John Coltrane 100: Expression - A Summary of the Final Stage

By Klaus Kitzinger

As I already had the privilege to write a feature about the posthumously released album Stellar Regions on this blog, i want to stretch this even a bit further. Here, I take a look at the period to follow, which eventually and fatally turned out to be the last five months in John Coltrane’s life. My focus is on the production of music in this final stage, as far it has been recorded and released, rather than John’s personal or health condition.

On 15 February 1967, John had recorded the tracks eventually released as Stellar Regions in 1995 (see my earlier feature) with the quartet.

One week later, on 22 February 1967, he returned with Rashied Ali for a saxophone – drums duo session, eventually to be released as Interstellar Space (see Gary Chapin‘s feature on this album).

On 07 March 1967, in another session with the quartet again, he recorded two tracks, as far as we know, Ogunde and Number One.

Ogunde is, first of all, a relatively short piece at a few seconds over 3 ½ minutes. A noticeable parallel to Stellar Regions, where the title track and Iris have approximately the same length and concise structure. The track takes its title presumably from an afro-brazilean folk song „Ogundu Varere“, rougly translated as a prayer to the gods. John occupied himself with spiritual traditions especially from Africa. John uses his forceful, cry-like late saxophone sound, overblowing his instrument, which gives an emotional urgence to the piece. The theme starts with a solemn, hmyn-like melody, but breaks out in free, atonal outbursts, before it fades away. In summary, John condenses the intensity of his (at that time) usually half-hour long live improvisations into less than a handful of minutes (but see below, what happened live).

At some time in spring (David S. Wild confirmed in the liner notes for Stellar Regions that this track was not recorded on 15 February, so the actual recording date remains unknown), John must have recorded To Be, where he plays flute and is rejoined by Pharoah Sanders on piccolo flute. He shows a very calm, introspective and meditative side here. At over 16 minutes playing time, this track feels like a spiritual retreat. The two flutes give it an airy, almost floating mood. Alice Coltrane’s flowing piano style provides a mystic, harp-like cushion. Rashied Ali on drums and Jimmy Garrison on bass keep it calm and subdued. All together, the piece lacks a trditional jazz pulse, even leaves traditional jazz structures completely and makes a profound structural switch towards a meditative, open-end spiritual incantation. It stands as one of the most explicit artifacts of the creative partnership between John and Alice at that final stage and already mirrors the „cosmic jazz“ landscapes that Alice would pioneer on her own in the years to follow in her landmark solo releases (Universal Consciousness, Journey in Satchidananda). Not to forget about Pharoah Sanders (Karma).

Also unknown is the exact recording date for the piece titled Expression in spring 1967 with the quartet, which later lended its title to the album.

23 April 1967 is the date of the last live recording, The Olatunji Concert. This performance, originally recorded for a radio broadcast, is featured by Fotis Nikolakopoulos on this blog, so see there. With due respect to Fotis, I will limit myself here to the absolutely striking contrast between the live version of Ogunde and the studio version. Performed live, it swells to 28 minutes playing time. The studio recording’s tight and condensed structure is only preserved in the theme at the beginning to which it returns only at the very end. In between, it gets overwhelmed by a storm-like wave of pure energy. After the introduction of the melody as theme, the structure collapses completely in a ritual storm. A dense, polyrhythmic vortex is unchained in Rashied Ali’s drumming. Alice Coltrane plays cascade-like runs on the piano. On saxophone, Pharoah Sanders adds his bone-rattling, ecstatic overblowing cries. Yes, the quartet has been expanded here. Pharoah Sanders is back at it on the second saxophone. Two additional percussionists joined in, Algie DeWitt and Jumma Santos.

The last ever live gig came at Baltimore’s Famous Ballroom on May 7, 1967. No audio recording of that performance is known to exist.

On 17 May 1967, exactly two months before John’s death, a sextet met for a last studio recording. The master tapes have been lost or at least unissued so two tracks with the titles None Other and Kaleidoscope have been unreleased so far and do not even appear on retrospective compilations.

With the recorded material, a last studio record was conceived during John’s lifetime. It was given the title Expression. John was actively involved in the production and met with Bob Thiele.

On side 1, it had Ogunde as the opening track (the studio version, as above, of course). Track #2 was To Be with John and Pharoah Sanders on flutes (as above). At over 16 minutes, it was the longest track, making up for nearly half of the original album’s playing time, and the only track on the album in which Pharoah Sanders made an appearance.

Side 2 opened with the majestic ballad Offering, the only track chosen from the 15 February session, thus making it the only track on the posthumous album Stellar Regions (see there) that had been released before and had an original title. Hank Shteamer has just featured this track prominently in the New York Times and put it into the larger context of spiritual jazz, for which a piece like Offering „would seem like a perfect prototype“ (Hank Shteamer, Spiritual Jazz Has Turned Cozy. John Coltrane Demanded More. New York Times, September 18, 2026). The original album closed with the title track Expression,John‘s last studio recording to ever be released. In the later CD release only, Number O ne, recorded on the same day as Ogunde, was added as a bonus track (the track, however, had been released for the first time in a 1978 compilation album).

Obviously, the most recent recording session of May 1967 was not considered in the process at all (at that time, the tapes at least should still have been around, I guess?).

John reportedly selected the four tracks for the original album release and their exact sequence himself. On Friday, 14 July 1967, three days before his death, he met Bob Thiele, handed the master tapes over to him and finally authorised the title and the release of the album, but expressed his opposition against liner notes.

Expression, as John Coltrane’s final statement, was released in September 1967, two months after his death, containing John‘s chronologically last audible studio recordings and being the first posthumous release of his music.

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John Coltrane 100: Interstellar Space

By Gary Chapin

Reading back into the reviews of this recording, from over the past decades, you encounter the word “relentless” a lot, probably more than for any other album in the history of albums. It’s interesting because, when I first heard Interstellar Space, “relentless” was the word that occurred to me — right after the introductory bells of track one faded. Till then, I hadn’t realized that “relentless” was a thing that music could be, and that relentlessness was awesome. Even transcendent.

It’s not a complicated record. You’ve got your tenor and drums. Each piece starts with a theme, enters the improvisation, and then winds down and restates the theme. Each improvisation travels a similar arc, beginning in a saner space, rising intensity and ecstasy, whipping us into a frenzy, then easing off into … well, not serenity, but you get close to it as you hear the shaken bells that begin the next piece.

The joys of Interstellar Space come not from structural intrigue, but from the cascadingly brilliant improvs. Coltrane and Ali were both ridiculously ON that day. (Ali actually felt he had underperformed because he didn’t know they were doing a duet session until he arrived at the session.) And the duet setting makes the music almost transparent. Aside from the beauty of Trane and Ali’s playing, you also get a sense of exactly what Coltrane was trying for. His insistent explorations (relentless) are laid bare. This is an excellent entry to Coltrane’s later works. His playing is like water moving through the ground, trying to find its way through a shelf of granite. Eventually, the water finds the crevices, freezes, expands, thaws, and breaks the stone to pieces. The water always wins. A force of nature.

