[Dixielandjazz] The Pedagogical Approach

[Steve Barbone]

Not OKOM, but an examination of the Lincoln Center Approach to Jazz
Programming. The Coltrane concerts are opening salvo in this season's
concert series. The "teaching" mission is laudable. Will it succeed?

For those who associate Trane with avant garde, perhaps a listen to the
Johnny Hartman record (see last 3 paragraphs) will prove enlightening. He
was also one hell of a jazz ballad player.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone


NY TIMES - By BEN RATLIFF - September 8, 2006

JAZZ AT LINCOLN CENTER¹S more ambitious concerts, while playing to an
audience impressed by flash and smoothness, never completely lose their
pedantic side; they¹re always functioning in part as lessons. But sometimes
that doesn¹t sound so appealing. The cost of living is rising faster than
salaries, and now even pleasure is work? And whose jazz history is this,
anyway? Doesn¹t jazz activate a loose, adaptable kind of intelligence that
teaches you to be suspicious of someone else¹s agenda?

I guess the pedagogical aspect can be a drag if you don¹t feel close to
what¹s being played, or if the momentum of the performance falls off. On the
other hand, that teaching mission is always a great strength of Jazz at
Lincoln Center. It reminds you, in an increasingly sponsored-up arts
environment, that there are goals beyond corporate branding.

So let¹s approach Jazz at Lincoln Center¹s opening concerts of the new
season, a series of shows based on the music of John Coltrane on the 80th
anniversary of his birth, as beginner classes. If you buy a ticket, you¹re
likely to learn something no matter what. You¹ll learn much more if you do a
little preparation. Jazz at Lincoln Center has provided us with a working
list of the music to be played; think of this article an annotated homework
assignment, to be supplemented if possible with some extra-credit listening
on your own. Don¹t be alarmed. You have a week to prepare.

The Legacy

Next week, Thursday through Saturday at the Rose Theater, Wynton Marsalis
and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra will present ³Coltrane,² a program
of his pieces originally recorded between 1957 and 1963. Some will be
expanded for big band; in the concerts¹ second half some pieces will be
played by smaller breakout units within the orchestra.

Meanwhile, at the Allen Room in the Jazz at Lincoln Center complex, Kevin
Mahogany will be singing nightclub sets with a backing quartet, drawing from
the album ³John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman.² And in the following months
various other nightclubs and concert producers will be putting on worthwhile
concerts built around Coltrane.

The repertory for the Lincoln Center shows has doubtless been chosen to
break down Coltrane into his various strengths: his kind of blues, his kind
of modal jazz, his ballad styles and his superstudious paradigmatic pieces,
stuffed with quickly moving chords. This encapsulates the official Coltrane,
the period that brooks few arguments about its merits.

As far as Coltrane¹s later work ‹ mid-1965 to 1967 (when he died) ‹ that
music is alive from within and mysterious from without, and perhaps it¹s
better celebrated by other musicians anyway. (The accompanying list of
highlights includes other concerts, including one by his widow, Alice
Coltrane, that might do the job.) But let¹s not get hung up on this issue.
The works to be played next week are suggestive pieces that have meant a lot
to the last few generations of jazz musicians, and there is much to make of
them.

The Early Works

Born in 1926, Coltrane grew up in Hamlet and High Point, N.C., moving to
Philadelphia after high school; the top of the second-tier jazz towns in the
Northeast, it was his home base as he worked through roadhouses across the
country, apprenticing with bandleaders like Eddie (Cleanhead) Vinson, Johnny
Hodges and Dizzy Gillespie.

When Coltrane made the album ³Blue Train² in 1957, for Blue Note, he was 30
and had only one album out under his own name. By that year Sonny Rollins,
the saxophonist perceived as his rival, had already made a dozen, and he was
four years younger. ³Blue Train² was the newly pulled-together Coltrane,
after an entanglement with drugs and drinking, and a long period in music
spent learning, faltering and near-missing.

³Moment¹s Notice,² a piece from ³Blue Train² on the Rose Theater program, is
an unusual and quickly moving set of chord changes, and soloing through it
can challenge improvisers. Double that for ³Giant Steps,² which has also
made it into the Rose Theater set list.

In ³Giant Steps² the chord changes arrive even faster: once every other
beat. Coltrane worked obsessively on ³Giant Steps² and the whole harmonic
theory behind it. But he had his doubts about it, finding it too mechanical,
and seldom performed it thereafter. The tune has accrued weight over time as
a finger-buster, an étude to prove one¹s facility with harmony.

A clip that appeared on YouTube last month shows the song apparently being
played by a robot, blowing air through the tenor saxophone, with machine
hands fingering the keys. The robot, if it is a robot, sounds pretty good
playing it. 

At a certain point, about 1961, Coltrane¹s name became shorthand for the
idea of cultural rarefaction. You might remember Coltrane references in
movies like Woody Allen¹s ³Alice² or Spike Lee¹s ³Mo¹ Better Blues,² or from
books like Ken Kesey¹s ³Sometimes a Great Notion²: they propose Coltrane as
a kind of sacred mystery, an unparsable source of enlightenment. But he was
a down-home character too, and the raw country sound was always with him.

