John Coltrane: An Appreciation
As a very grown-up 18 year old (or so I thought), I traveled to New York City alone for the first time during my senior year in high school. Some 40 years later, I vaguely recall getting off a Trailways bus at the Port Authority and walking out into the teeming throngs on 42nd Street. I lunched on a freshly-sliced roast beef sandwich at an Irish pub near Madison Square Garden and washed it down with my inaugural English ale. I dropped some pocket change into the open guitar case of the first street musician I’d ever encountered before taking the subway uptown to Columbia University, where I (futilely) hoped to attend college, walked across the campus green to Low Memorial Library and later window-shopped along Broadway.
But what I most clearly remember from that day is gazing into the window of a hole-in-the-wall record store a few doors from the West End restaurant and seeing John Coltrane’s My Favorite Things album beckoning me inside.
This rookie didn’t know Coltrane from Colbert (as in Claudette, not Steven), but I was taken by the image of the intense looking black man blowing a horn on the dust jacket. I figured that if the title track was a cover of the Rodgers and Hammerstein waltz from The Sound of Music and the flip side included George Gershwin’s “Summertime,” which I knew from Porgy and Bess and adored, then these were good enough reasons to pay four or five bucks (I don’t remember exactly how much) to plunge into the great musical unknown.
Besides which, buying my first modern jazz album seemed like a very sophisticated thing to do for a young man on his own for the first time in the big city. I took the album out of its bag several times on the return trip, I’m sure as much as to try to impress my seatmates as to contemplate the man on the cover. I was cool!
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We celebrate today what would have been John Coltrane’s 82nd birthday with the usual outpouring of tributes and remembrances. This is mine.
Please click here to read more at Kiko’s House and here for an index with links to other appreciations.
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7 Responses to “John Coltrane: An Appreciation”
I've listened to John Coltrane's “My Favorite Things” many, many, many times. I never tire of it. Coltrane's interpretation of “My Favorite Things” just gets this tough dude all emotional. McCoy Tyner's piano work just bounces along the Coltrane's soloing like a great point guard in basketball handling the “rock”. I can talk about “My Favorite Things” for hours.
Although it was Miles Davis' “Bitches Brew” that got me into playing the piano/keyboard (I feel in love with fusion jazz), it was Coltrane's “My Favorite Things” that made me FULLY appreciate this wonderful sound that America created.
Much better, Shaun.
On a similar note — listening to Grover Washington, Jr., has been something I've enjoyed, particularly when driving through New York City (“A Secret Place” starts as I turn around the ramp off the Verazzano Narrows bridge heading north and east toward the Brooklyn Bridge).
LOL
T_Steel, sorry to hear your love of fusion jazz. IMHO it's mechanical/technical flavor is like light beer to a full bodied beer. I'm n “old fart” and grew bored with the likes of Return to Foreever and that ilk. Now the ECM label is how I enjoyed Chick Corea, over Al DiMeolas endless runs.
http://www.indiejazz.com/page.aspx?page=genre_d…
http://www.ecmrecords.com/Startseite/startseite…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Jarrett
Similar to T, it was Davis's “Bitches Brew” that really turned me on to jazz. My dad was a fan of big bands, and I liked them too. I hadn't heard anything like Bitches Brew before. Miles Davis opened up many musical doors for me. As I got into his older stuff (especially “Blue”, which I consider one of the best collections of music ever assembled) I got into be-bop, and Coltrain, Bird, Dexter Gordon, Thelonius Monk, and Brubeck. And fusion wasn't all bad. I liked Weather Report okay. And John McLaughlin. And dabblers like Tony Williams and Stanley Clarke.
Yeah I know “fusion jazz” causes the jazz heads to want to jump off a cliff. LOL!
T:
My “problem” with fusion is that as a body of work, it hasn't had the legs that other jazz genres have.
Weather Report and Mahavishnu Orchestra and some stuff by David Sancious, Stanley Clarke and Larry Coryell sound as fresh and exciting today as they did back in the day, but I can't say that about many other fusion bands and artists who experimented with fusion.
I blame my antipathy in part on the explosion of the synthesizer. Damned few people knew how to play them and it showed.
As a self-proclaimed “synthesizer wiz” (well that's what folks who know me say), I agree with your point about people not knowing how to play them. You don't play the synths like you play a regular piano. The synth tones are a world onto themselves. That's why the majority of the music that I performed was in the house, club, and electronica genres. I didn't get much love from jazz bands because I had such a synth slant (even though my background is jazz piano).
I'm a big bebop fan myself. Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Charlie Mingus, Fats Navarro, Monk, etc… Listening to Bud Powell right now.