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John Coltrane 100: The Olatunji Concert: The Last Live Recording

By Fotis Nikolakopoulos 

Truth must be said from the beginning, I’m not, even a little, objective when it comes to John Coltrane’s last chapter in life and in music. Those two are inseparable in any case. Second truth is that this last period that starts roughly sometime in 1964, prior to A Love Supreme, and ends with his death is my favorite music. He and all his comrades, especially Alice, Pharoah, Rashied and Jimmy managed to create a body of music of transcendence –an ascension for the soul and deep meditation for the mind.

My album of choice is this last live recording (where the aforementioned musicians are joined by Juma Santos and Algie DeWitt on percussion), recorded just three months before his death at the Olatunji Center of African Culture in Harlem, N.Y.C. In a quite symbolic move (the place: deep in an African-American neighborhood, the name: African Culture and tradition as a starting point) the music of the players, even though both geographically and in name still black, still jazz but free, is already a new entity.

With this recording, one that the sound is not so hi-fi, Coltrane’s sound seems to be in the final stage of the total freedom that Ascension initiated. Listening to the unrelenting growls, howls and their thick wall of sound created by Trane and Pharoah, one could easily comment that the two tracks, Ogunde of almost half an hour and the total reconstruction of My Favorite Things that clocks in thirty four uncontrollably joyous minutes, are pure noise.

This ferocious a la Ayler attack by the two locked in reeds brothers, provides a rough field, like a magic carpet flying in the air, for the others to give everything they have. And they have to give a lot to the not so big crowd attending, as their collective struggle to follow or lead at some points, or intertwine with small gestures like the polyrhythmic-not-so-rhythmic barrages by Rashied, the lovingly plucked piano chords by Alice and the even though not always audible, monstrous strength by Jimmy on double bass.

Allow me to humbly comment that Coltrane’s music channeled everything in black tradition and went beyond that. He created his own tradition. You also don’t need me to say that this is an amazing recording. One that encapsulates all the stated goals by John Coltrane himself. Total freedom, love, myriads of feelings and a spiritual unity that could be the final Truth.

If there’s something to think about, to question, it could be this: where could his music go after this? Did he, before even turning 41, reached a point of no return?

@fot.isn

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John Coltrane 100: Concert in Japan

By Martin Schray

The reason I like John Coltrane’s Concert in Japan best out of all my Coltrane albums is that it includes one of my all-time favorite tracks: “Peace on Earth”. And as good as “Meditation/Leo (Part One),” “Leo (Part Two),” and “Part Three” are - “Peace on Earth” outshines them all.

When John Coltrane arrived in Japan in 1966, he was welcomed like a king. He arrived at Haneda Airport on July 8, 1966, along with his wife Alice, Pharoah Sanders, Jimmy Garrison, and Rashied Ali. Ali, who later recalled the trip, said they were greeted by thousands of Japanese fans. At the airport, there were huge, life-size cardboard cutouts of the musicians, a red carpet leading from the plane to the terminal, and bouquets of flowers.

And Coltrane had a message, it was no coincidence that he wanted to perform in Japan. He insisted on traveling to Nagasaki to visit the Peace Memorial at the site of the atomic bombing. He laid down a wreath and prayed for a long time. The place had a profound emotional and spiritual impact on him. On the evening of his concert in Nagasaki, he played “Peace on Earth” - at that time a new piece and a kind of musical prayer for peace. At a press conference during the tour, when asked about the Vietnam War, he said: “I dislike war, period. It should stop, and any other war.”

On Concert in Japan - and on “Peace on Earth” in particular - one can see how Coltrane’s thirst for new sounds is inextricably linked to his desire to view the universe from a spiritual perspective; his music radiates a cosmic aura. The piece begins with an incredibly beautiful melody that floats above Alice’s arpeggios, Garrison’s bass sprinklings, and Ali’s sparse drumming. It seems like the musical embodiment of the Garden of Eden. Nearly six minutes of pure harmony - but then deliberate atonality creeps in, paradise is threatened, only heavenly saxophone lines save it for the time being. Then, however, a dissonant storm is conjured up, shaking this world to its very foundations. The piece is thrown into utter disarray; block chords replace the arpeggios, and the bass and drums throw the meter overboard. At the very end, however, harmony returns, and the melodies resurface, albeit different from how they began.

In July 1966, John Coltrane was just one year away from his untimely death, yet his zest for life was greater than ever. His musical explorations were more adventurous than before, and “Peace on Earth” brilliantly captures the essence of what his music is all about. Or, as my friend Thomas Weber puts it: “On the one hand, it’s utter extravagance and exhaustion, on the other, it’s the dissolution of boundaries. Free jazz with melodies.”

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John Coltrane 100: Ascension

By Gregg Miller

To celebrate and commemorate John Coltrane’s 100 ^th birthday, drummer extraordinaire Don Berman will reprise at the Chapel Performance Space in Seattle his original composition, 'Ascension Northwest', written in the spirit of Coltrane’s Ascension (Impulse!, 1966). As in the original, Berman has11 musicians playing a series of mantras interspersed with spirited soloing over improvised support from subsets of other players, including a double-bass duet.

A preview of this year’s performance written by Paul Rauch appears in Seattle’s Earshot Jazz magazine: https://online.fliphtml5.com/risyt/Earshot_Jazz_09_2026/#p=13

You can hear earlier versions of 'Ascension Northwest' released here: https://threshold24.bandcamp.com/album/ascension‑northwest

As a contribution for the FJB Coltrane birthday column, I’ve asked the 11 musicians performing 'Ascension Northwest' (myself included) to reflect on Coltrane’s Ascension and its impact on their musical journey. Below, our answers (gingerly edited). The questionnaire is reproduced at the very end.

Tom Varner (French horn)

1. I knew about Coltrane and loved his music from his time with Miles, and also his ‘classic’ quartet recordings, when I was in high school and getting into jazz. I did not know about Ascensionuntil a bit later, perhaps early in college. Even though I loved Ornette Coleman, and even Albert Ayler, I must say that very late Coltrane and Ascension was a bit :”Whoa! This is too heavy for me!” at first listen. I think I wanted to hear the ‘melodic line’ no matter how ‘out’ it was, and this music went beyond that. Eventually I grew to love it, letting go of the ‘I must hear a clear line’ worry and just enjoying being carried away in the power of the SOUND. I.e., that sound of a ‘scary but then NOT scary’ glorious totality of several improvisers all going full steam ahead at once. The JCOA Michael Mantler ‘Communications’ 3-LP set, from 1968, with Pharoah Sanders and other greats, was a kind of bridge for me to the world of Ascension. To a kind of ‘beautiful crying battle’ as opposed to just noise. Within one or two years, I was open to playing in those settings!

1a. Ascension opened up a new world of “multiple new sound-creating improvisers” creating new avenues that were not ‘just’ chord change or single-line orientated. From then on, Coltrane’s world and the worlds of, say, Xenakis and Ligeti, were not so far apart!

1b.Moving into the ‘90s, I worked with ensembles that had 6, 7, 8 winds with bass and drums. I was going for that high energy sound where it was ‘ok’ to not hear individual single lines and just get swept away in the sound. The best example of this is my own “Death at the Right Time,” on “The Mystery of Compassion” on Soul Note (1992). 5 saxes, three low brass, bass and drums.

