Jazz Journal - Where's The Coltrane Feature ?

This is an iconic Coltrane cover from Britain's Jazz Journal, however, where's Coltrane inside ? The December 1961 issue had the annual Jazz Record of The Year poll feature. Coltrane was 18th in the top twenty Jazz records of the year with Giant Steps. Demonstrating where Jazz still was in 1961, Billie Holiday topped the poll with a re-issue, and Pee Wee Russell was 2nd. Nineteen critics provided their top ten records of the year, with a few having Coltrane mid-table. Steve Voce had Trane one and two, Giant Steps and Coltrane Jazz. Africa/Brass hadn't yet been released in Britain (more of that below), unlike e.g. France that had it on the Vega label (IMP 3).
Modern Record of the Year was one of six categories, with Giant Steps coming third in the category.

Critic Steve Voce, in his two page column, talked about Coltrane's 1961 visit to Britain, and explained a little bit why Impulse records were late to hit the market in Britain. I've noticed this trend, even later in the 1960s.

Missed The Trane by Steve Voce

It was bad enough not seeing Peggy Lee, Anita O'Day or JATP this year, but what really made me mad was the fact that John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy didn’t appear within 100 miles of Liverpool. What have we done?

I recently managed to buy one of Trane’s latest LPs. This, one of his best yet, is on the American Impulse label and is entitled Africa/ Brass. Eight brass, two saxes and an extra bass are added to the usual group to play spectacularly original Eric Dolphy arrangements of Africa, Blues Minor and Greensleeves. The record packaging is the best I have ever seen, being in stiff-backed book form with excellent photographs and jacket design. The whole thing, duty paid, cost 42/6d. I believe there is no chance of it being issued over here.

Impulse, which also has new LPs out by the Blakey Messengers and the Max Roach group is an average American label in the Blue Note-Candid-Jazzland range as far as price is concerned. Why then should this record cost ten bob less than it would have done if I had bought it through a record shop? Someone is making a good profit.

Incidentally, Geoff Rhoden of E.M.I. tells me that his company have already begun issuing the balance of the Impulse catalogue on H.M.V. Apparently there is some difficulty which prevents the Coltrane disc from being released over here.

Stanley Dance Column

Of interest was a piece in Stanley Dance's column, which is mostly referencing an article in the New Yorker, but he puts his spin on it too :

Whitney Balliett has recently devoted about nine columns in “The New Yorker” to what he describes as “two momentous new recordings’, one by Cecil Taylor on Candid, the other by Ornette Coleman on Atlantic. “Despite their occasional shortcomings,” he says, “these recordings indicate the rather frightening direction in which jazz is to go.”

“Taylor is never euphoric,” Whitney claims. “Each step of the way is an equal mixture of passion and thought, which in catharsis fashion, is virtually forced on the listener—an exhilarating if bonetrying experience.” If the thought of a rough but exhilarating purge daunts you, there’s worse to come. The other record “causes earache the first time through, especially for those new to Coleman’s music.” However, with “the fourth or fifth listening, one swims readily along, about ten feet down, breathing the music like air.”

The people who were so witty, and so patronising, about “mainstream”, are evidently in trouble for a label to attach to the new music. “Third Stream” won’t do, perhaps because it ran dry so soon. “Since this music is highly abstract, why not ‘abstract jazz’?” Whitney sensibly asks. “Anyway, abstract jazz is as far removed from bebop as bebop is from swing.”

The last sentence frankly puzzles us, because we thought the new critics had proved to themselves that bebop developed quite tidily and logically from swing. Continuity, all one piece, all jazz, you know! It just shows how difficult it is to keep up with the avant-garde. Of course, we have to keep reproving our alter ego. He’s always claiming that the avant-garde is just a ragtail collection of scouts who prance picturesquely about on the skyline and strike movie postures, their banners pointing in all directions, and that it is the main guard, coming steadily up the road behind them, which will have all the real fighting to do.

“The newest revolution in jazz—the abstract music of Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Charlie Mingus, and George Russell—is uncannily topical,” Whitney explains. “A largely free music, which turns its back on most of the traditional methods of jazz, it eerily reflects the mad, undecided temper of the present.”

What are these revolutionaries up to?

“The soloists’ melodic lines (usually not melodic at all) tend to be extremely long, altogether ignoring bar divisions and the standard chorus measure. The new musicians are also experimenting tonally with a variety of emanations that fall between anguished human and electronic sounds. Yet for all these resolutely neoteric methods, abstract jazz is not aimless and amoebic.” It couldn’t very well be when it possesses in Cecil Taylor an artist who invents “bitter, unbroken series of single right-hand notes, which fall like acid on powerful irregular chaconnes in the left hand. (Occasionally, these basses rise up like whales and smite the right-hand figures.)”

The Coleman record has an unusual instrumentation of two trumpets, two reeds, two basses and two drums. “Moreover,” Whitney points out, “it consists entirely of a single, unbroken free improvisation (no key, no chords, no theme, no time limits) that lasts just over thirty-six minutes. The result, the longest jazz recording ever made, is astonishing.”

If we are a little less enthusiastic about the records, it is because we still have a bit of an earache, but we will say that we found them definitely neoteric. The fact that we thought them a teeny bit amoebic was probably because we were swimming only six feet down most of the time. When Frederic Ramsey examined Cecil Taylor’s album in “The Saturday Review”, we suspect he didn’t bother to submerge at all, for he wrote:

“... what this reviewer heard seemed to be an adequate but not very inspired or original series of improvisations, admittedly showy and bristling with technique, which may have been successful in projecting a variety of moods, but which’ did not build to any cohesive or meaningful musical entity. If it takes only this to be hailed as imaginative and avant-garde in the house of jazz, then that house is indeed in need of an airing.”

Such diversity of opinion merely reflects, we suppose, “the mad, undecided temper of the present.” Like that character sitting on the doorstep, smoking, a spade in his hand, who hasn’t yet made up his mind whether or not to start digging his fallout shelter. What he has just about got straight, however, what he has nearly finished deciding, is which six LPs he'll take down with him when the sirens wail. Mingus and Monk and the M.J.Q., Dolphy, Russell (George) and Ornette too, so the boys'll know he died sitting hip !
That Cecil Taylor himself was not of a "mad undecided temper" was admirably shown in an article by Bill Coss in "Down Beat" for October 26th. "The pride in playing has been missing since 1955," said Cecil. And then, taking us right back to what Cosby and Chasins were talking about : "Communications has become a lost art. Maybe that's why we have psychiatrists."