conk the listener over the head with a social or political agenda, leaving the listener to make it up in his/her head and blend into the creative design of the Dead world. For me, the Dead tell a more complete story of the West, of a wild America of the sixties and seventies and times before, like the gold mining days in California, with just as much richness as the best of the folk troubadours. 

The Dead's creativity still seems under-appreciated, as their ability to create utterly new music with new twists and turns every night left us with a body of work that is staggeringly immense, unique and utterly telling of us as a people: the American West in its most purest form. 

What we get in '74 is a band that has been together at least 200 nights a year for almost 10 years straight, who'd see one key band member die and another leave (temporarily), whose bonds of brotherhood must have been so incredibly strong (almost frayed and fatigued by 1974, which is why they took their hiatus in 1975 and 1976. But the word hiatus is a strange because of the sheer volume of work they were able to achieve in those "hiatus" years.) And because of those bonds the band's collective mindset was perfect for orchestrating longwinded, incredibly sophisticated and drawn-out Jams that I believe are the peak of American improvisatory music, rivaling even the works of two of my favorite Jazzers, Miles Davis and John Coltrane and all of the players who played with them, who also are at the pinnacle of improvisational music. But what also surprises with Missoula is not just the jams, but the songs are really at their peak here, too. Between "Row Jimmy,""Brown-Eyed Women,""Loser," a brand new "Scarlet Begonias," even "Tennessee Jed" impresses, you've got some subtle yet distinctively beautiful tunes for the American songbook. The Wild West at its best. 

There have been many "jam bands" that have followed in the wake of the Dead--some, more technically proficient--but they pale in comparison with the rich body of work the Dead have offered us. The Dead were master imitators, and I mean this in the best way, before they had many imitators themselves. They were studied scholars of American musical history, perfectly synthesizing so many genres that are distinctly American--country, bluegrass, Jazz, minstrel, blues--in a totally unique way. The "Weather Report Suite"-->"Dark Star"-->"China Doll" stream is really the American West at its best. Wild with reckless abandon, one sees landscapes beyond description in their mind's eye while listening. 

Like all meaningful music and most music by the Dead, Missoula demands multiple listens in order to appreciate. And it's staggering once you appreciate it. Unfathomable that it hadn't been released commercially before. 



kendall.whitney@gmail.com