Listen
by ChrisMay 24th, 2005 10:24 pm
Tonight’s track, and the album it’s from, played a big, disorganized part in my life, so forgive me if I lack some coherence. The album is entitled Miles Davis in Stockholm 1960 with John Coltrane and the track is So What. I would ordinarily feel the need to ask you to buy the record in order to cover myself legally, but since none of the musicians ever received a dime for this, do as you please.
The band features Miles Davis on trumpet, John Coltrane on tenor saxophone, Wynton Kelly on piano, Paul Chambers on bass and Jimmy Cobb on drums. The track itself was recorded in Stockholm, Sweden on March 22, 1960 at the Stockholm Concert Hall as part of a live radio broadcast. It is the last significant live recording of the Miles Davis Quintet with John Coltrane. He left the band a few weeks after the broadcast to form his own quartet.
While the entire performance is wonderful, I’d like to ask you to focus specifically on John Coltrane’s solo. I don’t think you will have any trouble doing it. What we hear is the culmination of five years of turbulent, brilliant growth and a foreshadowing of what was just about to come. We hear a shot across the bow of the tradition. Just as a listening exercise, focus on the extensive harmonic substitutions over the plain modal backdrop, and then again on the beautiful madness that occurs when Wynton Kelly’s piano drops and Coltrane is left almost entirely to his own devices. If you can, compare this performance to any of the performances of Impressions by the John Coltrane Quartet recorded at the Village Vanguard in 1961.
Forgive me for getting a little personal here, but this performance is one I hold closer to my heart than nearly any other. This is a performance that has haunted me since the day I first heard it and haunts me to this day. While I was still an aspiring musician, Coltrane’s solo on this track left me awake many, many nights asking myself two questions:
- Is there anything left to be said?
- If there is, can I ever say it?
My answers are yes and no. There is, indeed, quite a bit left to be said. Coltrane, and many others since, have answered that question beyond any shadow of a doubt. As for the second question, the answer was, for me, a very brutal no. Needless to say, I quit playing music altogether and without regret. Musically, I have nothing to add. Such is life and such is music.
That is the power of this performance. Please do have a listen. If you don’t get it at first, listen to it over and over until you do. I know you won’t regret it.
If you didn’t catch all of the other links to the MP3, click here to get it. The file is a little over 15 megabytes so expect a fairly long download if your connection is a little slow.
May 25th, 2005 at 12:34 am
I know my way out of a paperbag better than I know jazz, but that being said, I can certainly identify a fabulous sax solo when I hear one. You can’t negatively compare your playing with someone of Coltrane’s stature. I hate to think this is what made you give up your dreams. That’s kind of sad if you ask me. (yeah, I know you didn’t ask, but I’m telling you anyway). :)
May 26th, 2005 at 1:31 am
I know it’s not a popular way of looking at things, but I really think that you can and you should. I think that as an aspiring artist, if you really care deeply for a particular art form, you must hold yourself to the most brutal of standards. If you don’t, you’ve proven that it really means little to you and that you probably never really got it to begin with.
It’s hard to explain, and I know I’ll never be able to explain fully , what it’s like to be consumed by music, do okay with it in a practical sense but declare absolute failure and stop altogether. I don’t mean failure in a commercial sense, that was always a given, but rather in the pure art for art’s sake sense. This particular track certainly wasn’t the only thing that threw me off, there is quite a bit more to that story. This is, however, one that cleared things up for me and removed any foggy notions of whatever I had in my head. It helped me evaluate myself in very harsh terms and come to a conclusion I can live with. Any painter who doesn’t compare him or herself honestly to Picasso is a fool.
May 26th, 2005 at 12:05 pm
As a non-artist and non-musician, I absolutely cannot relate, but I guess I sort of understand. Then the question is, don’t you get satisfaction and enjoyment out of playing music for it’s own sake? That’s the part that doesn’t make sense to me. Who really knows, but do you think John Coltrane started playing music to absolutely set the world on fire? I mean, maybe he did, but I think there’s a good chance he played because he loved it and that probably showed through. Of course I could be completely nuts…
May 26th, 2005 at 10:20 pm
Chris,
I came across this post and your follow-up comment today, and it’s been stuck in my mind all day. Wow, I couldn’t disagree more with some of your comments. For an aspiring musician to compare themselves, either favorably or unfavorably, to Coltrane would be foolish and without merit. For a painter to compare themselves, favorably or unfavorably to Picasso, would also be foolish. If Steinbeck had started writing and compared himself in this way to Shakespeare, he certainly would have quit as well. Picasso could never have painted like Rembrandt, and Coltrane could never have written a Beethoven symphony. For that matter, Coltrane was never, ever going to write a Led Zeppelin song. Beethoven would have had a pretty rough time writing a Bach fugue. Miles Davis was never, ever going to play a Coltrane solo and vice versa. Miles didn’t have anything like the virtuosity of Coltrane, and it didn’t keep him up even one night. He only wanted to speak in his own language. Part of the amazing and wonderful thing about musicians like Coltrane and Miles was that they didn’t get stuck in any one place for too long. They didn’t worry about sticking to the rules. They defined their own forms and genres as they went foward. They didn’t give a crap about how they well they performed by comparison to somebody else’s predefined idiom, nor their own previously discarded idioms. If Coltrane had lived to the present day, he might be playing over Hip-Hop beats or heavy metal riffs or sitting at a computer composing electronic music based on complex math (probably the latter). How could a musician in 2005 possibly put themselves where Coltrane was when he played this solo? We are all doomed to failure if this is our goal. But we don’t need to say what Coltrane already said, and we don’t need to be able to speak his language to be valid as artists. Our validity comes from our own intensity of feeling and our own need to express and create. It comes from the sum of all of our experiences and influences.
