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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.
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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
