By Neil Tesser
I never had the chance to ask him, but I'd like to know what went through Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson's head the first time he heard the 1960s recordings of John Coltrane - not only such works as Ascension and Meditations, now considered landmarks of avant-garde jazz, but also the comparatively straightforward Crescent, and even the still-in-development modal playing that Coltrane had earlier unveiled on My Favorite Things.
After all, Coltrane's explosive reinvention of "My Favorite Things," unexpectedly borrowed from a smash Broadway show, came barely a dozen years after his debut in Vinson's blues band, in Philadelphia at the end of 1948. A dozen years is not so very long a time; Vinson would still have remembered the slim young alto saxophonist who spent a few months playing twelve-bar blues (and bop lines as well) in his busy touring band. Coltrane left after a bit to work in Dizzy Gillespie's orchestra (still playing alto), but ended up back in Philadelphia, playing tenor in various rhythm-and-blues bands to support himself. He even "walked the bar"; that is, he honked his way through sax solos while traversing the service area of local nightclubs, a tried-and-true practice of the r-and-b trade. He may have spent his free hours practicing complicated exercises, and hosting jam sessions to further his knowledge of new sounds, but in those days he made his living playin' the blues.
The music for which Coltrane has attained his immortality - "My Favorite Things," A Love Supreme, his poignant ballads and his multiphonic-riddled polemics - stands a far cry from the tavern entertainments he performed with Vinson. But I've got to think that Cleanhead would have heard the similarities: the drenching intensity, the throaty passion, the relentless effort to use the most practiced means to convey the most immediate emotion. In truth, Coltrane's music never lost the influence of the first arena in which he worked, and it retained plenty of the spirit; his very sound, with its rich, earthy broadness, told the tale.
So in a way, the title of this album seems ridiculously redundant. "Coltrane plays the blues?" When didn't he?
Coltrane not only played blues (or at least played with blues feeling) throughout his career; he also wrote a raft of them. Besides the six blues lines found here, a great many of Coltrane's most memorable melodies fall into the category: "Slowtrane" and "Blue Train," "Cousin Mary," "Equinox," and "Mr. P.C.", "Bessie's Blues," "Impressions," even the free-for-all "Chasin' the Trane." (And should you still doubt that Coltrane identified strongly with the blues, consider how many of those titles refer to himself or those close to him.) Coltrane gravitated toward the blues, and even more telling, his imagination ran wild with them: comparing the songs named above, you can't help but notice the variety he could achieve with the same chords and even with melodies that traced similarly scalar contours.
McCoy Tyner, his pianist and soulmate, had joined Coltrane shortly before these sessions, and he agrees that his boss's blues sensibility was genuine and intrinsic to his music. "Remember," Tyner says now, "he was really deep-seated in the Baptist experience as well as playing in all those r-and-b bands, and he was deeply influenced by [blues guitarist] T-Bone Walker. . . . When we went in to do this album, I'm not sure we even had a rehearsal. We may have, but we were playing a lot of that stuff on the bandstand at the time.
"But not for much longer," Tyner points out. Coltrane, whose legendary artistic restlessness bordered on obsession, had already begun the transition to a more experimental music, one that would reduce the clutter of chord-running in favor of modally based improvisation and prairie-vast harmonic vamps - even as he played these blues lines to the hilt.
Tyner recalls something else about the recording of this music: it took place during a marathon recording session that produced material for more than one album. "It was normal for him to go in the studio and do two albums at one time. It kind of shocked me; I never saw anyone do that before," says Tyner, who - then just 21 years old - had only recorded with the Art Farmer-Benny Golson Jazztet. "But John liked doing that."
In fact, Coltrane made three visits within a five-day period to the Atlantic Studios in New York in the fall of 1960. The first came October 21, followed by a marathon session October 24 and a shorter one October 26. These sessions yielded some 19 separate pieces (and a handful of alternate takes), which Atlantic divvied up onto no less than three albums: My Favorite Things, Coltrane Plays The Blues, and eventually Coltrane's Sound. But that one didn't arrive till the summer of 1964 - by which time the saxist, having already moved from Atlantic to Impulse Records, was recording the highly regarded Crescent and beginning to ideate "A Love Supreme."
Coltrane had undertaken long record sessions before, amassing material that might show up on two or more albums, when he worked for Prestige in the 1950s. But this was different - three complete LPs worth of material laid in less than a week - and one has to wonder how much it had to do with Coltrane's excitement about his new quartet. For not only had Tyner come aboard to help steer the music in a new direction (replacing Steve Kuhn in the middle of a long summertime engagement at the Jazz Gallery); so had drummer Elvin Jones, cementing what would become one of the most impressive and influential musical organizations of the 20th century. The band now lacked only bassist Jimmy Garrison, who would replace the less adventurous Steve Davis about a year later. But at the piano and at the drums, Coltrane had installed the vital helpmates he needed to spring his music from the structural constraints of hard bop - limitations he had stretched to bursting on the composition "Giant Steps."
Coltrane had in fact kept his eye on both Tyner and Jones, waiting for them to get free from other obligations. In light of that, the recording sessions of October 1960 can be seen as an intense celebration to start the partnership off right - a honeymoon, almost. This assessment may sound fanciful, but it rings a little truer when you read the comment made by Billy Higgins in relation to his being drummed out of the Coltrane band. Coltrane had hired Higgins for a club date in Denver with his drummer at the time, Pete LaRoca, unable to make the gig and his first choice, Elvin Jones, busy with a previous commitment; but when Jones suddenly became available, Coltrane flew him out to meet the band, where he joined and subsequently replaced Higgins on stage. The jilted drummer understood the situation perfectly: "He was supposed to work with Elvin before," Higgins later told Coltrane biographer Lewis Porter. "That was just like a marriage, you know."