I could keep ranting all day, but I’ll stop now. But you know why this bugs me so much? By your logic, I should probably have quit music a long time ago. Not gonna happen. Fortunately for me, I was never astute enough to notice when I wasn’t very good, so I kept playing until I got better. I intend to write my best music as an old, old man.
Oh, and the other thing? Your playing WAS good and WAS saying something unique.
May 27th, 2005 at 12:56 am
Ok, I’ve probably phrased this all wrong, so I’ll give it another shot.
I’m no more interested in saying what anybody else has already said than you are. That’s exactly the point and you nailed it. Despite what you say to the contrary, Coltrane was quite concerned about being able to speak the language of his predecessors, learned to do it, and, having mastered the language, built on that tradition. It was squarely on the shoulders of tradition that his radicalism was built. The same was true of Picasso. While I’m not certain how much he concerned himself with Rembrandt, he was quite fluid and well versed in the styles and techniques of his predecessors. That, in my mind, is how all of the greatest art has been created. The idea was not to replicate anything, but rather to build on what came before.
In the post I describe a question I used to ask myself, and it wasn’t just with regards to this tune or this musician, but one I asked myself often. Let me see if I can add a few more to try and clarify — What can I, as a musician, add to this? What can I build from this? Where can I take the music from here? How can I build on this tradition?
Those are not valid questions for everybody. They were, however, valid questions for me and I answered them. I certainly wasn’t happy about the answers.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to make assumptions about what a particular artist would be doing if they were active today. Since we’ve been talking about Coltrane, I would say that there were certainly better ways for a musician to make a living in the 1950’s and 1960’s than he did. He chose not to partake, and indeed made several comments expressing disdain for the rock music that was popular at the time. There has always been folk music. To assume that somebody who didn’t take an interest in it while he was alive, would take an interest in it now, seems off to me. The Jazz tradition is still very much alive and growing as an art form. There are brilliant young musicians playing it today who are taking it places Coltrane, in his day, couldn’t have dreamed of. Quite a good deal of what they are doing is built off of the music of people who build their own music off of his music and the music of his contemporaries. Generations of growth in the music has occurred since 1960. Who’s to say he wouldn’t have been a part of it, if he was 30 years old today?
Anyway, whatever. I always piss people off when I talk about these things, so I should probably just stop. It’s certainly not what I’m trying to do. I think I only know one other person who actually agrees with me on this stuff, so that should probably tell me something right there. I mean no offense, and I really wasn’t talking about anybody other than myself and the way I chose to evaluate what I was doing. I don’t evaluate anything else as harshly. If I did, I would probably just lie on the sofa all day and watch my belly grow.
Maybe I was good, I’m not really even sure on that point. For me, being good wasn’t nearly good enough so I stopped. That’s probably as clear as I can make it.
May 27th, 2005 at 9:58 pm
As you are the Jazz scholar and I am not, I accept your statement that Coltrane was deeply concerned with the Jazz tradition. To this reasonably well-educated layman’s ears, however, he was moving and developing rapidly in directions no one could have predicted, and moving away from those traditions. I would never presume to know where what type of music he would have eventually played. I was just picking some far-reaching examples. I certainly wasn’t intending to imply that he would be somehow drawn to rock music. He did seem to be open to other new ideas and influences (LSD, anyone?).
All of that was not my point. I agree that an artist needs to be aware of and understand the tradition that came before them if they hope to make a lasting impact. I don’t, however, think that they need to master any given tradition to be a valid artist or to say something worth hearing. If we have some kind of foundation to start from, then we can build our own language and create our own journey.
There is absolutely no reason for a musician to impose all of these rules upon himself. There will always be ideas and traditions, musicial and otherwise, that each of us can’t add something to or build upon. Admitting failure because one can’t build upon the ideas of a master is ridiculous standard, not to mention pretentious. Quitting music because one can’t build upon a specific style from a specific time is like killing doctors to prevent abortions.
Anyway, I’ll let you be. You are obviously passionate about your feelings in this area, and no one is going to make you change your mind. Thanks for letting me vent.