There is such strength in his acting that the train of adjectives employed by French critic Gerard Bremond in a Jazz-Hot article on Coltrane hardly seems at all exaggerated. Bremond called his playing "exuberant, furious, impassioned, thundering."There is also, however, an extraordinary measure of sensitiveness in Coltrane's work. Part of the violence in lots of his acting is the madness of the search, the obsession Coltrane has to meet all he can see or would wish to hear - often all at once - and yet at the same sentence have his music, as he puts it, "more presentable." He said recently, "I'm worried that sometimes what I'm doing sounds like just academic exercises, and I'm trying more and more to get it sound prettier." Itseems to me he already succeeds often in accomplishing both his aims, as sections of this album demonstrate.This is the first set composed completely of Coltrane originals. John has been writing since 1948. He was natural in Hamlet, North Carolina, September 23, 1926. His mother played several instruments, and interested his son in music. At 15, John learned E-flat alto horn and clarinet, and in high school, he switched to tenor. He studied. in Philadelphia at the Granoff Studios and the Ornstein School of Music, became a master at 19, and played in a Navy band based in Hawaii from 1945-46. From 1947-49, he worked with Joe Webb (Big Maybelle was in the same entourage), King Kolax, Eddie Vinson and Howard McGhee. Charlie Parker had become a prevailing influence on his playing.
He was on alto with the Dizzy Gillespie band in 1949, and after Dizzy disbanded, John returned to Philadelphia, discouraged and stressful to rule his own way in music. From 1952-53, he was with Earl Bostic, and then played with Johnny Hodges, Jimmy Smith, and Bud Powell.He first joined Miles Davis from 1955-56. Miles regards Coltrane and Rollins as the two major modern tenors. "I ever liked Coltrane." Miles said recently. "When he was with me the start time, people used to assure me to attack him. They said he wasn't playing anything. They also used to order me to get rid of Philly Joe Jones. l know what I want though. I also .don't see this mouth of Coltrane being hard to understand. What he does, for example, is to meet five notes of a chord and so keep changing it around, trying to see how many different ways it can sound. It's like explaining something five different ways. And that voice of his is affiliated with what he's doing with the chords at any given time."Miles encouraged Coltrane and also stimulated his harmonic thinking. In price of composition as well, John feels he's learned from Miles to make certain that a call "is in the correct tempo to be its most effective. He too made me go farther into trying different modes in my writing." After two days with Miles? there was a stop in 1957 with Thelonious Monk that Coltrane found unusually challenging. "I ever had to be alive with Monk," he once said, "because if you didn't keep aware all the sentence of what was passing on, you'd suddenly feeling as if you'd stepped into an empty elevator shaft."Coltrane worked briefly with a Red Garland quintet, then rejoined Miles, and has been with him ever since. He has nothing of his own in the Davis book at present, but he has devoted more and more of his metre to composing. He is generally self-taught as a writer, and generally starts his turn at the piano. "I sit there and run over chord progressions and sequences, and eventually, I usually get a song - or songs - out of each little musical problem. After I've worked it out on the piano, I then produce the song further on tenor, trying to extend it harmonically." Coltrane tries to explain what drives him to keep stretching the harmonic possibilities of improvisation by saying, "I feel like I can't see but so often in the ordinary chords we usually have going in the accompaniment. I only own to get more of a blueprint. It may be that sometimes I've been trying to draw all those extra progressions into a structure where they don't fit, but this is all something I take to continue running on. I believe too that my rhythmic approach has changed unconsciously during all this, and in time, it too should get as pliable as I'm trying to have my harmonic thinking."In her analysis of Coltrane's style in the November and December, 1959, issues of The Jazz Review, pianist Zita Carno pointed out that Coltrane's range "is something to wonder at: a good three octaves upward from the last note obtainable on the horn (concert A-flat).There are a full many tenor players who make an extended range, but what sets Coltrane apart from the balance of them is the equation of speciality in all registers, which he has been capable to get through long, hard practice. His voice is but as clear, full and willing in the topmost notes as it is low in the bottom." She describes his look as "a consequence of the peculiar combination of mouth and reed he uses plus an extremely tight embouchure" and calls it "an incredibly powerful, resonant and sharply penetrating sound with a spine-chilling quality."
Of the tunes, Coltrane says of Giant Steps that it gets its name from the fact that "the bass note is sort of a loping one. It goes from minor thirds to fourths, kind of a lopsided pattern in line to moving strictly in fourths or in half-steps." Tommy Flanagan's relatively spare solo and the way it uses space as function of its construction is an effective contrast to Coltrane 's intensely crowded choruses.Cousin Mary is named for a cousin of Coltrane who is so called Mary. The call is an effort to draw her. "She's a very earthy, folksy, swinging person. The flesh is riff-like and although the changes are not conventional blues progressions, I tried to keep the spirit of the blues."Countdown's changes are based in great role on Tune Up, but against that, Coltrane uses essentially the same succession of minor thirds to fourths that characterizes Giant Steps. His solo here, and in the others as well, illustrates Zita Carno's point that Coltrane, for all he's trying to express in any given solo, has a singular sense of form.Syeeda 's Song Flute has a particularly attractive line and is named for Coltrane's 10-year-old daughter. "When I ran across it on the piano," he says, "It reminded me of her because it sounded like a happy, child's song."The tender Naima - an Arabic name - is likewise the list of John's wife. "The melody is built," Coltrane notes, "on suspended chords over an Eb pedal tone on the outside. On the inside- the channel - the chords are suspended over a Bb pedal tone." Here again is demonstrated Coltrane's more than ordinary melodic imagination as a composer and the deep emotional intensity of all his work, writing and playing.There is a "cry" - not at all necessarily a desperate one - in the form of the best of the jazz players. It represents a man's being in thorough contact with his feelings, and being able to let them out, and that "cry" Coltrane certainly has.Mr. P.C. is Paul Chambers who provides excellent back and thoughtful solos on the book as a solid and whom Coltrane regards as "one of the greatest bass players in jazz. His acting is beyond what I could say about it. The bass is such an important instrument, and has so often to do with how a radical and a soloist can best use that I look very fortunate to give had him on this date and to have been capable to work with him in Miles' band so long." Tom Dowd's engineering, incidentally, has caught Paul's sound as good as it's always been heard on records, and for an insight into the grandness of the bass's function, it might be valuable to go through the show once, paying attention principally to Paul. Also worth noting is the steady, generally discreet drumming of Arthur Taylor and Jimmy Cobb throughout.What makes Coltrane one of the most interesting jazz players is that he's not apt to ever stop looking for ways to complete what he's already developed and likewise to go beyond what he knows he can do. He is thoroughly involved with plunging as far into himself and the expressive possibilities of his horn as he can. As Zita Carno wrote, "the just matter to require from John Coltrane is the unexpected." I'd qualify that dictum by adding that one quality that can ever be expected from Coltrane is intensity. He asks so often of himself that he can thereby bring a great plenty to the hearer who is also willing to try relatively unexplored territory with him.
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