6 two concepts going

Coltrane ran as far as he could in one direction, then started running quickly in another.

By late 1963, he didn’t want to keep playing the same tunes; his band book started to change. Also, as we have seen, he didn’t want to be controlled by harmonic exercises anymore.

These were not the only changes in his life. Coltrane had left his wife, Naima, in the summer of 1963, and shortly thereafter was living with Alice McLeod, a pianist from Detroit who played bebop and had studied informally with Bud Powell in Paris. They had met soon after she moved to New York in 1962, and made an instant connection. In the summer of 1964, John and Alice moved to a house in suburban Dix Hills, Long Island. They were raising Michelle, Alice’s four-year-old daughter from her first marriage, and John Jr., their newborn and first child together.

He had peace, and time to practice continually, on many instruments: besides tenor and soprano saxophone in the house, he had Eric Dolphy’s flutes, bagpipes, a harp, various drums, and an acoustic guitar. He was still using charts and graphs, based on math and astrology and architecture, to inspire composition; he had even found ways to derive song from the shape of a cathedral. They had few visitors. “He was the type of person, he didn’t care for socializing,” Alice Coltrane said later. “And I don’t care for socializing, so that’s sort of the way it was.”

Coltrane was songwriting, using this new method of composing to the written word. Ultimately he was ready to spread out—both in terms of building a bigger group, and by compounding his interest in religion and philosophy, so that it affected the structure and style of his music.

Alice Coltrane has said that on one day in the late summer of 1964 he came downstairs in his new house “like Moses coming down from the mountain,” holding the complete outline for a new suite. No other Coltrane music would be so formally prepared.

A manuscript showing this preliminary musical arrangement for A Love Supreme surfaced in late 2004, when Alice Coltrane (they married in Juárez, Mexico, in October 1965) offered it to Guernsey’s Auction House to be sold. It indicated, among other things, that Coltrane felt the piece could be arranged for a group of nine: tenor saxophone and “one other horn,” piano, trap drums, two basses, two conga players, and one timbales player.

Other markings on the paper demonstrate his thoughts: toward the end of part one, he noted, a saxophone solo with quartet accompaniment should lead into “all drums multiple meters and voices changing motif in Emi ‘A Love Supreme.’” Later, toward the ending: “Make ending attempt to reach transcendent level with orchestra … rising harmonies to a level of blissful stability.” At the bottom of the page he writes: “last chord to sound like final chord of Alabama.”

Apart from creating a nine-piece group, which he did not do—he only added Archie Shepp and Art Davis on a scrapped alternate take of “Acknowledgement”—Coltrane realized his ambitions. He recorded A Love Supreme in one day, December 9, 1964, and it is not just another cusp in a series of cusps but the fulcrum of his career, setting the outline for understanding both his past and future work.

Much is established in the first ten seconds of the first part, “Acknowledgement”: Coltrane plays an ascending pattern in the key of E-major, then develops related melodic cells that he runs up and down for the major part of his improvisation. (This cellmaking process—and at times these particular intervals—are in his playing from “Crescent” onward.) At the core of “Resolution” is a doleful ballad melody played with sweeping legato between notes that relates back to Kaper’s “While My Lady Sleeps” and “On Green Dolphin Street,” not to mention Coltrane’s own “Lonnie’s Lament.”

It is a full-band work: all members have their own moments within the record, and the quartet’s ensemble sound grows especially rich at the end of “Resolution.” The record includes his fast, hard, nubby “Chasin’ the Trane” style of playing, in the middle of his “Pursuance” solo. It also includes a B-flat minor blues: “Pursuance,” part three of the work, which incorporates the work’s unifying cell. And it includes a word-based recitation, probably his best, in “Psalm,” taking off from Coltrane’s poem, which was printed on the LP sleeve. (“Thank you, God” is the refrain in between lines; in that phrase, the word “God” always signals a return to the tonic.)

It seems likely that by the beginning of 1965 Coltrane was thinking of changing the quartet—probably by adding to it, as he experimented with on the Love Supreme sessions.