That¹s the unique and spooky thing about Coltrane: his stolidity, and his
deep countryness. In photographs, distinct from the hard-shell hipster
urbanites around him, his eyes register the same note of guileless
concentration that you see in Walker Evans¹s pictures of farm families from
the 30¹s. 

The Bluesman

The lovely title track from ³Blue Train² was just the beginning of a family
of original blues pieces. The album ³Coltrane Plays the Blues,² recorded a
little more than three years later, has proven weirdly resistant to age.
Lesser known within the Atlantic Records period that produced the albums
³Giant Steps² and ³My Favorite Things,² it is beautiful for its new-old kind
of blues, a more droning, largely major-key, easy-tempo, antique-sounding
kind than the ambitious bebop blues tunes circulating through jazz of the
1950¹s. (³Mr. Knight,² from ³Coltrane Plays the Blues,² is scheduled to be
part of the Rose Theater concerts.)

³Coltrane Plays the Blues² doesn¹t collect all Coltrane¹s blues pieces of
that period: among others, there¹s the Moby-Dick of them all, ³Chasin¹ the
Trane,² from ³John Coltrane Live at the Village Vanguard,² recorded in
November 1961. 

³Chasin¹ the Trane,² also on the Rose Theater list, is a blues in F, and a
16-minute spell of off-the-cuff, cropped statements that eventually roll out
into long, precise, stirring improvisations. Bach-like in hardness and
precision, these lines gobble up the horn, jumping all over it within single
phrases. 

There are bootleg recordings preceding it that give the general idea ‹ I
cherish one from the Sutherland Lounge in Chicago, eight months earlier ‹
but this performance is the first well-known indication of the greatness of
Coltrane¹s band, with the bassist Jimmy Garrison and the drummer Elvin
Jones. (This is not to ignore the pianist McCoy Tyner, but he drops out for
³Chasin the Trane,² to make the band a trio.)

The Romantic

In his time Coltrane had no peer as a player of romantic ballads; he learned
from Johnny Hodges, the master of that form. For his first wife, he wrote
³Naima,² which is on the Rose Theater set list. Perhaps it¹s the insistent
pedal tone, grounding everything, or the wide intervals, or the rich
harmony; but ³Naima² almost reinvented this type of tune in jazz, building
on Hodges saxophone showcases like Duke Ellington¹s ³Warm Valley² yet
intimating something deeper, a kind of contemplative,
I¹ll-see-you-in-the-next-world feeling.

Shortly, though, Coltrane moved on and started making a new and different
kind of ballad, hymnlike songs with ancient and slightly tragic overtones.
And in the tradition of jazz musicians who made sure they knew the lyrics to
a song before playing it on the horn ‹ Lester Young, for the best example ‹
he began writing his own texts to base the ballads on, imitating the rhythm
of how the words might be spoken.

The culmination of this approach was the ³Psalm² portion of ³A Love
Supreme.² But the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra has chosen instead
something equally powerful: ³Alabama,² which was recorded in the studio but
came out on the LP ³Coltrane Live at Birdland.² It was recorded two months
after the bombing of a Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala.; within that time
the suspect, a Klansman named Robert Chambliss, was found not guilty and
received a small fine and a six-month sentence for possessing the dynamite.

The first part of Coltrane¹s ³Alabama² sounds as if it were through-written,
its phrases a little unnatural; it has been long suspected that it is tied
to a written text, though none has been found. At the middle comes an
easy-swinging improvised portion, less than a minute long, and then the
re-entrance of that strange theme. The music projects a feeling right next
to despair, but still intent on moving forward.

If anyone wants to know why there¹s such a major fuss still made about John
Coltrane, why he is so loved and referred to, the reason is probably inside
³Alabama.² The incantational tumult he could raise in a long improvisation,
the steel-trap knowledge of harmony, the writing: that¹s all very
impressive. But ³Alabama² is a kind of perfect psychological portrait of a
time, a complicated mood that nobody else rendered so well.

³John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman² is another mood record, but one
accessible to anyone who listened to pop music on the radio in the 20th
century: the kind generated by a deep male voice singing heavy-lidded love
songs. It serves as the backbone of the gig at the Allen Room next week,
with the baritone singer Kevin Mahogany and the Coltrane-influenced tenor
saxophonist Todd Williams, who was part of Mr. Marsalis¹s bands in the late
80¹s and early 90¹s, before leaving to play in the Times Square Church.

It is a supermeditative record, with the drummer Elvin Jones, elsewhere as
forceful as a truck, playing barely audibly on songs like ³They Say It¹s
Wonderful,² under Johnny Hartman¹s cellolike voice and Coltrane¹s broad
sound. As with the best Coltrane ballad recordings, these songs conjure
something bigger than earthly love. For each listener the record occupies a
distinct imaginary space.

At Lincoln Center the trick will be to make the music work in a very real
space, a high-rent commercial zone with glasses clinking and tabs mounting.
Come armed with a version of it in your own memory, and remember that
Coltrane brought a lot of listeners up short 40 years ago. If we do our
homework, we might be able to catch up to him now.