A couple of weeks back on my Insta I posted the CD reissue of a 1977 double album of (mostly) tunes from Coltrane's Stockholm concerts in 1963. Two being from Berlin. Norman Granz had organised another annual tour of Europe for the John Coltrane Quartet, playing eleven venues in eight countries. They played two shows at the Stockholm Konserthuset, the first date on the tour. Four days later they played the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. The 2nd show didn't start until midnight and there seemed to be some issues. Perhaps Michael James was feeling a bit peeved due to the late start since his comments don't seem to gel with the actual recordings from a few days earlier. Having said that, perhaps the performance did suffer. Anyway, interesting review.
The JOHN COLTRANE Quartet in Amsterdam by Michael James
THE SCENE IN Amsterdam's Concertgebouw at midnight on Saturday, 27th October, was to my mind more typical of a rock-and-roll concert, and an ill-organised one at that, than a jazz presentation. The group began to play before half the ticket holders had managed to elbow their way into the hall, and even when the doors had been closed the gangways were packed with amateur photographers who assumed all sorts of curious postures, some kneeling, some crouching, and others bending over backwards and holding their cameras aloft in order to get the pictures they wanted. This had the not unexpected effect of irritating the people in the nearby seats and scuffles broke out continually throughout the first half. Furthermore, spectators never ceased encroaching on the rostrum itself, and the attendants were kept hard at work dealing summarily with these intruders. One memory of the evening I particularly treasure is of a bespectacled would-be Gjon Mili who crept craftily up to within a few centimetres of Elvin Jones's hi-hat and kept his lens trained on the drummer from this position, clicking steadfastly away throughout the whole of the final number, not in the least deterred by the car-splitting barrage of sound Jones was busy drawing from his kit!
With so many distractions it was amazing that Coltrane and his men managed to turn in any sort of performance at all.They began poorly, with a lacklustre rendition of My favourite things in which the climaxes, instead of being gradually built up, sounded almost arbitrary. There followed a ballad feature, You leave me breathless. Here the leader switched from soprano to tenor and produced some attractive paraphrases of the tune, but spoilt the final effect with a coda that not only went on for an unconscionable length of time but was also melodically repetitive. It is worth remarking that even at this very leisurely tempo the increase in musical tension was largely engineered not by Coltrane but by Elvin Jones, whose work throughout the evening was nothing short of magnificent.
"You want to play all your old crap when you go to Europe, man" was the advice Jackie McLean got before he travelled to London in 1961 to appear onstage in The Connection. Coltrane's choice of opening numbers suggested that he may have received similar counsel. That it was worth taking from the purely material viewpoint was stressed by the indiscriminate applause with which the audience saluted these two items, but I find it hard to believe that he or his sidemen were satisfied with the way they interpreted these over-familiar tunes. The next number, whose title, like those of the others, was unannounced, found the band much more deeply involved in their music. Cast in the same mould as Impressions or Chasin' the Trane, it began with a tenor theme statement that was immediately followed by a piano solo whose quality came through despite the lamentable acoustics. Garrison's ensuing bass solo was less impressive, not so much because of his questionable taste in humorous effects as because the overall texture was much thinner, Jones and Tyner being tacet for much of the time. With Coltrane's return to the microphone, however, we were shown for the first time that night just how emotionally compelling his music can be. The three-part interplay between tenor, bass and percussion was no carefully ordered affair, but a bitterly fought-out struggle in which the saxophonist's melodic line, at first composed of fairly long phrases,eventually disintegrated into a series of jagged fragments under the onslaught of Jones's thunderous drumming. The absence of any strict harmonic cycle and the freedom with which Garrison played, abhorring any suggestion of a rigid four-to-the-bar beat, meant that Coltrane could seek no shelter in a conventional musical pattern from the bass drum explosions, crush rolls and arhythmic cymbal pulse of his drummer. It was as though his efforts to create continuity of shape and line came to naught in the face of his sidemen's relentless antagonism, so that little by little melodic appeal gave way to the plethora of rhythm, only to reassert itself in the final theme statement. That the band could produce this effect without jeopardising the tremendous impetus they had set up from the very first bar was, I thought, a staggering feat. This eventual predominance of rhythmic complexity over melody when Coltrane's group is functioning in that way, as it so frequently did that night, explains why he has met with so much adverse comment and also, incidentally, tends to set him apart from Ornette Coleman, another player whose aims have been widely misunderstood by his detractors. Coleman's thinking, I would say, is essentially horizontal: he delights in evolving one phrase out of another to create a continually changing melodic line. Coltrane's, on the other hand, is analytical in nature, as though he were bent on cutting away the superfluities of his thematic material to get at its rhythmic ossature; and to carry this aim through he depends on an unprecedented extent on the co-operation of his sidemen.
The band played four more numbers that night. Two of them were ballads, if that term covers the harshly dramatic effect Coltrane conjures up at slow tempo. The first, I believe, was Alonzo Levister's Slow dance. Besides offering some superb high-register tenor work, it also contained a charming solo by McCoy Tyner, and one was led once again to reflect that it was a pity the hall did not do justice to this musician's sensitivity of touch and fine feeling for chordal colour. I did not recognise the other ballad, which in one respect at least was more interesting, since it found the leader simultaneously laying down two lines on his soprano, alternating runs at the top of the instrument's range with recurrent single notes in the low register.
The other two items, Village blues and a swashbuckling Mr. P.C. taken at over seventy bars to the minute, fell into the same stylistic bracket as the fast number the group had played just before the interval, and were quite as successful. They made it clear that the gradual erosion of melody, as the word is conventionally understood, by the sheer weight and richness of Garrison's, and particularly Jones's, polyrhythms, was no isolated phenomenon, but, as I have hinted above, found its echo in several other aspects of the band's music. Most prominent of these were the leader's harmonic freedom and his growing fondness, over the course of any one number, for distortions of pitch that in another man's work might be highly questionable but in their own context brook no such criticism, since they serve to intensify the whole emotional effect. The impression the listener receives at such times is of extreme nervous tension, as though Coltrane and his men carry their music to the very brink of disorder, yet somehow never quite transgress the boundary which separates intricacy from chaos.
Ref : Jazz Monthly Dec '63, Afro Blue Impressions sleeve notes, John Coltrane Reference
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