The New Jazz Musings

In my search for articles I'm finding that quite a few are articulate, intelligent, incredibly insightful and interesting. None more so than this 1971 piece by Barry McRae, published in the Jazz Journal. McRae writes about John Coltrane - The Impulse Years, but expands further outside for perspective and his contemporary position during the 1960s. I've noticed some earlier British articles on Trane miss out versus US journals because it was more difficult to get all the albums. Here however, McRae references not just Trane's Impulse output, but also that of Pharoah Sanders and Alice Coltrane. John Coltrane - The Impulse Years by Barry McRae That jazz has moved forward in both spiritual as well as a musical sense in the sixties is an obvious fact. Preoccupation with aesthetic values has sometimes obscured the total evolutionary picture, however, and a great number of words has been dissipated on the significance of the music rather than its style and format. The early free f...

I bought this 1970 magazine when I saw the full page John Coltrane photo by Bob Thiele. What I didn't expect was the associated article by John Postgate. I hadn't seen another article by him in my British jazz magazines from (mostly) the 1960s. It was the article title that initially had me searching online. Apparently an eminent British microbiologist, Fellow of the Royal Society, amateur dixieland musician and jazz writer. He was Gramophone's main jazz critic for more than twenty years ! Firstly, I'm sure the title was a take on the Blackface 'light entertainment' TV show, The Black and White Minstrel Show that ran during the 1960s and 1970s. A show that with today's beliefs is seen as highly offensive. Not just today's beliefs - I remember it being 'well dodgy' when I was young. Postgate states that jazz in 1970 is in disarray. I've seen many examples of the old guard during the 1960s complaining about modern jazz and avant-garde. However,...

THE MAN WHO WALKED IN BALANCE  An Article By KALAMU YA SALAAM Poet Kalamu Ya Salaam wrote a piece in the Sep/Oct 1992 issue of Coda Magazine, which combined his reviews of the current reissue of a bunch of Coltrane works on CD (box-sets), some other histories and his personal Trane journey. It's the first time I've seen the Major Works on CD and Live in Japan on CD critiqued in a major publication. Live in Japan rates highly with Kalamu.  He also theorises that Coltrane was a Black revolutionary musician. If you compare with Bob Thiele from another article in the same magazine, Thiele believed that people were reading too much into his music, and he wasn't an anti-establishment guy like LeRoi Jones. Certainly, contemporaries like Archie Shepp and Max Roach were more active, and vocal in their actions and beliefs. Trane was a revolutionary musician, and Black. For sure Coltrane felt aggrieved at the injustices of the time, but it's still debatable the scale of its influe...