In June 1965, Coltrane recorded three sessions. The recordings resulted in quartet performances that ended up on the albums Transition, Living Space, and Kulu Se Mama. The track “Transition” shows a band running together at its highest output, like a floored car engine. It starts off with a slight rhythmic muddle before the downbeat; only on the 8th bar do you feel the full force of Elvin Jones’s “one.” Ninety seconds in, the music reaches its top revving, and stays there.

“Resolution” had been the last of Coltrane’s great melodies. Beyond it, for the most part, lay something other than songs-for-thesake-of-songs: melody lines were now a matter of intervals and cells, musical vitamins to keep the drone healthy. “Suite,” recorded six months after the suite that really mattered, isn’t nearly as distinctive. It marks the beginning of a late Coltrane-quartet period that amounts to one interconnected song. It is music of meditation and chant, the sound of his interior cosmos.

The music Coltrane’s quartet played at New York’s Half Note in the spring of 1965—often bootlegged, and not released officially until 2005—shows better than the studio albums just where the band had gotten to. A recording of “One Down, One Up,” during which Elvin Jones breaks his bass pedal and plays without a bass drum for several minutes, remains one of the best indicators of the group’s energy. From the midway point to the final iteration of the theme, thirteen minutes of its twenty-seven-minute duration are a duet between Coltrane and Jones, and so it belongs in that select group of Coltrane-Jones performances alone, alongside “Vigil” (from Transition) and a portion of “Crescent.” And in it Coltrane swings, wired to the slightest accents of his drummer, delivering massive projection.

“One Down, One Up” is extraordinarily tough and coordinated music. There is not much obscure or implied about it; both the technical accomplishment and the physical endurance are of a sort that I have never experienced firsthand from any jazz group.

Those who caught it, during Coltrane’s run of gigs during this time, remember it as an almost physical sensation. The saxophonist Joe McPhee saw him in 1965 at the Village Gate and felt flooded, overloaded. “I thought I was going to die from the emotion,” he said. “I’d never experienced anything like that in my life. I thought I was just going to explode right in the place. The energy level kept building up, and I thought, God almighty, I can’t take it.” The jazz critic and historian Dan Morgenstern—whose passion runs toward swing and bebop players and who has never been known as much of a Coltrane booster—said something similar about an evening he spent watching Coltrane at the Half Note at around the same time. “The intensity that was generated was absolutely unbelievable,” he said. “I can still feel it, and it was unlike any other feeling within the music we call jazz.”

The year 1965 was a period of more concentrated excellence for Coltrane than has often been acknowledged. Its excellence is in its turbulence, its volubility. The great quartet was still intact but reaching the edge of the cliff, and Coltrane had fully absorbed Albert Ayler.

Ayler, ten years younger and several times wilder, found a purpose for naïveté in jazz, even more so than Ornette Coleman had. He was a walking example of new American transcendentalism. William James would have assigned Ayler to the “religion of healthy-mindedness”; he seemed to act out of Walt Whitman’s idea that “what is called good is perfect and what is called bad is just as perfect.” He had his own style, but he was the embodiment of an idea much more influential than his style: the advancing of “spirit” over craft.

Ayler wrote stirring melodies that sounded like anthems, hymns, or marches, completely subsumed in harmony: specifically, major-triad harmony. But his seeming lack of interest in tonal harmony in his improvisations (specifically, bebop harmony), his broken shrieks, his pile-driving volume, his lack of defining references to key or pulse or structure infuriated many of his elders, musicians like Johnny Griffin and Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis and James Moody. He seemed to be channeling terrors. (Harmony is rational science, and in his improvisations Ayler was effectively refuting it.) One could interpret it for days, seeing evidence of a new social order, but it really didn’t need explanation. It was immediately stunning, whatever it was. (When it wasn’t bluntly, forcefully stunning, it could sometimes be intricately stunning, as in his recordings in a trio with Gary Peacock and Sunny Murray in 1964.) Ayler played as if he were throwing himself at the fire, looking down into the precipice, et cetera; a legion of players and listeners oriented themselves around metaphors like that. But the music was all changeable, unpredictable, slightly anarchic. The metaphors and quick analyses never quite held fast. Was it lack of ambition? Was it grift? Magic? Supernatural visitations? Hippie vaudeville?

