During the JATP European Tour of late 1961, Val Wilmer sat down with John Coltrane for an interview, published in the January 1962 edition of Jazz Journal, below. I also have two other blog entries covering this period :
John Coltrane's Only British Tour in 1961
John Coltrane in 1961
Conversation with Coltrane - Valerie Wilmer
“Melodically and harmonically their
improvisations struck my ear as gobble-
degook,” wrote John Tynan in the
November 23rd Down Beat. He was
speaking of the recent musical experi-
ments of John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy,
experiments which confounded even ar-
dent Coltrane supporters when he toured
England last year.
The in-person sound of Coltrane was
so different from his recorded work that
most people wondered whether their
auditory processes were in order. It
seems they were, for Coltrane himself
confirmed that his music had radically
altered over the last twelve months or so.
Meeting the man himself, it is hard
to believe that such a quiet, calm and
serious individual could be responsible
for the frantic “sheets of sound” which
emanate from his tenor saxophone, or
that such a sensitive person could think
of some of his uglier wailings on soprano
as beautiful.
“The sound you get on any instrument
depends on the conception of sound you
hear in your mind,” he told me. “It also
depends on your physical properties, such
as the shape and structure of the inside
of your mouth and throat. I only tried
to find the sound that I hear in my mind,
a sound any artist hears and hopes to
be able to produce. I suppose I did strive
to get it with using different reeds and
things as any artist does, but now I’ve
settled on a reed at least, and I use a
hard one.”
I mentioned that everyone had re-
marked on how different he sounded in
the flesh as opposed to on records. “I’ve
discussed this fault with the engineers
because the play-backs haven’t sounded
right,” he said. “They get too close to
the horn with the mikes and don’t give
the sound time to travel as they should.
Consequently, they don’t get enough of
the real timbre and they miss the whole
body of the sound. They get the inside
of it but not the outside as well.
“I’ve heard one or two albums with
this fault and I’ve tried to clear it up,
even suggested that I play away from the
mike as I’d do in a club, which makes a
much more pleasing sound. And of
course the loudness also varies accord-
ing to the reed you have. If you have a
good one you don’t change it—my good
ones usually last about two weeks.”
Whatever one thought of the actual
sound of John’s soprano, it was good to
know that a leading modernist had taken
up the instrument seemingly doomed to
oblivion with the passing of Sidney
Bechet. He has, in fact, been playing it
for about three years, and as so often
happens, took it up quite accidentally.
“A friend of mine had one and as I
hadn’t seen one too often before, I
looked at it, tried it, and liked the
sound. I. thought I’d like to use it a
little but I’d only just formed my own
group and didn’t think I’d actually use
it in public.
“I don’t consider my work on it a
success, because I’m at the same place
on it as I am on the tenor. Of course
the tenor has more body to it, but the
soprano lends itself to more lyrical play-
ing. There are times when I feel the
need for one and sometimes I feel the
need for the other. I try to use either one
according to what the tune feels like.”
It is also interesting to note that he
has recently started playing the harp be-
cause, “I like the sound. It’s one of the
most beautiful things and just for the
fact that it’s different, that’s what I like
about it. I got interested in it around
1958 when I was interested in playing
arpeggios instead of just straight lines,
and so naturally I looked at the harp.
It’s just pure sound, it’s not even like
a piano where you’ve got to hit the keys
to make the hammers hit the strings. A
harpist friend of mine showed me some
fingering but I don’t have time to sit
down and make much out of it. Right
now I don’t see any chance of making
jazz out of it.”
Another of John Coltrane’s innova-
tions was his recent use of two basses—
well, not quite an innovation because
Duke had the idea twenty years ago—
but his regular bassist Reggie Workman
has been playing the rhythm parts, while
the group was augmented with the ex-
excellent Art Davis. It was through the
latter that the idea came about:
“Id heard some Indian records and
liked the effect of the water-drum,” said
Trane, ‘and I thought another bass
would add that certain rhythmic sound.
We were playing a lot of stuff with a
sort of suspended rhythm, with one bass
playing a series of notes around one
point, and it seemed that another bass
could fill in the spaces in the straight
4/4 line.
