Thread

Previously unheard recordings of John Coltrane, captured by Frank Tiberi

108 points · 44 comments · gregsadetsky

Slow_Hand · 1790543847 · focus · HN ↗
Career musician here. My dirty secret is that Coltrane doesn’t resonate with me at all. Not one iota; despite me being a huge jazz fan.
For my taste, his harmonic language tips over the threshold where it goes from being viscerally enjoyable to a more heady, academic exercise. It all feels like a blur to me. Maximal in it’s vocabulary, and yet flat in it’s overall effect. It’s often so dense that it ends up feeling “same-y” and grey to me. Like Schoenberg’s serial music.
Maybe my impression here comes from the fact that by the time I began listening to him in the mid 2000’s an entire school of derivative jazz players had long since developed upon and retroactively made his innovations feel far more common (to no fault of his own). It’s that flavor of jazz where you get the impression that the players are enjoying this way more than the audience. It’s not for me.
1. jamiek88 · 1790544177 · focus · HN ↗
  Seinfeld effect but for jazz! Seems very possible to me.
2. pvab3 · 1790546514 · focus · HN ↗
  <a href="https://youtu.be/Zu2fm8vmHIk" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/Zu2fm8vmHIk
3. na1026 · 1790547038 · focus · HN ↗
  > For my taste, his harmonic language tips over the threshold where it goes from being viscerally enjoyable to a more heady, academic exercise. It all feels like a blur to me. Maximal in it’s vocabulary, and yet flat in it’s overall effect. It’s often so dense that it ends up feeling “same-y” and grey to me. Like Schoenberg’s serial music.
  I felt exactly like this about Coltrane for years, which I think now was a consequence of primarily being exposed to Coltrane via his work with the first great Miles Davis quintet. Coltrane's albums as band leader come a bit later in his career and he drops a lot of the Art-Tatum-translated-to-sax "sheets of sound" approach in favor of a more lyrical yet still unorthodox style. Any of the late-50s or early-60s albums with Coltrane as band leader and McCoy Tyner on piano are really very good. From my perspective Coltrane had the fire and competitiveness as well as the pop sensibility of a player like Sonny Rollins and the thoroughly studied devotion to "the new thing" of players like Eric Dolphy.
  Anyway all that is to say that I heard screeds like this from Coltrane devotees for years and there is really something amazing there. The albums with Coltrane as leader are quite good and worth giving another chance if you're in the mood to listen to some good jazz recordings.
4. dharma1 · 1790547441 · focus · HN ↗
  Which era Trane are you talking about? The man went through at least 4 major shifts. I’m guessing you are talking about Giant Steps and the later avant garde years?
  He did a lot of stuff too which is not dense at all and very approachable - Naima, A Love Supreme, My Favorite Things, Kind of Blue with Miles, a lot more, enjoyable, classic albums.
  Dig deeper
  1. breezybottom · 1790564308 · focus · HN ↗
    It's all subjective. The idea that none of these are dense is pretty bonkers to me. Some people don't find hard-bop to be approachable. Kind of Blue is really more the exception to his typical output.
  2. rayval · 1790580983 · focus · HN ↗
    the songs you mention are ones that I've played time and again for 40+ years. Never get tired of them.
    Giant Steps is more abstract but still worth dipping into once in a while.
    Here is a musical analysis of Giant Steps (basically the Circle of Fifths):
    <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62tIvfP9A2w" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62tIvfP9A2w
5. madaxe_again · 1790547667 · focus · HN ↗
  Not a career musician - just a musician, pianist.
  I love Coltrane - I find the complexity lyrical, like Art Tatum or Django Reinhardt in their respective disciplines - or if you throw back, Liszt, Chopin, the other bloody show-offs who could sing with an instrument. I dunno. It talks to me, but I guess at the end of the day it’s all just taste.
  1. na1026 · 1790547811 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm not a saxophonist but I believe that a lot of Coltrane's rapid scale traversal approach comes from transcribing or appropriating Art Tatum pieces for the saxophone.
    madaxe_again · 1790701325 · focus · HN ↗
    Oh totally - but if you listen closely to Tatum you find Rachmaninov hiding in there, occasionally a little Chopin riff - it’s turtles all the way down.
6. viccis · 1790552295 · focus · HN ↗
  Also a jazz musician and I find that it depends on what time frame you're talking about. I like him a lot up to the very early 60s, and then he loses me around this point. I prefer the direction other hard bop players took at this time. Coltrane benefited greatly imo from Tyner's rock solid comping and Jones' aggressive drum work. His sax soloing got a bit too interested in dense excess, often fairly inscrutable even before he drifted into free jazz. Opinions absolutely vary on this point though. I think it still sounds good even if it's not what I reach for.
  >an entire school of derivative jazz players had long since developed upon and retroactively made his innovations feel far more common
  The worst of this to me is at straightahead jazz jams when sax players run out of ideas or lose the form and then just start honking lol
7. CPLX · 1790557929 · focus · HN ↗
  I'm also a jazz musician.
  There's no accounting for taste. There's lots of stuff that I would say the same thing about that everybody loves that I don't like.
  With that said, I don't see how you can listen to My Favorite Things or Love Supreme and not just find yourself in utter awe.
8. shermantanktop · 1790564653 · focus · HN ↗
  Agree. There’s a Berklee player stereotype and later Coltrane is like that. It’s all about his drive to do his thing, in his own special way, nothing to do with his audience, and only a little about the other players.
9. belZaah · 1790568103 · focus · HN ↗
  Same. It’s a tiring exercise keeping up with what is going on in Giant Steps. I marvel at the intricacies I can’t mostly even begin to understand but it doesn’t speak to me musically the way eg Watercolors or Kind of Blue or Take Five does.
10. qmr · 1790580051 · focus · HN ↗
  Moments notice!? Nothing?
11. globnomulous · 1790581276 · focus · HN ↗
  If the does nothing for you or feels like an inaccessible academic exercise, your ear must be very, very different from mine: <a href="https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=saN1BwlxJxA" rel="nofollow">https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=saN1BwlxJxA
12. seabre · 1790605371 · focus · HN ↗
  His Ballads album is probably one of the best albums ever made by anybody. It got dunked on by critics originally because they thought he was ditching his sheets of sound stuff from Giant Steps for more commercial appeal.
  If you don't own it you should. Preferably the deluxe edition with his Greensleeves takes.
  As far as his sheets of sound stuff, I think Sun Ship is ridiculously underrated and is a bridge between his classic quartet and Pharoah Sanders/free jazz era stuff. Really really good if you've never listened to it.
13. m463 · 1790623633 · focus · HN ↗
  It's ok, I resonate more with roscoe p myself.

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