№ 4
His Are a Few of Our Favourite Sounds
—The Globe and Mail, Dec. 22, 2007
Coltrane
The Story of a Sound
By Ben Ratliff
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 250 pages, $27.50
When saxophonist Branford Marsalis was in his first year at Boston’s prestigious Berklee College of Music, he dreamed of becoming a record producer. It was 1979. Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall had just been released. Despite his formal jazz training, Marsalis fancied himself a next-generation Quincy Jones, the jazz trumpeter turned master pop producer, initially with Off the Wall, then with its follow-up, Thriller.
Marsalis’s saxophone instructor, however, suggested another direction: He urged his young student to consider John Coltrane.
“I don’t want to listen to that stuff,” Marsalis remembers telling his teacher.
He’d been quite consciously avoiding Coltrane’s work. Everywhere Marsalis looked, he saw Coltrane clones and cookie-cutter technicians. “Listen to the way these guys sound,” he said, damning a whole segment of the scene, terrified of falling into a trap seemingly set by the great man’s legacy.
That inheritance — straddling reverence and fear and dutiful observance — is at the heart of Ben Ratliff’s excellent (and deceptively modest) Coltrane: The Story of a Sound. Ratliff, a critic with the New York Times, could easily have written something persnickety and parochial; music writers too often adore the equivalent of inside baseball. Instead, he’s turned a real jazz book into an immediate declaration of relevance. Coltrane is about artistic influence and American culture, and Ratliff uses perhaps the toughest matter at a critic’s disposal to tell this story: a musician’s sound.
“I mean ‘sound’ as it has long functioned among jazz players,” he writes, “as a mystical term of art … a full and sensible embodiment of [a musician’s] artistic personality.”
Hold on. Can you really explain — in words — how a musician’s tone “feels in the ear and later how it feels in the memory, as mass and as metaphor?”
It’s tough. But just consider for a moment Ratliff’s sharply cut prose. He traces Coltrane’s incremental evolution, album by album, from the “acrid grapeshot bursts and long tones” (with Sonny Rollins) to the “great twisted skirls of notes” (with Thelonious Monk), locating Coltrane’s tone in just a single image: “large and dry, slightly undercooked, and urgent.” This isn’t music theory; Ratliff’s sentences will resonate for specialists and general readers alike.
If jazz has always been fuelled by Great Man theory, John Coltrane holds an unbreakable spot in the pantheon. He was just 40 when he died from liver cancer in 1967, yet by then he’d already transcended simple adoration. The “spiritual awakening” he alluded to on the 1964 album A Love Supreme infused his late music with a mystical, visionary quality, despite its sometimes brutal avant-garde discord. He was, as Ratliff writes, a man of “unusual stamina, phlegmatic temperament and stoic charisma, who found ecstasy in his labour.” Four years after his death, the Church of St. John Coltrane was established in San Francisco. Its parishioners have been known to bake Coltrane’s image into their “daily bread.”
This tenor and sometimes soprano saxophonist’s influence took root in the mid-1950s, especially during his spells with Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk. Later, on records such as My Favorite Things and Crescent, Coltrane’s own quartet (with pianist McCoy Tyner and drummer Elvin Jones) re-imagined the way a small jazz ensemble might operate: fearsome and tender and unafraid of new musical forms. Between 1961 and 1964, Ratliff argues, Coltrane “sounds like the thing we know as modern jazz, just the way that Stravinsky sounds like the thing we known as modern classical music.”
But how did this happen? How did Coltrane, as Ratliff claims, become the most widely imitated jazz musician of the past half-century?
To answer this, Ratliff digs, drawing connections ever outward from Coltrane’s original work — in sources such as old radio shows, panel discussions and nearly 40 of his own interviews with musicians (Marsalis’s anecdote comes from one). Iggy Pop, “a Coltrane-head,” is here. So are Steve Reich and the Grateful Dead’s Phil Lesh. Jazz musicians in the club range from Roy Haynes, octogenarian drummer, to Marcus Strickland, 20-something saxophonist.
The jazz business may have faltered long ago, its aesthetic severed into “hundreds of microclimates,” as Ratliff contends. Perhaps that’s why Ratliff isn’t practising pure specialist history. He’s constantly broadening the discussion, bringing in, among others, Jane Jacobs (to show jazz’s decline as an “organic part of small-scale, local daily life”), Robert Lowell (on the sublime) and Susan Sontag (Against Interpretation).
Coltrane: The Story of a Sound is above all about influence and style and how it trickles down from one arts community to the next. It is a probing, questioning book that asks where jazz has gone, and where it’s going. And, ultimately, it throws you right back to the records. How else should you judge a book on music? After having Ratliff’s reading in your head, you’ll just want to listen.