Albert Ayler had sat in with the Coltrane quartet at the Jazz Temple in Cleveland in the summer of 1963, during a period when he was living with his parents and defeated by lack of work in New York. Later, that winter (December 31, 1963), as a member of the Cecil Taylor Unit, Ayler appeared on the same bill with Coltrane at Lincoln Center.

Around the same time, the drummer Rashied Ali was getting ready to leave Philadelphia, where he was one of the hometown believers. (In the late 1950s he used to sometimes sit in Fairmount Park across from Coltrane’s mother’s house on North Thirty-third Street, in the Strawberry Mansion neighborhood, listening to the sound of Coltrane practicing on the top floor.) Ali had his own turnaround experience with Coltrane, who encouraged him to move to New York, promising him that there were people there who played in the rhythmically free style he favored.

Again—as in the case of hiring Eric Dolphy at the moment of his greatest commercial success—Coltrane demonstrated independence of mind. Like Earl Bostic in his time, Coltrane had become the ultimate saxophone student, recognized and respected as such; he practiced constantly, even regularly between sets at nightclubs, and had become astonishingly proficient at working through harmony. But he heard something powerful in Ayler, who took the very opposite approach.

Ayler was not particularly interested in keys. He was not interested in extensions of bebop. He really did want to scream through his instrument, and he had his reasons for it. Perhaps we are underestimating Coltrane’s ambitiousness and competitiveness; perhaps Coltrane was in some sense threatened by Ayler. But if this were true, he wouldn’t have absorbed him so quickly. After all, Coltrane had a baseline authority. He was a master bebop player. The overwhelming percentage of jazz lovers, who as a rule do not like to hear screaming through the horn, would never have tsktsked him about not having come to terms with Ayler. He could simply have ignored him.

From 1963 on, Coltrane and Ayler, when both in New York, were often in the same room. Various recollections have placed Coltrane watching Ayler and Cecil Taylor at the Take 3 Coffeehouse in the West Village in the fall of 1963; watching Ayler and Eric Dolphy together at the Half Note sometime that year; inviting Ayler onstage at the Half Note in March 1964; hearing Ayler’s group with Rashied Ali at a little performance space at 27 Cooper Square in early 1965.

On that evening in 1965, Coltrane may have been interested in hiring Ali. Ali remembers Coltrane pulling out a chair from the row at the performance space, a building where the writer Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones) and Archie Shepp were living, and putting it in the middle of the aisle so he could get a clear view of Ayler as he played. This made Ali nervous and self-conscious.

Coltrane is said to have given money to Ayler, and eventually helped him get a record contract with Bob Thiele at Impulse.

Coltrane started bringing new members into the band in 1965. The reception to this experiment had been chilly enough when he tried it with Eric Dolphy; this time his audience was even less forgiving, and as a result he undermined his own credibility. Most of his fans could go with his new music as long as band members of repute were playing it. With new members of less objectively measurable talent, some felt they were being conned.

At some point in early 1965, Rashied Ali got up the courage to ask Coltrane if he would let him play with the group at the Half Note. Later that year, possibly in May, Coltrane let him sit in for a whole night when Elvin Jones was unavailable. After that, Ali brought his friends Pharoah Sanders and Archie Shepp to the Half Note; in time they would sit in with the group as well. In return, Coltrane started coming to their gigs.

A filmed performance exists of Coltrane with his quartet, from August 1, 1965, in Comblain-la-Tour, Belgium. The setting is an outdoor jazz festival, and the weather is cold. It is a comfortable group doing a night’s job, playing well-trod repertory. But that workmanlike comfort involves extremely rigorous playing. The bridge of “Naima” becomes torn, agitated, almost baleful, with Jones occupying the far back end of the beat and Garrison sketching impulsively around the tonic. At the conclusion of this superb “Naima,” Coltrane—thicker and heavier now than he appeared on the Danish television broadcast in 1961, and playing with his eyes tightly shut, unlike in the earlier footage—doesn’t acknowledge the applause. Even before the last beat of the song he darts off to his left to fetch his soprano saxophone, and then starts to play “My Favorite Things.” It is evocative footage: the musicians are working up a sweat in their heavy dark suits—Jones especially—and the cold air causes steam to rise visibly off their figures.