1c. Ascension kind of gave us ‘permission’ to create beautiful and powerful structures with very little or no written music, just ideas, and trusting that the improvisers will create a lasting artwork on the spot. I love that!

2. This is very corny, but at age 18, I clearly remember thinking “Well, remember, Tom, if things get bad in the future, or very challenging, don’t forget to listen to Coltrane—that music is healing. That music will always be there.” And, I would also simply say, “thank you, Mr. Coltrane.”

Jim Knodle (trumpet)

I heard Ascension when it was released in 1966. I regard it as a companion to Ornette's double quartet project Free Jazz. The interaction between Scott LaFaro and Jimmy Garrison is really something! Perry Robinson told me that the whole thing started at the Federal Prison in Lexington where everyone practiced in the same room at the same time. They didn’t want them to rehearse, so they just played ad hoc .

Kenny Mandell (alto sax)

1. I was probably 19 when I first heard Ascension. 1972 or so. Being in college, I had heard free jazz players in NYC, and I knew Sun Ra’s music. Ascension was way more organized than a lot of Sun Ra’s music insofar as it kept the traditional jazz form where there was thematic material followed by solos. There are motifs but there aren’t any chord changes to speak of, and there is some degree of cacophony. Depending on the player, some of the solos were more traditional, others were, I would say, divinely inspired, like Eric Dolphy’s.

In my listening life at that time, I quickly went from Led Zeppelin to the Art Ensemble, Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp, and Cecil Taylor. Most people thought I was crazy. I related to the energy of it. The dissonance never bothered me per se. Ascension showed me that the big band format could be stretched. The rock stuff was relatively static in comparison. Hendrix was close. Everybody else stayed in the form. I see Ascensionas important but not seminal. It’s certainly part of the canon.

1b. I’ve put many large groups together over the years. Part of the game plan for large group improvisation is to establish a level of trust. I’ve learned to pick people who are comfortable recognizing that the traditional limits or strictures put on playing are actually optional, and one can use or not use those depending on what sort of statement the whole piece wants to make. Murray Bookchin’s Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971, 1986) was pivotal (early 1970s) for me as much as any of this music. I tried to use those principles in music and in organizing. My book some day will be called The Tyranny of Harmony. Piano chords in particular limit your choices as an improvisor.

It’s also the case that as I’ve gotten older and found that the audience just hasn’t been there for totally unstructured, large-form music, I’ve tended to select pieces or write pieces that give the audience some sort of repeated motif to ground their listening experience.

1c. Ascension opened the door. After A Love Supreme (1965), people thought Coltrane took an extreme left turn into the world of sound exploration as it could be manifested in improvisation and group interaction. Ascension put into stark reality the challenges of making and of listening to that kind of music. I don’t think they got to the level that the Art Ensemble of Chicago did over the years, and some of Cecil’s groups that stayed together for years: Jimmy Lyons, Sirone, Andrew Cyrille, they practiced incessantly and got telepathic.

2. John Coltrane had an obsession with achieving a certain sound. Coltrane—his essence for me–is that ceaseless searching. This is what I love about music probably the most, it’s that it never ends.

Dick Valentine (tenor sax)

I reflected at length on the questions you posed, and on the evolution of my attitudes, responses and relations with Coltrane’s music, which I understand in a context of almost 60 years trying to educate myself and participate in contemporary expressions of Great Black Music. In the end, despite that his recorded output made a tremendous impact on my playing ‑‑ and was a singular factor in motivating my drive to make music ‑‑ I think it fair to say Ascension, the recording, has not occupied as big a space in my development or conceptualization as some other works.

I played in Don Berman's three presentations of Ascension Northwest in 2016, and I'm very pleased indeed to get to do it again on the Coltrane centenary. I really cherish the privilege of participating with artists the caliber of those whom Don has persuaded. I look around the room at the assemblage of musical knowledge, emotional depth, technical proficiency, and aesthetic ambition, I am inspired and amazed and humbled.

I’m long past accepting that I will never "understand" society. It seems to me the “order that governs power and human relations” in our real world is founded on out‑of‑date assumptions regarding what humanity needs to flourish. I know that there are many people aware of this damaging misalignment, and I can tell they mostly share my frustration that fixing large‑scale misalignments is not in the offing, thanks precisely to the systems that govern the distribution of power and dictate humans' relationship with real resources.

So, on John Coltrane's centenary, we'll gather musicians, players and audience in celebration. In a sense, a roomful is perhaps a model of “society.” Everyone in the room will have some mental image of what constitutes a successful event ‑‑ in context, the definition of the community “flourishing,” right? As players, we have the responsibility to provide physical, audible inputs to the outcome. There is a bit of magic to what may happen here. Each player contributes to the global fabric, whose nature he may not predict. It’s understood that coordinated inputs are in some sense a prerequisite for success, and communication is required for coordination. How is communication achieved? By the act that constitutes that player’s input. It’s a bit recursive, to say the least!

Neil Welch (tenor sax)

1. Ascension came my way when I was 15 or 16. I picked up the album in cd format at a record store. This was my first experience with Trane’s music on Impulse!. I picked up the album out of curiosity. I was initially struck by three things:

1. The album cover ‑‑ Coltrane the seeker, looking beyond himself, and beyond us to something cosmic.

2. The length of the album: Until this point, I didn't know that a ‘jazz’ album could be +/‑ 40 minutes in length.

3. The cd version had takes 1 and 2, which made it a double album. It was the most expensive CD I had ever bought.

The response for me was immediate. I felt the album opened with a declarative question. Coltrane begins with a theme, but it is incomplete. The tonic is ‘missing’ from the first note he plays. He asks the band a question with only the partial theme, and leaves it to the band to complete that theme.

Ascension felt to me a major and inevitable document in Coltrane’s music from this period. The emotional intensity of his solos, and what he was asking of a small group, had reached a tipping point. I found it deeply humbling and revealing that he used the vehicle of a communal sound to further amplify the concept of the jazz musician as soloist and group collaborator.

1a. After Ascension, I understood that in musical conversation, a powerful theme could be stated with brevity. A short theme can grant space for a complex response of virtually any length.

1b. Ascension helped me to experience song length as a durational mind-set. A song could, and ought to be, exactly the length needed to fulfill its musical and emotional aims.

1c.Ascension is, for me, an album of colliding forces and the unity of embracing those forces towards a common mission. It’s like people in a building. All these souls one floor atop the other. Different lives, worldviews, needs, hurts, wants, but all share the same vertical massing. If that building is on fire, they are invested in each other's outcome. They’ve looked in the eyes of those people in the elevator.

2. Can we as a society still sit with, and grapple with in real time, discordance in art‑making? Can intensity of sound and emotion hold space for us in our lives and aid us in the journey of deeper personal growth? 
 

Steve Meyer (alto sax)

1. I must have been 14 or 15. I was just getting into Coltrane and came across Ascension at my local record store. At that point I’d only known some of his earlier quartet work and work with Miles. Seeing that this was a larger group piqued my interest. And I recognized the names of a lot of heavy players, though I doubt I’d heard most of them at that point, so thought it would be a good album. After getting back home, I’m in my bedroom and put on the album. I don’t know what I was expecting but not too far into the first side (the first ensemble part) I knew it wasn’t for me. I didn’t know what to make of it, and it didn’t speak to me. I think I finished the first side but didn’t listen to the second. A few years went by before I was ready to give it another try. I was still an adventurous listener, so my first reaction didn’t turn me off from listening to other “out”/free musics which I grew to appreciate and enjoy more and more.