“Art and I had been working quite
a bit together before the band started
and I was interested in bass lines and
sequences and he could help me. I actually
wanted Art to join me as regular bassist,
but he was all tied up with Dizzy and
so I had to get in Steve Davis and when
he left Art still couldn’t make ‘it, so I
got Reggie.
“Once I was in town and I said to
Art to come on down because I liked
him so much and I figured that he and
Reggie could exchange sets. But instead
of that they started playing some to-
gether and I got something from it. Reg-
gie played as usual and Art countered
it and it was very good. I only wish I
could have brought Art over with me.”
One night, according to Eric Dolphy,
“Wilbur Ware came in and up on the
stand so they had three basses going.
John and I got off the stand and listened
and Art Davis was really playing some
kind of bass. Mingus has some ‘know-
how’ of bass that he won’t tell anyone,”
said Eric, ““But Art sure does have some
‘know-how’ of bass like Mingus. John
made a date with two basses, one called
‘Africa’ on the Impulse label, and another
called ‘Olé’ on Atlantic, and Art plays
fantastic.”
There certainly seems no chance of
Coltrane’s group becoming stagnant, a
thing which he fears more than any
other, with the constant change of per-
sonnel combinations. “We had Wes
Montgomery out on the Coast,” he said,
“and I wanted very much to have him
here in England. He’s really something
else because he made everything sound
that much fuller.”
As for Eric Dolphy, whose playing
disappointed so many people when heard
in person, John said: “He just came in
and sat in with us for about three nights
and everybody enjoyed it, because his
presence added some fire to the band.
He and I have known each other a long
time, and I guess you’d say we were
students of the jazz scene,” he smiled.
“We'd exchange ideas and so we just
decided to go ahead and see if we could
do something within this group. Eric
is really gifted and I feel he’s going to
produce something inspired, but although
we’ve been talking about music for years,
I don’t know where he’s going, and J
don’t know where J’m going. He’s in-
terested in trying to progress, however,
and so am I, so we have quite a bit
in common.”
Apart from the epic performance of
My Favourite Thing which lasted for
half-an-hour at all the London concerts,
the majority of Coltrane’s material is
original. Of his writing he said: I think
playing and writing go hand in hand.
I don’t feel that at this stage of the game
I can actually sit down and say I’m
going to write a piece that will do this
or that for the people—a thing which
some artists can do—but I’m trying to
tune myself so I can look to myself and
to nature and to other sounds in music
and interpret things that I feel there and
present them to people. Eventually I hope
to reach a stage where I have a vast
warehouse of study and knowledge to be
able to produce-any certain thing.
“Duke Ellington is one person who
can do this—that’s really heavy musician-
ship and I haven’t reached that stage yet.
I’ve been predominately a soloist all my
natural life, and now I’m a soloist with
my own band, and this has lead me into
this other thing: what am I going to
play and why?
“My material is mainly my own, and
I find some of my best work comes
from the most challenging material.
Sometimes we write things to be easy,
sometimes to be hard, it depends on
what we want to do.
“A year ago we
few standards which made up a
third of the book, but now a
number of people, certainly Ornette and
Eric, have been responsible for other
influences.
“At the time I left Miles I was trying
to add a lot of sequences to my solo
work, putting chords to the things I was
playing, and using things I could play
a little more music on.
“It was before I formed my own group
that I had the rhythm section playing
these sequences forward, and I made
‘Giant Steps’ with some other guys and
carried the idea on into my band. But
it was hard to make some things swing
with the rhythm section playing these
chords, and Miles advised me to abandon
the idea of the rhythm section playing
these sequences, and to do it only my-
self. But around this time I heard
Ornette who had abandoned chords com-
pletely and that helped me to think
clearly about what I wanted to do.
“It was Miles who made me want to
be a much better musician. He gave me
some of the most listenable moments
I've had in music, and he also gave me
an appreciation for simplicity. He in-
fluenced me quite a bit in music in every
way. I used to want to play tenor the
way he played trumpet when I used to
listen to his records. But when I joined
him I realised I could never play like
that, and I think that’s what made me
go the opposite way.
“Recently I’ve been doing songs with
the rhythm section having more freedom
and not being bound to. chordal
structures, but still giving the soloist
just as much freedom. Sometimes we
start with one chord and drop it later,
and improvise on the bass line or the
piano, and this I find much easier to
do on original material. I haven’t done
it on a ‘standard’ yet, but maybe I will
soon. But unless I find a simple one,
there are no more break-throughs on
those standards for me.