His performance at Soldier Field in Chicago two weeks later, on August 15, 1965, as the headlining act of the Down Beat Jazz Festival, has been understood as a famous breaking point—a Dylan-at-Newport, or a Rite of Spring. As with both of those examples, the challenge put forth from the artist to the audience is half-overstated and half-real. The set was thirty-seven minutes long. The quartet, with Archie Shepp as an extra on tenor, yoked together a set out of the theme from “Nature Boy,” some collective improvising, and “Blue Valse.” The music grew jagged and vociferous. It aggravated a great part of the crowd, prompting, according to some witnesses, a large exodus. It has seldom been considered, however, that the first intimations of the truly wild Coltrane had already been recorded but not yet released. Or that casual jazz fans who had been in the sun all day at a free festival, listening to more straightforward performances by Woody Herman and Gerry Mulligan and Monk and Joe Williams, might well be inclined to start for home at the first splash of dissonance.

Some of his recorded music from this time shrinks his options down. “Amen,” for example, from Sun Ship, recorded two weeks after Soldier Field, uses only a I–II–V cell—that basic harmonic relationship from the “Acknowledgement” section of A Love Supreme.

On the other hand, the album Ascension, recorded in late June 1965, before his European tour, expanded his options. Possibly as a result of his allowed sit-ins at the Half Note, seven extra musicians—Archie Shepp, Pharoah Sanders, John Tchicai, Marion Brown, Freddie Hubbard, Dewey Johnson, and Art Davis—joined the group, playing through a series of scales flowing into each other, signaled by Coltrane; the music moves through pile-ons and gradual extrusions of single soloists. The extra musicians create a weakening of the music’s base; in retaliation, Jones and Tyner keep reasserting the pulse as hard as they can.

Ascension is not a success in particular. It is hard to get around the tremulous chaos of the group sound, not to mention the many moments of a band whose members are not in sync with one another, reaching points where they might as well stop, but don’t.

Instead it is a success in general, a paradigm. First of all, it had to happen: if you intimate the loosening of structure in any art form, sooner or later you are going to have to let the opposite of form run rampant. (“Form” exists on many levels, however, and Ascension was by no means formless.) It broke the seal on full-bore, single-gesture, all-out, free-blowing sessions—Sun Ra’s free sessions were lighter-bodied, and Ornette Coleman’s album Free Jazz was calligraphy by comparison—as well as the notion of the jazz band as community, a collective effort to make large-scale textural music rather than an exclusive, carefully structured machine moving through smaller and more defined parts. This had obvious political implications in 1965, especially in Europe, where Marxism was strong and the memory of fascism was still fresh. The album led directly to the German saxophonist Peter Brötzmann’s album Machine Gun, three years later, one of the major statements of European free jazz. Even if the philosophical ideas governing Machine Gun were different from those of Ascension—Brötzmann carries a rich sense of himself as a product of the working-class, steel-and-coal Ruhr Valley, and as a German born during World War II—the sound is similar.

In terms of applicable conventions that could be crudely aped, it was the rare example of Coltrane getting there first. (It was more Coltrane’s way to move organically toward a harmonic pattern, or a group sound, that was personal and resistant to political metaphors.) Because he did, it became the basis for a huge amount of free jazz after it, then and still. While Albert Ayler had been making heart-palpitation yawps, Cecil Taylor explored pantonality and the music of physical reflexes, Ornette Coleman made Ornette Coleman–style group interaction, and the New York Contemporary Five recapped Ornette Coleman, Ascension was the first major piece of work from the jazz avant-garde to valorize the idea not only of sheer volume but of texture in jazz-group interaction.

However subtly, Coltrane designed and directed Ascension, and he arises from it as its single impressive soloist by far. But it is an experiment in the democratic ideal—much more than most other works of jazz, no matter how often, and loosely, the metaphor of democracy is misapplied to the music.