1a. If I don’t like what I hear on first listen, I remind myself that there are works of art out there that I’m not ready for. Music will speak to us when we’re ready to hear it.

1b. While I was listening to more out music in my teens it was years later before I played free music – at least with others. In high school this wasn’t the kind of music most of my musician friends would be into. Even with the one or two who weren’t opposed to it, we never thought to attempt it ourselves, at least not in any serious way, sticking to more standard jazz and the fusion music of the day. (This is early 80s, btw.) Even later, people I played with tended to be more conventional in the foundation of their music. These days I’m fortunate to have a community of musicians who embrace free/creative music. And, I have more confidence in myself to nudge the conversation that way when playing with others that I think will be receptive to it.

1c. I tend to not view music through a sociological lens, but Ascension and similar music has made me consider the normative orders of music in the US. Mainly, they’ve shown me there are a lot of stories to be told and a lot of different ways to tell them.

2. I want to thank Coltrane for his music and inspiration. The question to ask myself: how can I harness the focus and questing spirit of Trane?

Eric Ring (piano)

While A Love Supreme was life changing at 18, I’d surprisingly never heard Ascension prior to preparing for this performance.

Don Berman (composer, drums )

1. A sax player at my summer Maine resort job, a student of Jackie McLean, had introduced me to Coltrane’s Live at Birdland (Impulse!, 1964). This was 1972. I heard an amazing spiritual element in John Coltrane's music when I heard his quartet play “Alabama.” It struck me incredibly deeply and I have adored jazz and playing jazz ever since. (The piece was a deeply moving eulogy to the victims of bombing of the 16th street Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama.) A couple of years later, in my junior year of college, I heard Ascension and realized that Trane had helped jazz expand its scope enormously to express a wider range of feelings. With the Ascension session, jazz composition and form had evolved light years from the beginnings of jazz decades earlier. After Ascension, there was now a huge universe of possibilities for jazz musicians to explore in their work.

1a.As I got further into jazz I particularly loved Miles Davis and John Coltrane, because I saw how each had evolved continuously throughout their musical journeys, from one period and chapter and style to another. The way I think about music and music making after Ascension is part and parcel of how I feel about music and art in general. All of the art forms have a rich and magical history. If you have studied and played music for years and years, you have to discover who you are and what your aesthetic is.

1b. For me, Ascension is part of what guided me further into freer playing and improvising in the last 20 years. Creating my own compositions has become more important for me. I organize pieces that contain both written and improvised sections. For this I select musicians that can both interpret written compositions and also improvise very well.

2. I would ask others: How does Coltrane’s music move you and make you feel about what feelings or sounds you play and express when you play? The world is full of a truly amazing variety of music. There are masters playing in each of those styles. I would ask others who take music seriously to open their minds and make sure they hear the music of master creators, live when possible, and in as many styles as possible. Master the basic fundamentals, and take music as seriously as Trane did.

For those just seeking fun, that is fine too. A lot of striving people in the arts take things too seriously, especially when they become too self-absorbed and their egos interfere with what they are attempting to do as musicians. As the great pianist and educator Kenny Werner teaches his students and readers, “your value as a human being is not based upon how well you play a musical instrument.”

Gregg Miller (baritone sax)

1. Around 1997 I bought a used CD copy of the compilation, The Major Works of John Coltrane (GRP Records, 1992) which included both takes of Ascension as well as Om, Kulu Se Mama, and Selflessness. I was stunned at the difference in intent between those recordings and Giant Steps. In Giant Steps, I heard a restless cramming of as many notes as quickly as possible within structures that could barely contain them. In Ascension, Coltrane had left that set of problems behind in favor of a compositional form that foregrounded the free-playing (and listening, or not listening) of every other player, a dense maelstrom that produced its own power without regard to or in opposition to or transcending of the traditional tropes of organized sound. To my ears, there was still an evident structuredness to the resultant noise, but full-on interplay was now the method and the lesson. It felt to me like a releasing of mutual respect, a lifting of repression inherent in most musics, and a deliberate shifting of power dynamics from a singular ordered mind that commands obedience (and players willingly, often reverently submitting to that control) to the shared embrace of others who jointly participate. Messy, but beautiful. I was studying a lot of Habermas at the time, and so for me, the link between music-making and communicative action was an easy one to see/hear and understand. I wasn’t playing free music (or any music) at the time, but the seed had been sown without me knowing it.

1a. In the late 1990s I would listen to Ascension and the other tracks on Major Works over and again while studying. It was the kind of music that permitted my mind to roam freely and/or easily concentrate elsewhere without demanding I enter its rhythms, melodies, cadence. There was something liberating in its power to shape time and experience like that. Among other things, it forced me to confront the limitations of pop music and its draw.

1b. As wild as Ascensions ometimes feels, it predicates without having arrived at a music that depends foremost on collective improvisation where listening and meaningful response have overtaken chops and strutting (not that chops and strutting can’t be part of meaningful communication). What opens up, then, is the possibility for music-making where the reception of one’s own and others’ sound while playing is governed by a feeling out of the pulse of the whole, accepting contingency and accident as integral to the flow of making. Musical “intention” in this context becomes an emergent property of the experience of intersubjectivity.

1c. Most (90%?) deliberately made music appears to our ears in strict time, where the musicians aim to become part of a single organism beating in time, and their music tries to compel listeners to imaginatively join that rhythmic organism. There is solace and belonging offered in that vision of unity and unfreedom. I’ve had enough of that music. How else might we imagine and experience collective practices of meaning-making/moving/sounding as individual and collective flourishing/belonging/being-with-others? Ascension.

Questionnaire

1. When did you first hear Ascension, or come to know about it? What was your response? How did this event affect your understanding of Coltrane and what he’s up to, of jazz music, and/or music and what it’s up to?

1a. How do you think about music and music‑making after Ascension?

1b. Has Ascension (or its ilk) informed your practice – of playing, of organizing, of selecting musicians, of conceptualizing the field of music?

1c. Has Ascension informed your understanding of society, or, dare I say it, the normative order(s) that govern(s) our understanding of power and human relations?

2. What question would you want to ask of yourself, of others, about John Coltrane @100?

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John Coltrane 100: Stellar Regions

 

By Klaus Kitzinger

Reflections on Stellar Regions (1967/1995)

Around the end of the year 1995, a „new“ album of John Coltrane, posthumous of course, was announced to be released. Alice Coltrane(AC), generally referred to in the press as Coltrane‘s widow and archive keeper, had found a previously lost tape of a 1967 recording date (and given titles to the tracks), we learned.

