John Coltrane...Ascension...

My apologies for the lack of posts – but I have been whacked with a double whammy – health problems and domestic upheavals – my daughter is moving into a new house in town. Next week, things should fall back into place. Hopefully...

On y va...

John Coltrane's 'Ascension' was recorded in 1965, a few years after Ornette Coleman's 'Free Jazz,' and followed the altoist in several other ways: minimal ensemble composed linking sections, a two man bass team on board - and the presence of Freddie Hubbard, who never quite seems comfortable with his surroundings - but is prepared to try and follow the charismatic sax pied pipers where they lead. But Coleman's work was played by a doubled quartet which included two drummers. Here, there are two more musicians added - and only Elvin Jones in the boiler room. Only? What a performance – one of his greatest, driving the sprawling, wailing ensembles and soloists onwards with a relentless and fiery barrage of polyrythms that never lets up. The true star of the day? He roots the band in the way that Billy Higgins and Ed Blackwell did – the beat never fractures completely into abstraction but has a definable pulse - however wayward it seems at times.

Another contrast? Unwind the words... Coleman's title was to define a style of improvisation within jazz (for better or for worse) at the head of the sixties and the phrase could be further explored by splitting it and considering the word 'free.' Adjective? Or verb? Describing this new music – or exhorting musicians to 'free' jazz – from what had been perceived by many as the fag end of bebop. Whatever... Ornette's freedoms had philosophical implications way beyond the music that imply new ways of living and coming together. Free jazz and free yourself and others at the same time. But in this world, maybe... Coltrane's epic has vivid overtones of that spirituality which flows from his own voyage of inner discovery. Yet this is a fiery uplifting – a questing, questioning movement. Whatever inner peace he found this side of the grave, so much of his later work has an urgent feel to it – as if Kierkegaard had come back as a tenor saxophonist. And behind that again – although far transcending its inherently sectarian significance - is the 'Ascension' that is at the centre of Christianity - victory over death by the risen Christ. I have always heard Coltrane's sound as hard-wired into the pentecostal fire music of the Afro-American churchs – even when he takes in the Oriental/Asian influences with their implications of more quiescent philosophies they have to battle with that wild searching voice that floods his timbral spaces. Maybe this tension where one would expect to find peace is precisely set up by the dynamics inherent in crossing east and west via a distant African heritage. Beyond these speculations... no listener can come idly to this music. You either reject it – or embrace the wild ride...

Hallelujah...

I intend in my usual perverse and elliptical fashion to post Ornette's early masterpiece out of historical sequence... hopefully very soon...


John Coltrane
(John Coltrane: tenor Saxophone;Freddie Hubbard:trumpet; Dewey Johnson:trumpet; Marion Brown: alto saxophone: John Tchicai:alto saxophone; Pharoah Sanders: tenor saxophone: Archie Shepp: tenor Saxophone; McCoy Tyner: piano; Art Davis: bass; Jimmy Garrison: bass; Elvin Jones: drums).

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Ascension (take 1)

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