Ascension suggests cathartic release, but Coltrane felt anything but released while recording it. “I was so doggone busy; I was worried to death,” he told Frank Kofsky. “I couldn’t really enjoy the [recording] date. If it hadn’t been a date, then I would have really enjoyed it.”

Immediately thereafter, the idea of texture would become very basic to experimental jazz. The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, led by the pianist Muhal Richard Abrams and including the musicians who would make up the Art Ensemble of Chicago, compounded the emphasis on texture by bringing new instruments into the regular mixture of horns and piano and percussion; they were the first jazz performers to use the sounds of bulb-horns and cans of water hung on a rope. They used pragmatic, everyday sounds: they promised an expanded but still neighborhoody new world of what they came to call “Great Black Music.”

John Coltrane was releasing albums on Impulse at a rate of about one every three months. He was able to record at Van Gelder’s studio even when Impulse wasn’t aware of it. If being in the presence of Ellington helped him let go of each record more easily, the new unlimited opportunity seemed to make him more pasha-like. He called Bob Thiele after the release of Ascension and declared that the take he chose was not the take Thiele had pressed. Amazingly, Thiele complied, issuing a new, correct (and longer) take. A few months later, in September 1965, Coltrane recorded Meditations, a rather beautiful new suite with serene echoes of the ballads from Crescent but clearly in the direction of condensed cells over developed melody. He decided not to release it—this first version would not appear until 1977—and rerecorded the suite at the end of November with Rashied Ali added on drums and Pharoah Sanders added on tenor saxophone.

This one-foot-in, one-foot-out phase was characteristic of Coltrane, who resisted making qualitative decisions about his music. Essentially, he wanted it all: he wanted to mash the old players and the new players together, without losing anyone. “There was a thing I wanted to do in music, see,” he said. “I figured I could do two things: I could have a band that played like the way we used to play, and a band that was going in the direction that the one I have now [in 1966] is going in—I could combine these two, with these two concepts going. And it could have been done.”

One assumes that Coltrane was talking about combining the two into one unit, rather than keeping two groups going separately, so that the combinations could produce some positive tension in his work.

As he implied, it wasn’t done, or at least not to his satisfaction. Miles Davis would do it, however, a few years later, during the two-year transitional period between his albums Nefertiti and Bitches Brew. He fused groups, combining his old people and his new people. Being sandwiched between completely different approaches to music isn’t just a psychological or critical challenge: it is a technical challenge. Some of the musicians closest to Coltrane found free jazz difficult, necessitating a whole new language; Jimmy Garrison said he had to learn “to phrase, rather than to walk,” in his new role. And Coltrane’s newer recruits were not up to the challenges of his old material and his old band. Some of Davis’s newer recruits, on the other hand, were.

Sanders was a rhythm-and-blues journeyman who had met Coltrane in 1961 and moved to New York in 1962. If Ayler was a free agent, a self-conscious, original naïf, a post-everything player and a weird kind of old-fashioned melodist at the same time, Pharoah Sanders (fourteen years younger than Coltrane) was specifically the first major post-Coltrane saxophonist: his pan-tonal musical personality came straight out of modal pieces like “Africa.” He essentially became Coltrane’s new Eric Dolphy, a wilder trip wire who helped the leader more than he helped the group as a whole.

Live in Seattle features a sextet, with an extra bassist (Donald Rafael Garrett) and Pharaoh Sanders, and its versions of “Out of This World” and “Body and Soul” are effective returns to the contours of Coltrane’s older work.

This “Body and Soul” is more soul than body. It keeps part of the arrangement from Coltrane’s Sound: the “Giant Steps” changes remain in the bridge. But this was a slower and more ancient-sounding version of the song, as if its original source was one of Coltrane’s collections of spirituals, as if Coltrane wanted to melt the song down to liquid. Donald Rafael Garrett bows long tones on the bass during Tyner’s solo, and Tyner becomes more insistent on sounding the bass-clef tonic, hard; he gives the piece a thick upper layer of drone.