As a relative newbie to modern, avant-garde jazz, you would generally resort to sources like „Das Jazzbuch“ by acclaimed writer J.-E. Berendt from your local public library (in Lower Bavaria, in my case). As to Coltrane’s music, you would probably have already taken Soultrane and Blue Train as a starting point, passed by Giant Steps und initiated yourself into the Impulse-/classic quartet period with, for instance, Live at the Village Vanguard . You would have learned that A Love Supreme was the peak of his creative work and a great milestone of modern jazz in general. Going on further to Ascension, probably tempted by Mr Behrendt‘s description of it „as an orgasm lasting 40 minutes“, it was, however, not for me. It was simply too much for me to take at that time, especially the lack of any „song structure“, I did not find an orgasm, but a collective, cacophonic mess lasting 40 minutes, to be honest.

With that background, learning that the announced release, titled Stellar Regions , was originally recorded in 1967, it caught my curiosity nonetheless. Not only was this my birth year, it would also be interesting to see: how had Coltrane developed from 1965 on? And, sadly, we could expect to listen to some of his last recorded music, just five months before his death,

Some raw facts: All the music assembled on Stellar Regions was recorded in the Van Gelder Studio in one day’s work on 15 February 1967, and the released material comprises everything recorded in that session*, with his regular group members of that era: AC on piano, Jimmy Garrison (JG) on bass and Rashied Ali (RA) on drums. But at this date in the absence of saxophonist Pharoah Sanders(PS), thus reducing the late period quintet of Live at the Villard Vanguard Again! to a quartet. After this studio date, Coltrane would return there exactly one week later on 22 February for a duo recording with RA (Interstellar Space) and in March for three more tracks to be released in late September 1967 on Expression. All but one of the tracks on Stellar Regions were unreleased before (I knew none of it anyway), as #5 Offering had already been used to complete the Expressionalbum. And by the way, the title track #3 (alternate take #9) was an early version of Venus from the duo session with RA one week later.

What is going on here?

Having my CD copy of Stellar Regionsin hand, what did I get?

As an obvious statement already from the back of the cover: Shortness. A return to a noticeable format and compositional structure. 11 tracks (including 3 alternate versions) with a maximum length of just under 9 minutes (#1 Seraphic Light), well … that sounded fairly familiar to me, even compared to a Genesis or Dire Straits LP (which, in the meantime, had found a place a bit farther behind in the rack).

On first listen: Conciseness. Cohesiveness. Control, even constraint. The contrast to Ascension and even more so (although unknown to me), the sprawling marathon improvisations of his live 1966 work (the non-stop concerts of the 1966 tour in Japan!), becomes evident from the start. These pieces are tighter and more concise, the emotional bursts more focused.

Lyrical clarity. Spiritual atmosphere. Much to my surprise. While intense and free, these pieces are balanced with moments of meditative calm. I found lyrical beauty on #1 Seraphic Light, #5 Offering and #4 Iris -the latter being a gorgeous ballad, pleasant rediscovery on re-listening and easily the most traditionally and melodically accessible track on the album.

Is it „free“ jazz“ actually?

Is this free jazz, I wondered? While I have no doubt, that this is a true free jazz album and the right stuff for the readers and makers of the Free Jazz Blog, this album still sits quite on the border for me. Needless to say, by February 1967, Coltrane had abandoned traditional chord progressions and swing rhythms.

Why it may justifiably be called free jazz:

- The protagonist does of course not abandon the extended techniques he had developed over the years - overblowing, shrieking altissimo notes and multiphonics.

- RA displays his non-metric drumming and plays multidirectional rhythms, creating a fluid, rolling wave of percussion rather than playing a traditional steady swing beat.

- The musicians as a whole are not bound by traditional chord progressions. They play with harmonic openness, outside the conventional harmony.

And what makes it distinct from other works of the period, so it may be not:

- Unlike his live performances of this time, Stellar Regions has clear, distinct thematic melodies at the beginning and end of most tracks, providing structural anchors.

- JG‘s bass playing also acts as a massive anchor. Because he uses repetitive and modal tools to anchor the root note, the musicians never fully detach from a tonal center.

- AC‘s chord playing on piano provides a harp-like, meditative harmonic cushion. It is free-form, but it’s deeply melodic and highly tonal as well.

Conclusion:

Stellar Regions uses the vocabulary of free jazz (energy, microtonality, open rhythm, non-metrical drumming) but pours it into shorter, concise and deeply spiritual tone poems, finding a balance between freedom and structure. Instead of plainly breaking the rules or „tearing down walls“, it is all about using freedom to achieve an emotional and spiritual state.

What stands out

I like the more lyrical pieces on this album very much. They really define this album and give it a distinct place in Coltrane’s late period timeline. They a show us a side of Coltrane’s final months that makes already a shift to a more spiritual atmosphere. They touch my heart and make me wistfully curious if more of that kind would have come flowing out of that musician.

Offering (# 5) is a majestic ballad, the emotional center of the session and arguably the most structurally complete composition on the album. The track opens with a beautiful, hymn-like melody, played on tenor with incredible tenderness, sounding like a religious lament. AC enters with resonant low-register block chords. Coltrane’s solo moves away from the melody into intense, microtonal and split-tones. However, because AC sustains chords instead of playing dissonant clusters, Coltrane’s own fiery playing never sounds angry or harsh, but soulful, like a spiritual cry. The track concludes with a return to the opening theme. By the time the melody returns, the storm has cleared, leaving a sense of exhausted peace.

Seraphic Light (#1). If Offering is a grounded prayer, Seraphic Light,the album’s starter, is pure cosmic ascension. While it has a more active, rolling rhythm play from RA, it remains one of the most texturally dense tracks on the album. This track begins not with a saxophone melody but with a rumbling of drums and cymbals from RA. AC establishes a continuous tremolo on the piano, while JG plays an aggressive, bowing bass drone. RA provides a rapid, metrically free tapestry of cymbals and snaredrum hits throughout. When Coltrane enters on saxophone, he plays short, declarative motifs that rise upward in pitch, bypassing a traditional jazz melody entirely. On this track, AC abandons all traditional piano performance boundaries. She does not simply play chords to back up a soloist, but creates a massive swirl of sound. The track builds to a peak where Coltrane‘s solo moves into the stratosphere, played in the extreme altissimo register of his instrument. Yet even throughout this peak, JG‘s grounding bass and AC‘s rolling waves prevent the track from becoming exhausting. It remains radiant and luminous.

Does this album show us a path to the (unrealized) future?

Now, as this year marks the 100th anniversary of John Coltrane’s birth and these recordings are almost his last notes to be captured on tape, it is a compelling „what if“-question: Where would he likely have moved to from here? Does this February 1967 recording – especially its lyrical core (see above) - give us a blueprint of what would have come?

That is open for debate. Coltrane, sadly, recorded this music just five months before his death. We will never definitely know for sure how his music would have evolved if he had lived on. In his Allmusic review (4 ½* by the way), Scott Yanow argues that Stellar Regions offers no real hints of a future path.

However, it may as well be stated that these recordings „represent a suggestion of the evolution his music would have taken had his life not been cut so short“ (David S. Wild, author of the liner notes, June 1995). Stellar Regions implies that Coltrane was heading toward a "chamber free-jazz" where total freedom was guided by internal discipline and structured devotion. Also, Stellar Regions suggests that the 1970s version of John Coltrane would have been less aggressive and far more compositional, spiritual and influenced by eastern aesthetics. It would have been intriguing to see him join his wife Alice in making the shift to World and Spiritual Jazz. Coltrane was already moving toward the cross-cultural, transcendent, meditative music of the 1970s, as evidenced in Alice Coltrane‘s (Journey in Satchidananda, 1971) and Pharoah Sanders‘ albums recorded after his death.