“There are some great songs that have
been played in this music and only need
a new approach to revive them. Faced
with this fact, I couldn’t revise my
musical approach drastically, and so I
said well, maybe I’m really doing some-
thing with this harmonic approach and
should stick with it for a while.
“There are going to be songs with one
chord and songs with no chords, which
in my case means freedom to see if I
can develop more in a melodic fashion
through these unlimited harmonies.”
Although he himself is not certain of
the exact directions in which his music
is going, this highly intelligent musician
is striving for a music that will doubtless
be entirely different to any we have heard
before. He has been called the only
important jazzman since Bird, and I
asked him what he thought of his own
contribution to jazz.
“Basically I am trying not to stagnate.
I go this way and I go that way and I
don’t know where I’m going next. But
if I should get stagnant, I'd lose my
interest.
“There are so many things to be con-
sidered in making music. The whole
question of life itself; my life in which
there are many things on which I don’t
think I’ve reached a final conclusion;
there are matters I don’t think I’ve
covered completely, and all these things
have to be covered before you make
your music sound any way. You have
to grow to know.
“When I was younger, I didn’t think
this would happen, but now I know that
I've still got a long way to go. Maybe
when I'm sixty I'll be satisfied with what
I'm doing, but I don’t know... . I’m sure
that later on my ideas will carry more
conviction.
“T know that I want to produce beauti-
ful music, music that does things to
people that they need. Music that will
uplift, and make them happy—those are
the qualities I'd like to produce.
“Some people say ‘your music sounds
angry’, or ‘tortured’, or ‘spiritual’, or
‘overpowering’ or something; you get all
kinds of things, you know. Some say
they feel elated, and so you never know
where it’s going to go. All a musician
can do is to get closer to the sources
of nature, and so feel that he is in
communion with the natural laws. Then
he can feel that he is interpreting them
to the best of his ability, and can try
to convey that to others.
“As to the music itself and its future,
it won’t lessen any in its ability to move
people, I feel certain of that. It will be
just as great or greater.
“But as to how it’s going to do that,
I don’t know. It’s left to the men who’re
going to do it—they would know!”
Ref : Jazz Journal Jan '62
John Coltrane's Only British Tour in 1961
John Coltrane in 1961
Conversation with Coltrane - Valerie Wilmer
“Melodically and harmonically their
improvisations struck my ear as gobble-
degook,” wrote John Tynan in the
November 23rd Down Beat. He was
speaking of the recent musical experi-
ments of John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy,
experiments which confounded even ar-
dent Coltrane supporters when he toured
England last year.
The in-person sound of Coltrane was
so different from his recorded work that
most people wondered whether their
auditory processes were in order. It
seems they were, for Coltrane himself
confirmed that his music had radically
altered over the last twelve months or so.
Meeting the man himself, it is hard
to believe that such a quiet, calm and
serious individual could be responsible
for the frantic “sheets of sound” which
emanate from his tenor saxophone, or
that such a sensitive person could think
of some of his uglier wailings on soprano
as beautiful.
“The sound you get on any instrument
depends on the conception of sound you
hear in your mind,” he told me. “It also
depends on your physical properties, such
as the shape and structure of the inside
of your mouth and throat. I only tried
to find the sound that I hear in my mind,
a sound any artist hears and hopes to
be able to produce. I suppose I did strive
to get it with using different reeds and
things as any artist does, but now I’ve
settled on a reed at least, and I use a
hard one.”
I mentioned that everyone had re-
marked on how different he sounded in
the flesh as opposed to on records. “I’ve
discussed this fault with the engineers
because the play-backs haven’t sounded
right,” he said. “They get too close to
the horn with the mikes and don’t give
the sound time to travel as they should.
Consequently, they don’t get enough of
the real timbre and they miss the whole
body of the sound. They get the inside
of it but not the outside as well.
“I’ve heard one or two albums with
this fault and I’ve tried to clear it up,
even suggested that I play away from the
mike as I’d do in a club, which makes a
much more pleasing sound. And of
course the loudness also varies accord-
ing to the reed you have. If you have a
good one you don’t change it—my good
ones usually last about two weeks.”