Jones’s 4/4 ballad swing-rhythm had deepened since he joined the band; his tempo gravid and lovely, the snare feels even more small and precise; the loud smacks of Tyner’s fifths in the left hand sustain a ringing on the first beat of every measure. Coltrane begins the tune after thirty seconds of vamp, plays it fairly straight in the first 8 bars of the melody chorus, begins to improvise broadly on the second 8, barely refers to the melody of the bridge yet stays in tonality, and starts propelling himself in the final 8. The second chorus, before Tyner’s three-chorus solo, is where the action really starts—the short, low-register bursts, the gargled hunks of scales. The bridge on the second chorus, going into the final 8 of the second chorus, darkens, growing thick with fluttering notes.

Tyner gives one of his thundering, sustain-pedal improvisations, playing modal within chords; Pharoah Sanders enters, in the hard spot of having to follow such heavy-gauge expositions, uninterested in the chord movement in the bridge, playing weakly and generally off-microphone, chary about getting in deeply until the very end, when he delivers pure sound: low, capacious blasts. Finally, at the end, the band gathers itself up for a quiet, final flourish, with the drums dropped out.

“He was a deep, great artist, even if he was rather a sententious man,” D. H. Lawrence wrote of Melville in Studies in Classic American Literature. Lawrence might have been describing the Coltrane of late 1965. Coltrane continued to play for his audience in suit and tie; talked with gracious sensitivity to interviewers, politely refusing to elaborate on his split-focus beween the old jazz reality (Johnny Hodges) and the new jazz reality (Albert Ayler); became physically heavier and less easy to parse; stayed available by telephone to his circle of musicians, but did not enter into deep friendships; bought a Jaguar; maintained a middle-class home life in Long Island with Alice and their two children.

At the same time, to a certain way of thinking, he represented America’s tribal subconscious, its attraction to sublimity. He was reportedly taking LSD during this period, and the day after the show at Seattle’s Penthouse, he recorded Om, with the quartet plus Pharoah Sanders, the multi-instrumentalist Donald Garrett, and the percussionist and flutist Joe Brazil. Om cannot be held up as an ideal example of what Coltrane was working toward. It is a fairly disjointed, agitated, muddy, twenty-nine-minute catharsis, culled from a six-hour jam session.

“Om” is a Vedic mantra meant to suggest the sound made at the moment when God created the world. The Coltrane record begins and ends with thumb piano, wood flute and bells, and this recitation from the Bhagavad Gita:

Rites that the Vedas ordain, and the rituals taught by the scriptures, all these am I, and the offering made to the ghost of the fathers, herbs of healing and food. The mantram. The clarified butter. I, the oblation and I, the flame to which it is offered. I am the sire of the world, and this world’s mother and grandsire. I am he who awards to each the fruit of his action. I make all things clean. I am om. Ommmm, ommmm, ommmmm, ommmm …

“He was a real American in that he always felt his audience in front of him,” Lawrence continued, about Melville.

But when he ceases to be American, when he forgets all audience, and gives us his sheer apprehension of the world, then he is wonderful, his book commands a stillness in the soul, an awe … It is the same old thing as in all Americans. They keep their old-fashioned ideal frock-coat on, and an old-fashioned silk hat, while they do the most impossible things … Their ideals are like armour which has rusted in, and will never more come off. And meanwhile in Melville his bodily knowledge moves naked, a living quick among the stark elements. For with sheer physical vibrational sensitiveness, like a marvelous wireless-station, he registers the effects of the outer world. And he records, also, almost beyond pain or pleasure, the extreme transitions of the isolated, far-driven soul, the soul which is now alone, without real human contact.

McCoy Tyner had been the first to leave the band, at the end of 1965. Then Jones left at the end of January 1966. They both gave the same reason, more or less. “He added another drummer,” Jones told Whitney Balliett, “and I couldn’t hear what I was doing any longer. There was too much going on, and it was ridiculous as far as I was concerned. I was getting into a whole area of frustration, and what I had to offer I felt I just couldn’t contribute. I think Coltrane was upset, and I know in those last weeks I had a constant migraine headache.”

So the quartet, such as it was, ended.