This session from mid-February 1967 still proves that avant-garde music can be profoundly beautiful, universal and divine.

*The liner notes from June 1995 by David S. Wild confirm that the track To Be, released on Expression, with Coltrane on flute and PS rejoining him on piccolo flute, was not actually recorded on that same date, although being credited to that date on its original release.

Also note: a contemporary review in German by Konrad Heidkamp from 09.12.1995, DIE ZEIT 50/1995, is still available for registered readers of DIE ZEIT.  

--- 

Klaus Kitzinger, born in 1967 in Landshut, Lower Bavaria, Germany. Still lives and works there in his daytime job as a lawyer specializing in construction law. A faithful follower of FJB, he got his first hold of free jazz as a teenager in the early to mid 1980‘s, when one enthusiastic pub operator actually brought luminaries like Archie Shepp, Sam Rivers, Joseph Jarman, the Sun Ra Arkestra, Jimmy Lyons/Karen Borca and Andrew Cyrille (spelled „Grille“ in the local newspaper) to his provincial hometown. Besides free jazz, he has an interest in (nearly) everything related to Japanese culture, traditional and modern, thanks to being married to Yuka. 

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John Coltrane 100: Transition and Sunship

By Brian Earley

 

When John Coltrane died in 1967 the jazz world felt a startling void. With the release of Expression, Coltrane’s final studio album, it must have felt like a narrative had been cut short of its intended ending. After all, unless Trane had recorded material that had never been released, that was it: no more new music from John Coltrane. 

 

We know the story 100 years after Trane’s birth, however. And did he ever record material that had yet to be released! Alice Coltrane worked relentlessly to preserve John’s towering musical legacy, and we know from Andy Beta’s incisive book on her life that after a long day of raising four children on her own, she would put the kids to bed, sit in meditation, and practice the music that meant so much to her and her late husband. What she also did was listen to unreleased recordings by John and prepare them for release.

Among the recordings made public in the immediate years following John’s passing were two absolutely stunning (I can’t emphasize this word enough–stunning!) recordings by the famed Classic Quartet of Trane, McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, and Elvin Jones: Transitionin 1970 and Sun Ship in 1971.

Transition

 

 

 

McCoy Tyner related to writer David Wild that sometimes John would give them two notes, or maybe just a scale, as the basis of a composition before they recorded. The title track to the album Transition,recorded in the spring of 1965,certainly could be such a piece. The work features a tightly focused quartet that absolutely opens up the gates and begins to tear down the fences. “Transition” is one the group’s wildest, most ferociously open pieces. It’s as though the catalytic power of Ascension or Om has been concentrated into a narrow and controlled conduit. Both the kinetic energy coursing through that conduit and the narrowness of the channel itself create the conditions for tension and combustion.

 

The “Prayer and Meditation Suite,” on the other hand, is an absolute masterwork. I am of the persuasion that comparing works of Trane to other periods in his life can dangerously undervalue some of his accomplishments. Any suite, be it Meditations or “Prayer and Meditation” would beg comparison with A Love Supreme. Forget all that. “Prayer and Meditation” would stand as one the great works in the jazz canon if it were the only piece Coltrane and the Quartet created. Movement II: “Peace and After” is the sound of a quest for peace complete with all the pain inherent in that search. Movement IV: “Affirmation” picks up where “Transition” left off and rings with crisis, explosiveness, and spiritual urgency.

 

Violence was always slinking nearby during Coltrane’s life, as it is for us today, and his music embraces this reality, but I would never describe his music as “violent.” Just note the third remaining song on   Transition   : “Dear Lord.” It is hard for me to imagine there ever existed a world without this vulnerable dedication to peace. Urgency and catharsis. Peace and vulnerability. The circumstances without and the transition within.

Sun Ship

 

In the nighttime hours of August 26, 1965, John Coltrane and his classic quartet walked into an East Manhattan studio. That year Martin Luther King and hundreds of peaceful protestors were arrested in Selma for wanting voter registration fairness. Malcolm X was shot to death. The first massive contingent of US ground troops landed in Vietnam, and the United States would slaughter tens of thousands of people before the year ended using machine guns and missiles fired from military jets. In Los Angeles, unemployment rates for black Americans grew to levels greater than during the Great Depression, housing discrimination was bolstered by law, and Watts exploded in rioting after a violent encounter between police and a black man.

 

John Coltrane placed his mouth around his horn and blew. The sound that emerged, a passage of lyrical melody deeply tender and filled with solace, titled “Dearly Beloved,” lifted into the air. John embodied serenity and the path to it. People were dying and being denied their humanity by a power structure that required their destruction, and John never pretended this was not the case. The path to peace traveled through pain, not around it. People are dying right now as you read this, but life’s powerful play goes on, in all of its tragedy and real joy. Afterall, John’s baby boy Ravi had just been born, and John had assembled this collection of musicians to record at night because that day he was busy celebrating his first son, John Jr. 's, first birthday.

 

Attaining does not come without suffering, but it also arrives with beauty.

Attaining. Sun Ship. Ascent. Amen.

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John Coltrane 100: Live at the Village Vanguard Again

By David Cristol

 

So much has been written about John Coltrane and he's such a widely acknowledged and worshiped figure - one of jazz's top two most iconic artists, along with his once employer Miles Davis - that I don't feel I have anything new to bring to the table. Asked to comment on a favorite Coltrane album, however, I comply, for what it's worth. The first Coltrane album I purchased - a secondhand 1987 CD release - was Live at the Village Vanguard Again, recorded May 28, 1966. Prior to this, I had only heard Coltrane on Miles Davis' Kind of Blue.

 

 Village Vanguard Again was a punch in the gut, a puzzle for the mind and the record that won me over to free jazz for good, although it didn't happen overnight. I initially didn't understand what was going on, what to make of it. But was soon repeatedly attracted by the unhinged, torrential sounds unleashed on lengthy versions of "Naima" (a tender ballad with exquisite chords, here exuding rage and sorrow) and "My Favorite Things" (a distinctly lighthearted song from the movie "The Sound of Music", here given a terminally outrageous, or wonderfully out there treatment, according to your inclinations) interspersed with a six-minutes Jimmy Garrison bass solo. Each time I pressed the play button, I was unable to stop listening until the end of the total running time. The album held some arcane truth I couldn't live without anymore. It was music I had to sort out for myself, keep to myself, not music I could share with friends or relatives, let alone spin at parties... The line up had Alice Coltrane on piano, Pharoah Sanders on tenor sax and flute, Rashied Ali on drums, with Coltrane on tenor, soprano and bass clarinet. I was unaware there was a much-loved Coltrane "classic quartet" then, and that this was not it! Some of the Impulse! catalogue was being reissued at that time (the mid-90s), Sanders' "Tauhid" and "Karma" among the batch, both also expanding my musical outlook. Coltrane's albums and archival releases were dropping in quick succession, each new one a mandatory listen. I stumbled on small-priced, worn out LP copies of "Transition" and "Kulu Se Mama" (both recorded in 1965). I was hooked, although none of those albums, and no other Coltrane record I heard after the 1966 live set, had the same definitive, life-altering effect, or reached the same high as that first exposure to the work.