Whatever one thought of the actual
sound of John’s soprano, it was good to
know that a leading modernist had taken
up the instrument seemingly doomed to
oblivion with the passing of Sidney
Bechet. He has, in fact, been playing it
for about three years, and as so often
happens, took it up quite accidentally.
“A friend of mine had one and as I
hadn’t seen one too often before, I
looked at it, tried it, and liked the
sound. I. thought I’d like to use it a
little but I’d only just formed my own
group and didn’t think I’d actually use
it in public.
“I don’t consider my work on it a
success, because I’m at the same place
on it as I am on the tenor. Of course
the tenor has more body to it, but the
soprano lends itself to more lyrical play-
ing. There are times when I feel the
need for one and sometimes I feel the
need for the other. I try to use either one
according to what the tune feels like.”
It is also interesting to note that he
has recently started playing the harp be-
cause, “I like the sound. It’s one of the
most beautiful things and just for the
fact that it’s different, that’s what I like
about it. I got interested in it around
1958 when I was interested in playing
arpeggios instead of just straight lines,
and so naturally I looked at the harp.
It’s just pure sound, it’s not even likea piano where you’ve got to hit the keys
to make the hammers hit the strings. A
harpist friend of mine showed me some
fingering but I don’t have time to sit
down and make much out of it. Right
now I don’t see any chance of making
jazz out of it.”
Another of John Coltrane’s innova-
tions was his recent use of two basses—
well, not quite an innovation because
Duke had the idea twenty years ago—
but his regular bassist Reggie Workman
has been playing the rhythm parts, while
the group was augmented with the ex-
excellent Art Davis. It was through the
latter that the idea came about:
“Id heard some Indian records and
liked the effect of the water-drum,” said
Trane, ‘and I thought another bass
would add that certain rhythmic sound.
We were playing a lot of stuff with a
sort of suspended rhythm, with one bass
playing a series of notes around one
point, and it seemed that another bass
could fill in the spaces in the straight
4/4 line.
“Art and I had been working quite
a bit together before the band started
and I was interested in bass lines and
sequences and he could help me. I actually
wanted Art to join me as regular bassist,
but he was all tied up with Dizzy and
so I had to get in Steve Davis and when
he left Art still couldn’t make ‘it, so I
got Reggie.
“Once I was in town and I said to
Art to come on down because I liked
him so much and I figured that he and
Reggie could exchange sets. But instead
of that they started playing some to-
gether and I got something from it. Reg-
gie played as usual and Art countered
it and it was very good. I only wish I
could have brought Art over with me.”
One night, according to Eric Dolphy,
stand so they had three basses going.
John and I got off the stand and listened
and Art Davis was really playing some
kind of bass. Mingus has some ‘know-
how’ of bass that he won’t tell anyone,”
said Eric, ““But Art sure does have some
‘know-how’ of bass like Mingus. John
made a date with two basses, one called
‘Africa’ on the Impulse label, and another
called ‘Olé’ on Atlantic, and Art plays
fantastic.”
There certainly seems no chance of
Coltrane’s group becoming stagnant, a
thing which he fears more than any
other, with the constant change of per-
sonnel combinations. “We had Wes
Montgomery out on the Coast,” he said,
“and I wanted very much to have him
here in England. He’s really something
else because he made everything sound
that much fuller.”
As for Eric Dolphy, whose playing
disappointed so many people when heard
in person, John said: “He just came in
and sat in with us for about three nights
and everybody enjoyed it, because his
presence added some fire to the band.
He and I have known each other a long
time, and I guess you’d say we were
students of the jazz scene,” he smiled.
“We'd exchange ideas and so we just
decided to go ahead and see if we could
do something within this group. Eric
is really gifted and I feel he’s going to
produce something inspired, but although
we’ve been talking about music for years,
I don’t know where he’s going, and J
don’t know where J’m going. He’s in-
terested in trying to progress, however,
and so am I, so we have quite a bit
in common.”
Apart from the epic performance of
My Favourite Thing which lasted for
half-an-hour at all the London concerts,
the majority of Coltrane’s material is
original. Of his writing he said: I think
playing and writing go hand in hand.
