Consider Coltrane

The Feb 1963 issue of Jazz magazine opens with an editorial defending a letter from LeRoi Jones, in which he accuses the magazine of being in the hands of 'conservatives'.
John Coltrane makes the cover and the featured article. Some of the content of the article has been quoted or repeated, including in the liner notes of the album Duke Ellington & John Coltrane, which was released the same month.

CONSIDER COLTRANE
by GENE LEES

I wish I were one of those sages who can
say, “Man, I dug Bird the first time I
heard him.” I didn’t: the first time I heard
Charlie Parker, I thought he was ridicu-
lous, and it took a few months of exposure
for his music to start to get through to me.

I mentioned this to Dizzy Gillespie
once. Birks laughed and said, “The main
difference between you and other people
is you'll admit it.”

The first time I heard John Coltrane,
I thought he was ridiculous. In fact, I
walked out of the club, in company with
three very good musicians (one of them
a tenor player) who weren’t getting the
message either. I wonder if they now lis-
ten to Coltrane with as much interest as
I do?

It isn’t easy to get the hang of Coltrane,
although it is probably easier now than at
any previous time.

Coltrane has on occasion expressed puz-
zlement over such descriptions of himself
as “best of the angry tenors.”

“I guess,” he once said, “they say that
because I play the horn hard.”

Coltrane is, as a matter of fact, one of
the gentlest and quietest people in jazz.
Two or three years ago, he was just about
the shyest, and that didn’t make his music
any more accessible.

Not that he has become a study in
effusive camaraderie. But he has emerged
considerably from that cocoon of quiet in
which he used to live his off-stage life. He
talks more now, he laughs more readily,
he smokes cigars (to try to cut down his
appetite), and he seems more assured.

It used to be that, on stage, he’d plant
his feet solidly apart, shut his eyes and,
thus unshakable, play his music straight
at you. Now he seems willing to let you
approach him and get it for yourself. The
music comes out, instead of being thrust
out.

It was the discovery that as a man, Col-
trane is simple and sincere, that led me to
re-examine his playing back in that time
when I wasn’t getting it. That and the
opinion of several people I respect, such
as Ralph Gleason, the critic, whose judg-
ment I know to be sound and informed
and who I know are not poseurs. And lo!
I found that under the sheets of sound
was music of exceptional lyricism.

Fora time, I operated on the theory that
lyricism was a new quality in Coltrane’s
playing. Then I got my hands on one of
the first albums he ever made. It was done
for Prestige in 1955, with Tadd Dameron.
All that is Coltrane was there then, in-
cluding the lyricism. Well, wrong again.

His playing has, of course, undergone
considerable evolution since then. Once,
a year or two ago, I mentioned to him
how little I'd got out of his playing before
and how much I was getting now. I said
I didn’t know whether his playing had
changed or I was listening and under-
standing better. “Probably a little of
each,” he said.

After a reflective moment, he said, “I
guess my playing must have changed.
You're the second person who’s told me
that recently.”

“Who was the other one?”

“My wife,” he said.

Bob Thiele, the Impulse a&r man, who
made two albums with Trane recently,
thinks that John’s playing has undergone
another spurt of rapid evolution lately and
that Duke Ellington, with whom Coltrane
worked on the first of the two albums,
may be the reason for it. When Thiele
asked John to do a retake on one tune,
Ellington said, “Don’t ask him to do an-
other. He'll end up imitating himself.”

Whatever the reason, John’s playing
does seem to have taken another large, if
not giant, step. He is more direct now,
and his solos seem tighter, shorter, more
disciplined of organization, which over-
comes the one reservation I had main-
tained about his music.

The other Impulse album is all ballads.
John wanted to do a ballad album, “for
variety.” Meaning a change of pace. And
perhaps he wanted to apprize those who
haven't discovered that he can be lyrical.

Donald Byrd, the trumpeter, once said,
“After all these years of playing, I’ve come
to the conclusion that one of the most
difficult things to do is play a melody
straight and play it well, with good tone
and feeling.”

That's what John did, faced with the
task of ballads. Up-tempo playing presents
one set of difficulties, ballads present an-
other. An unrecovered error is more con-
spicuous in a ballad than in a stream of
high-speed notes.

John had no trouble.

The approach was casual to the point
of being really odd. John’s group had never
played most of the tunes before. They ar-
rived at the date with music-store sheet
music of the songs. John, pianist McCoy
Tyner, bassist Jimmy Garrison, and drum-
mer Elvin Jones would discuss each tune,
write out copies of the changes they would
use, semi-rehearse for a half hour, and
then do it. Usually the tune was done in
one take.

John played the tunes straight, in the
in-choruses“unless you count his lovely
phrase-endings as deviations from melody.
When the development occurred, he made
his musical points quickly and succinctly.

He had a cigar between his fingers
through most of the date. He used to be
a rum-candy nut, but now it’s cigars: his
saxophone case, lying on the floor, was
full of them. He'd never looked more relaxed.

The growth of Coltrane apparently
continues unimpeded.

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