Tyner, the other member of this "family," concurs. "We had finally found the right drummer we needed in Elvin," he recalls today. Speaking of Pete LaRoca, Tyner praises his playing but admits he was "a little overbearing on stage. Elvin was as strong a player as LaRoca, and he was still a great listener. John had told me about him - I had heard of Elvin - and John said, 'Yeah, Elvin's the guy.' He was very musical; he listened and responded so musically to what was going on."
No surprise, then, that Coltrane dedicated the album's opening track to the newest member of his band. "Blues To Elvin" has an unremarkable theme played at a relatively relaxed tempo; the lack of either melodic or rhythmic urgency in the tune encourages the listener to focus on Jones's storytelling accompaniment, along with Tyner's mocha-rich chords. The slow gospel allusion at the beginning of the tune quickly gives way to music better suited to a lazy Sunday afternoon than a morning in church, and it offers Coltrane's fans their first glimpse of the "Elvin lope," the deceptively indolent, hypnotic shuffle-beat - in four-four time, but infused with the swinging sing-song of waltz-time - that Jones could and regularly did create by stacking the most basic rhythms and counter-rhythms in previously unheard layers.
Interestingly, the first side of the original LP - "Blues To Elvin" and the next two tunes - compose a sort of primer on the "Elvin lope"; each track increases the tempo, so by the time we hear the bustling "Blues To You," the album has gradually brought us up to speed with regard to Jones's method. "Blues To Bechet" pays homage to Sidney Bechet of New Orleans, the first great master of the soprano saxophone, and one of the three first genius soloists in jazz (along with Armstrong and Hines). It of course features the soprano saxophone, an instrument not only new to Coltrane at the time of this recording, but also to most of his listeners; in 1961, when My Favorite Things arrived in record shops and introduced Coltrane's use of the horn, only Steve Lacy had sought to bring the soprano horn into the modern-jazz era. And "Blues To You" dispenses with Tyner's piano to create a power trio that throws even more of the spotlight on Jones - who responds with his busiest, most complex accompaniment of the date. (The opening phrase of the tune itself is a marvelous reduction of Coltrane's scalar approach to improvisation; his massive, joyous solo flows effortlessly into a series of tenor-drum exchanges.)
"Mr. Day," the best known theme of the album, was described in the original album notes as being in an "Eastern-minor" vein; it would be more accurate to say that Coltrane casts the melody, with its wide-open intervallic leaps, in the Mixolydian mode. (Western composers often employ minor scales to suggest the exotica of foreign lands, but most minor scales have a half-step between the seventh and eighth notes of the octave. The Mixolydian mode actually eschews that half-step and replaces it with an unsettling whole step - and thus sounds notably non-"eastern.") The tenor solo rocks and roils against the chattering propulsion that Jones establishes and maintains with such consistent variety.
On "Mr. Syms," Coltrane returns to the soprano, but he uses a warmer tone than on "Blues To Bechet" and couches it in cushiony piano harmonies; the theme thus becomes a sketch in pastels rather than a splashy portrait in oils, and Tyner plays a pretty solo that fills the frame; Coltrane's one-chorus return, between the piano solo and the theme restatement, reaches briefly for the Indian music he had begun studying. The song is a simple minor blues, a form that, as the original notes point out, Coltrane had often used in the past (and would often use in the future). But it is not a "minor blues with a bridge . . . quite similar to 'Summertime'," as the notes also claimed. The album concludes with the irrepressible "Mr. Knight," another minor blues, another simple theme, but this one set against a bouncy rhythm derived from West Indian and perhaps even African sources. Jones's masterful juggling of accents foreshadows the powerful imagery he would later bring to such masterpieces as "Afro-Blue," "Brazilia," and the opening movement of A Love Supreme.
Coltrane returns to the tenor for "Mr. Knight," another minor blues, and the juxtaposition of these two songs allows one to hear the distinctly different ways in which he approached each horn at this stage of his career. On soprano, his solos have a flightier quality; on tenor, they sound more solid. The most obvious explanation, of course, suggests that the higher horn has a natural buoyancy, while the earthy growl of the tenor gives it more gravity. But listen to the actual notes Coltrane plays. He may have incorporated these timbral stereotypes into his playing, but the phrases themselves have a different import on the two horns: his solos skitter more on soprano, and it is only on tenor that he locks into the kind of galvanizing content that had made him famous.
As the 60s unfolded, Coltrane would narrow this divide between the emotional impact of his horns, although he always retained a distinction: in his most epic solos the soprano became an exotic, snake-charming mesmerist, while the tenor bulldozed conservatism and hypocrisy in search of a new land, a new spirit. But in the autumn of 1961, he had other fish to fry. The Coltrane Quartet, three-fourths complete at the time of this recording, had begun its historic rise, and had also turned the corner in Coltrane's music, transitioning from the expressive verticality of "Giant Steps" to the more elongated, long-limbed lyricism that would define his role in the avant-garde. It can come as no surprise that to do so, he engaged the material he'd known longest and best - the blues.
Neil Tesser
author, The PLAYBOY Guide To Jazz (Plume)
Reprinted with permission from Rhino Records. Copyright ÃÂÃÂÃÂé Neil Tesser.