I don’t feel that at this stage of the game
I can actually sit down and say I’m
going to write a piece that will do this
or that for the people—a thing which
some artists can do—but I’m trying to
tune myself so I can look to myself and
to nature and to other sounds in music
and interpret things that I feel there and
present them to people. Eventually I hope
to reach a stage where I have a vast
warehouse of study and knowledge to be
able to produce-any certain thing.
“Duke Ellington is one person who
can do this—that’s really heavy musician-
ship and I haven’t reached that stage yet.
I’ve been predominately a soloist all my
natural life, and now I’m a soloist with
my own band, and this has lead me into
this other thing: what am I going to
play and why?
“My material is mainly my own, and
I find some of my best work comes
from the most challenging material.
Sometimes we write things to be easy,
sometimes to be hard, it depends on
what we want to do.
“A year ago we
few standards which made up a
third of the book, but now a
number of people, certainly Ornette and
Eric, have been responsible for other
influences.
“At the time I left Miles I was trying
to add a lot of sequences to my solo
work, putting chords to the things I was
playing, and using things I could play
a little more music on.
“It was before I formed my own group
that I had the rhythm section playing
these sequences forward, and I made
‘Giant Steps’ with some other guys and
carried the idea on into my band. But
it was hard to make some things swing
with the rhythm section playing these
chords, and Miles advised me to abandon
the idea of the rhythm section playing
these sequences, and to do it only my-
self. But around this time I heard
Ornette who had abandoned chords com-
pletely and that helped me to think
clearly about what I wanted to do.
“It was Miles who made me want to
be a much better musician. He gave me
some of the most listenable moments
I've had in music, and he also gave me
an appreciation for simplicity. He in-
fluenced me quite a bit in music in every
way. I used to want to play tenor the
way he played trumpet when I used to
listen to his records. But when I joined
him I realised I could never play like
that, and I think that’s what made me
go the opposite way.
“Recently I’ve been doing songs with
the rhythm section having more freedom
and not being bound to. chordal
structures, but still giving the soloist
just as much freedom. Sometimes we
start with one chord and drop it later,
and improvise on the bass line or the
piano, and this I find much easier to
do on original material. I haven’t done
it on a ‘standard’ yet, but maybe I will
soon. But unless I find a simple one,
there are no more break-throughs on
those standards for me.
“There are some great songs that have
been played in this music and only need
a new approach to revive them. Faced
with this fact, I couldn’t revise my
musical approach drastically, and so I
said well, maybe I’m really doing some-
thing with this harmonic approach and
should stick with it for a while.
“There are going to be songs with one
chord and songs with no chords, which
in my case means freedom to see if I
can develop more in a melodic fashion
through these unlimited harmonies.”
Although he himself is not certain of
the exact directions in which his music
is going, this highly intelligent musician
is striving for a music that will doubtless
be entirely different to any we have heard
before. He has been called the only
important jazzman since Bird, and I
asked him what he thought of his own
contribution to jazz.
“Basically I am trying not to stagnate.
I go this way and I go that way and I
don’t know where I’m going next. But
if I should get stagnant, I'd lose my
interest.
“There are so many things to be con-
sidered in making music. The whole
question of life itself; my life in which
there are many things on which I don’t
think I’ve reached a final conclusion;
there are matters I don’t think I’ve
covered completely, and all these things
have to be covered before you make
your music sound any way. You have
to grow to know.
“When I was younger, I didn’t think
this would happen, but now I know that
I've still got a long way to go. Maybe
when I'm sixty I'll be satisfied with what
I'm doing, but I don’t know... . I’m sure
that later on my ideas will carry more
conviction.
“T know that I want to produce beauti-
ful music, music that does things to
people that they need. Music that will
uplift, and make them happy—those are
the qualities I'd like to produce.
“Some people say ‘your music sounds
angry’, or ‘tortured’, or ‘spiritual’, or
‘overpowering’ or something; you get all
kinds of things, you know. Some say
they feel elated, and so you never know
where it’s going to go. All a musician
can do is to get closer to the sources
of nature, and so feel that he is in
communion with the natural laws. Then
he can feel that he is interpreting them
to the best of his ability, and can try
to convey that to others.
“As to the music itself and its future,
it won’t lessen any in its ability to move
people, I feel certain of that. It will be
just as great or greater.
“But as to how it’s going to do that,
I don’t know. It’s left to the men who’re
going to do it—they would know!”
Ref : Jazz Journal Jan '62
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