 

Could it be that I had started with a peak, a logical conclusion to what had come before? The music was

equal parts perplexing, intimidating, meaningful, dark, luminous, an unrelenting war machine yet brimming with sensitivity, not quite inviting if you were not ready to surrender to its revolutionary approach, but fully uplifting and cleansing if you were. 

 

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John Coltrane 100: John Coltrane in Detroit, June 1966

John Coltrane Memorial in Hamlet, N.C.
Photographer unknown.

By Stuart Broomer

If I can write anything meaningful about the music of John Coltrane, it may be about the context in which I came to experience his work live, in 1966, after listening intently to his work for four years on record and writing reviews of some of it as well. One’s juvenilia is embarrassing almost by definition, but that’s my particular gateway here to a world in which Coltrane was playing live a few feet in front of me. 13 months later he passed away. I write this hopefully to communicate something of the challenging world in which Coltrane made his music, that ever more intense, more radically free music, as testimony to his courage and vision as a great artist, as large a person as one might be in that world.

The John Coltrane Reference (Routledge, 2008) by Chris DeVito, Yasuhiro Fujioka, Wolf Schmaler and David Wild, edited by Lewis Porter (Routledge, 2008) is a monumental work of scholarship. After the introductions, there’s a Chronology of Coltrane’s life and career that runs to 357 large pages of fine print, followed by a Discography of 404 similarly sized pages in identical print, followed by 49 more pages of appendices, index, etc.

Very near the Chronology’s conclusion, there’s an entry for the John Coltrane Quintet’s appearance at Detroit’s Drome Lounge from June 17-26, 1966. The personnel, then consistent, is identified as Coltrane, tenor and soprano saxophones; Pharoah Sanders, tenor saxophone; Alice Coltrane, piano; Jimmy Garrison, bass; Rasheid Ali, drums, Friday to Sunday, matinees on Sunday. Reviewed in Coda (“John Coltrane Quintet – Drome Bar—Detroit” by Stu Broomer, Aug-Sept., 1966, pp.32 - 33). The review is represented by just a few of its sentences, but I’ll restrict myself to the Reference editor’s choices and their punctuation as well.

“This is probably the most moving working band in America (…) Tenor saxophonist Farrell “Pharoah” Sanders is now the most important soloist in the group. (…) When (Coltrane) first heard Albert Ayler in 1962, Coltrane told him he had heard himself playing like that in a dream once. (…). This band has recorded five times but nothing has been released. Perhaps Bob Thiele is hoping Coltrane will return to his old-time sanity. I for one hope he will not”. (Reprinted by permission of the author. All Rights Reserved).

What I’m trying to get at here about John Coltrane is an essential drive for expression and liberation, for liberation from every constraint to discover what’s real or what’s at least possible. If my memories from 60 years ago mean anything, they’re about the value of revolt and the horror of the norm, the judgmental restriction of cultural norms, in some places becoming more restrictive than anything I might have felt 60 years ago (a festival of liberalism by comparison). As a result, I want the music more intense, more personal, more unpredictable and I’ll stand up for it anywhere. But it is not without ambiguities.

As a teenager in the 1960s, I became obsessed with free jazz. It was a promise of freedom from restraint as well as constraint, an explosion of mixed emotions from great sorrow to ecstasy, in effect, perhaps, a promise too far. My absorption in jazz had begun in childhood with the 1957 TV special The Sound of Jazz and followed with the eventual LP. More television: I saw the Robert Herridge Presents episode with Miles Davis and John Coltrane in 1960 and loved it. My brief initial puzzlement and rapid-onset rapture with free jazz started when I picked up the September 1961 Metronome at the corner variety store. It included an epic essay on the jazz avantgarde by the then LeRoi Jones (I still have the essay somewhere — stapled together — the issue is gone). The writing was abstract, mannered and strange but also enchanting (I had already read a paperback of Kerouac’s Tristessa), its subject an arcane revolution. By the time I had purchased Ornette! and Free Jazz a few months later, Metronome had ceased to exist. I had only Down Beat, a magazine at the time sufficiently reactionary to condemn John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy as anti-jazz in a cover story. A few years later, circa 1965, I started writing for Coda, then Canada’s only jazz magazine.

If there’s a shock in that original account (in bowdlerized form), it’s likely the ranking of Sanders’ performance over Coltrane’s. Without digging for the original, I recall moments from that night when I was listening to the dense, tumultuous music and focussing on the brilliant screaming mayhem of the two saxophones, only to open my eyes and discover that John Coltrane was intently hitting a cowbell with a drumstick and Pharoah Sanders was the only person playing a saxophone. This isn’t a criticism of Coltrane. He was one of the greatest musicians who ever played jazz, but we all know now that he was seriously ill and still carrying a heavy musical load. Other memories: I already had certain knowledge that Jimmy Garrison’s solos, as memorably powerful as they were, depended heavily on the bass’s tuning in fourths, and the complex, droning solos dependent to a significant degree on the use of open strings (I was a bass player at the time). At one point in the evening, Coltrane spoke quietly to him (I was sitting at a piano-shaped stage, my ear within four feet of their mouths) specifying the key for one of his extended introductions. Garrison then looked upset, arguing for another key. I wasn’t surprised by the issue. I was surprised that it was happening about four years into Garrison’s tenure in the band.

Another and crucial surprise goes to the heart of the history of free jazz. My party (myself and three others, young musicians from Toronto, three Caucasian, one Japanese) were, in effect, insiders (however “out” we might feel in the Drome). We arrived early, conveying Rashied to the venue since we were staying in the same place, the Detroit Artists Workshop. Arriving early, we found a strange mix of conviviality and formality. Standing just inside the foyer, Jimmy Garrison was shaking hands with patrons as they entered. Even to a bass player, Garrison’s right hand (the plucking one) came as a shock: it felt like a bundle of sticks.

As popular, as great, as John Coltrane was, there was a fundamental divide in the audience about the shape his music was assuming, that was apparent from the time the music began (a shock perhaps influenced by the very music that Impulse was choosing to release). In essence there were two audiences. In the Drome it happened largely along racial lines, generally slightly older blacks on the one hand, and the white audience, many significantly younger, significantly suspended between hip and hippie. One audience looked disgruntled, offering spare, obligatory applause; the other clapped wildly with exclamatory shouts. Late in the evening, Coltrane broke into the opening phrase of his anthem, “My Favorite Things”, its bright coiling phrases instantly recognizable from the first note. It was amazing. With my back to the rest of the audience, I could actually feel the room lift, so strong was the shift in mood, comparable, for a brief instant, to the sun breaching a cloud cover. Within a couple of minutes, the sonic tumult had taken over again, and one could feel, even more intensely, the mood of the room dropping, to frustration and disappointment, perhaps, and most intensely, I felt, the abandonment, the sense of betrayal.

