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Topic: Players & Bands / Trane: An Alternate Take

It’s hard to skim the foam from the brew washing over pronouncements about the famous and the famed, but that evaluational chore presumes upon us big time in the matter of John Coltrane. It may be near-heretical to declare it, but I’ll dare to suggest that much of the estimation accorded Trane scores high – all too high – on the hype scale, and that perhaps the time has come to drop a counterweight or two on the other side of the debate, in the interests of a prudent ballast. There – I said it.

Don’t get me wrong; Trane did lots of weird and wonderful things. His conception was always very different, even in the early work (think of Tenor Madness, and the juxtaposition of Trane’s seat-of- the-pants, careening uncertainties of phrase to Sonny Rollins’ magisterial, if whimsical, command), he had monstrous chops, and he never met a chord change – or a tempo – he didn’t like. On a recent flight from London to New York, I happened upon an onboard channel sounding a host of tracks from Miles Davis’ Prestige sessions, a find that had me smiling through most of the trip as a result – and much of that was Trane’s doing (e.g., Four and Well You Needn’t). But there are deep and abiding shortcomings in Trane’s take(s) on his music – even if most of his listeners refuse to hear them.

Trane’s devotees too often conflate his intensity with improvisatory brilliance, or perhaps rather assume that the one flows ineluctably from the other (and you know what Yeats said about passionate intensity). They fail to hear the ways in which his conception – intensity notwithstanding – far too often straitens his material, and ultimately stiffens his solos. Much has been made about Trane’s deployment of “sheets of sound”; but apart from whatever the metaphor might actually mean (the coinage wasn’t his, of course; it was presumably Ira Gitler’s), the fact is that Trane evangelized an agenda that, by dint of its fierce arpeggiations and dense, asymmetrically-bunched phrases, inclined his music toward stasis.

The vertical tendency in Coltrane – that is, the suggestion of the chordal and the synchronic in an instrument dedicated to speaking in a single voice – bulks very large in his weltanschauung, and not always to the good. It would rather miss the point to acknowledge that Trane played “fast”; after all, Charlie Parker played fast too, but to a far different effect. If I’m not pushing my own metaphors too hard, Bird’s technique drove the music forward; Trane’s stacked it upwards. And that program far too often did not serve the music well.

Too often Coltrane regarded tunes as a spate of chord changes, each to be processed as a discrete, disconnected challenge (e.g., the So What solo from that 1959 TV show that’s all over the internet; but there are many examples, especially from 1957 on – compare, for example, the 1956 Round Midnight Bye-Bye Blackbird with the 1958 Newport rendition). As a result, for example, he was a generally weak ballad player (two exceptions – Monk’s Mood on the newly discovered Carnegie Hall date, which nevertheless bares the same frailties in other tracks, and the short exposition on Blue in Green). His dull work on the duet with Duke Ellington (yes, he may have recorded that album under some duress, but still…) demonstrates the infirmities in his melodic conception (evident all over the place, in fact) and a telling lack of syntactical deftness. Listen to the obscure, but very nicely conceived, Michel LeGrand chart on Jitterbug Waltz (about 1958) and compare Trane’s heavy-handed, graceless chorus there to Phil Woods’ far nimbler bounding over the changes. Or more famously, get back to the work with Miles. Truth to be told, and vox populi to the contrary, Cannonball Adderley consistently plays Trane under the table on the Davis sessions (I told you I was a heretic). Cases in point: listen to the Milestones album, and how Cannonball burns through the speedy blues Dr. Jackle with bracing fecundity, while Trane slogs across the changes in pedestrian sequentials; listen how the altoist jumps all over Trane when they trade choruses. Compare Trane’s forced, segmented treatment of the heavily altered blues Sid’s Ahead to the confident alacrity Cannonball brings to the chords (and one could say precisely the same thing about their respective outings on Green Dolphin Street, though it isn’t on that album). Consider Cannonball’s glorious Milestones solo in the context of Trane’s; the former leaps at the tune and grabs its changes (such as they are) with electrifying buoyancy, while Trane’s turn is by far the more reactive, waiting for the changes come to him in isolated bursts. And so on.

Now back to the intensity thing. The Coltrane group of the 60s – driven by a monotonic, hammer-over-the-head impulsion – simply could not compare to the Miles Davis quintet of the same vintage, a far more protean, craftier, downright nastier crew. Sorry, but Trane’s work on the famed Impressions – both the well-known long version and the shorter one posted on Coltrane.com – just can’t compete with, say, Wayne Shorter’s chilling, far more variegated solo on So What on the Miles in Berlin album. Same modal auspices – very different outcomes. And the wrongheaded apotheosis of A Love Supreme – hardly a masterwork, as some seem to believe (his fiercely cogent solo on Crescent two years earlier surpasses anything on the album) – mistakes theological ardor for great art. I can’t help thinking that Trane was cut some serious slack on this effort; intoning “A Love Supreme” 17 times isn’t quite the inspirational hallmark one might hear in it.

So perhaps it’s time for a bit of reassessment. Coltrane was a powerful, different, but flawed player whose virtues should be carefully appreciated in tandem with his liabilities. I love a lot of his stuff, but too often his conceptual frailties catch up with him – and discernment, properly applied, won’t shrink from that conclusion. Just one guy’s opinion.

Thanks,
Abbott Katz

Copyright 2007 Abbott I. Katz