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. Ascensionput 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?