In total, (expanding on Coltrane's grimly disappointed Black audience) the trip seemed at times to be about race but things would get much darker, or should I say lighter (toxic metaphors lurk in our tongue) -- I had gone there with three other young Toronto musicians with whom I played. I had an association with John Sinclair (then in jail on drug charges -- not sure how current John's name is, but his greatest moment of celebrity came when imprisoned during Woodstock: Abby Hoffman interrupted the beginning of the Who's performance with a comment to the effect that Woodstock didn't mean shit while John Sinclair was in jail; then Pete Townsend hit Hoffman with his guitar for trying to take over the Who's stage). In John’s absence, his partner Leni Sinclair was running the Workshop.

I knew The Detroit Artists Workshop through shared performances between Detroit and Toronto, performances arranged by John Sinclair and the Toronto poet Victor Coleman of the Bohemian Embassy, a Toronto coffee house and performance space. Shared performances had included members of Detroit trumpeter Charles Moore’s MC5 with featured musicians that had included Marion Brown and Andrew Hill (through which I got to play bass with Andrew for a weekend among other playing associations). I had also published a poem and a record review in John's mimeo'd music journal Changes, which I think may have only gone to two (or maybe three) issues.

The Workshop was the epicentre of radical culture in Detroit whether the issue was music, race, drugs, economics or language. Later it was the spawning ground of the MC5, of "Up Against the Wall Motherfucker" fame, who John Sinclair managed. He later was a founder of the White Panther Party, a Black Panther support group. When I met the members of [Ahmed] a few years ago in Guelph, talk turned to Detroit. Some members were thinking about visiting Detroit, and Pat Thomas and I found ourselves reminiscing about John, whose poetry Pat had accompanied during an Amsterdam performance. John's contract, Pat recalled, required a private pot smoking loft.

A few days before our group arrived in Detroit, a young inter-racial couple from the Workshop had been violently attacked on the street by the sons of a former Mississippi sheriff whose property adjoined the Workshop at the rear. While we were staying there, the sheriff had invited the residents of the Workshop to a get together/ barbecue to make peace. None of the Workshop residents (naturally) wanted to go and Leni Sinclair asked our Toronto group (whom they were temporarily housing, four males sufficiently groomed to get across the border without close scrutiny) to go as their representatives. We accepted with a certain reluctance, though things (barbecue, blanched pleasantries) went civilly enough.

An hour later, on the way out of Detroit, we stopped at an ice cream outlet before we hit the border. The sons and their wives and children were there as well. On neutral ground, none of us acknowledged the existence of the other. 

Charles Tyler, Stuart Broomer + Perry Robinson, 1966 
©2014 Bill Copeland

AN AFTERWORD: 60 years on, I frequently listen to John Coltrane recordings, probably more than to any other historical jazz artist. I have the complete runs of the Prestige and Atlantic recordings and most of the Impulses on CD and the recordings with Monk and Miles Davis and isolated one-offs like Blue Train on Blue Note. My usual listening choices run the gamut from the Prestige and Atlantic recordings (especially Olé, the last of them, with Freddie Hubbard, Eric Dolphy and Art Davis added to the working quartet of McCoy Tyner, Reggie Workman and Elvin Jones). My listening range ends with one of my favorites, Meditations, with the “classic” quartet augmented by Rashied Ali and Pharoah Sanders. I hardly ever, if at all, listen to much that came later. Whether that’s because the actual experience of the last quintet live was enough – sufficiently intense -- to satisfy my need for that music, or that the music is so unstable or destabilizing that I don’t feel a need to hear it in its “frozen” form. The sole exception made among recordings of the last stage is Interstellar Space, the recording of four duets with Rashied Ali, recorded in February 1967, though it too is rarely played, singled out perhaps for the relative coherence of the music and the focus of its intensity.

© Stuart Broomer, 2026 

 

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John Coltrane 100: Exploring the Archives

John Coltrane - One Down, One Up: Live At the Half Note (recorded 1965, released 2005), My Favorite Things: Coltrane At Newport (recorded 1963 and 1965, released 2007), Offering: Live At Temple University (recorded 1966, released 2014), A Love Supreme: Live In Seattle (recorded 1965, released 2021), Evenings At the Village Gate: John Coltrane with Eric Dolphy (recorded 1961, released 2023)

 

By Lee Rice Epstein

1965 was remarkably transformative year in Coltrane’s history. Thankfully, through its ongoing archival releases, Impulse Records has continued to fill in the picture of how, as an artist, he continually pushed himself and his band, deeply and passionately giving his all at all times. One Down, One Up takes us right to March 26, 1965, where Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, and Elvin Jones play an astonishingly high-wire, high-energy “One Down, One Up” that runs nearly 30 minutes. The electricity crackling between players says exactly why Coltrane still matters, why he’s still adored, and why countless players of all kinds continue to study and revere him. The set’s recapitulation on the Newport stage months later (the second half of My Favorite Things: Coltrane At Newport), more clearly shows how the group was thinking about and working through their headiest ideas. That the Newport set was released with a 1963 performance featuring Roy Haynes in the drummer seat gives some additional dimensions to the quartet’s changes over time. Tyner and Jones moved on by the next year, while Garrison held down the Alice Coltrane, Rashied Ali, and Pharoah Sanders group. Reportedly, he didn’t play with them in the fall of

1966, when Coltrane led a phenomenal set at Temple University. Offering has been alternately reviled and lauded, cited by some as a polished but unnecessary bootleg for completists only. But, if one just takes a step back and considers Offering happening the same season as Albert Ayler’s seminal European tour—with the quintet of Ayler, Donald Ayler, Michel Samson, Bill Folwell, and Beaver Harris—and if one wants to get really interested in sympathetic wavelengths, you hear Coltrane singing reportedly for the first time ever during “Leo” on November 11, 1966, while Ayler was recorded doing the same on a performance of Sanders’s “Japan” the previous night, November 10, 1966. That Ayler later screamed during his memorial performance for Coltrane would be too on the nose if someone manufactured it. The two shared both intellectual and spiritual bonds, a beautiful thing we’re scarcely able to know of or understand even partly.

As the saying goes, it would have been enough to get these first three albums, but the 2020s has produced two seemingly impossible sessions: a live recording of “A Love Supreme,” also from 1965, and an unissued session with Eric Dolphy from 1961, featuring “Greensleeves” and “Africa.” What, truly can be said about Coltrane and Dolphy that doesn’t lead to a mountain of what-if or if-only hypotheticals? The hour-plus set is fiery and rich with ideas in motion. If someone told me this was 1963 or ’64, I wouldn’t doubt it. By ’61, both Coltrane and Dolphy were already well out in front of many contemporaries, and the mutual support demonstrated during their brief time together is beautifully realized here. On A Love Supreme (fascinatingly, recorded a couple days after Live In Seattle),Coltrane leads a kind of crossover group, with Tyner, Garrison, and Jones as the core quartet, joined on the tour by Sanders and Donald Garrett on bass, with Carlos Ward jumping in on sax at Coltrane’s invitation. Both Coltrane and Sanders add percussion along with Jones’s drumming, and if Offeringrepresents some kind of approaching end point in Coltrane’s art, the Seattle performance of “A Love Supreme” leads in the same direction, ever forward. 

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