Tag: rashiedali

John Coltrane, Interstellar Space

Album of the Week, May 25, 2024

When I think about the final years of John Coltrane’s life, of the flurry of recording sessions from the end of 1965 to his death in 1967, many of which would not see the light of day until years afterward, I am reminded of Anne Sexton’s poem: “The story ends with me still rowing.”

In February 1967, a week after he played on the recordings that resulted in the posthumous albums Expression and Stellar Regions, Trane’s new regular drummer Rashied Ali drove with his friend Jimmy Vass to Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in Englewood Cliffs, expecting to record a session with the band. (Ali, another Philadelphia player, had joined Trane on Meditations, after studying with Philly Joe Jones and playing with Sonny Rollins, Bill Dixon and Paul Bley). But when they arrived at the studio, no one was there. Biographer Ben Ratliff relates:

“Ain’t nobody coming?” [Ali] said to Coltrane.

“No, it’s just you and me.”

“What are we playing? Is it fast? Is it slow?”

“Whatever you want it to be. Come on. I’m going to ring some bells. You can do an 8-bar intro.”

Though everything was recorded with no rehearsal and in only a single take, the opening track, “Mars,” sounds as though it burst fully formed from Ali and Trane. With an opening invocation on shaken sleigh bells, Trane seems to be summoning all the gods at once. Ali answers with a mighty crash of drums, and then Trane enters with a four note theme (I – IV – IIIm – I) that he immediately begins improvising on. Ali does not stick to a single rhythm, offering Trane the flexibility to sing (and scream, and chant) through his saxophone in whatever rhythm he wants. Which is not to say that Trane performs in an unstructured way. Free from conventional meter, he responds by constructing his own patterns from the basic repeated rhythmic motif, which, as in the beginning of A Love Supreme, he explores in multiple different tonalities, seeming to circle the harmonic wheel until he exhausts it, then taking a break and turning once more to the bells. Ali burns out his drums with relentless polyrhythms, accompanied by Trane on bells, to the end of the track.

The opening of “Venus” picks up where “Mars” left off, only instead of burning out on the drums, Ali seems to speak to the bells with cymbals and short bursts of the snare, as Trane plays… a melody? Here we get Trane the inspired balladeer, only instead of a standard or even the tender originals on Crescent, here he seems to be playing a hymn of love and praise. This isn’t a soppy love ballad; indeed, after the initial statement it seems to rise in ecstatic chanting, slowly escalating through different keys until it reaches a fever pitch. But Trane somehow lands the plane, bringing it back down from that plane of intensity into a finish that would have been at home on Lush Life.

Another invocation of the deity opens “Jupiter,” and this time Ali seems to call for the skies to open with crackling snare work. Trane’s melody here sounds a bit like something from Sun Ship, and as before, he creates a structure around him, this time with descending sheets of sound and a riff around a descending minor second. Following this he seems to take off, ascending into the highest reaches of his horn, then creating new noises as he pushes beyond. As if pulled down by Jupiter’s massive gravity, he descends again, then slingshots backup to the opening orbit and beyond in a soft chorus of bells.

Ali’s drums seem to search across the emptiness of space at the opening of “Saturn,” bursting with small pockets of life separated by irregular stretches of silence. He settles into a loping beat in which Trane’s saxophone finds, improbably, a bluesy waltz. The tune serves as a jumping off point for Trane to circle the center of chaos once more, alternating between flights of tonality and bursts of ecstatic wailing. At one point, his searing bursts of notes seemingly leaving vapor trails, he wanders away from the microphone for just a minute, as though his relentless searching is finally causing him to pull away from this plane of existence. But he circles back, snaps into the tune once more, and seemingly reveals the boundless exploration to have been bounded within this earth after all.

And so, with the utmost regret, we come to the end of our exploration of the music and influence of John Coltrane. And as we have heard today, no matter how far out his disciples got, Trane had already gone there, and farther. Were it not for the liver cancer that claimed his life at the age of 40 just five months after this recording was made, one wonder just how far out he would have gone. But in recordings like Interstellar Space, we get to hear how he brought together all the strands of his musical curiosity, from sheets of sound to intense lyricism to improvisation without a net to, above all, the endless search, and practiced them up until the very end.

We can continue the journey no further, so next week we’ll move onto something completely different. In the meantime, you can listen to this week’s album here:

Note: CD versions of Interstellar Space contain two additional tracks: a rendition of “Leo,” which would feature in many live recordings in the last 18 months of his life, and a longer version of “Jupiter,” called “Jupiter Variations.” The original release, constrained to the duration of an LP, contained only the tracks we’ve reviewed today.

Archie Shepp, On This Night

Album of the Week, March 30, 2024

Though their playing time together was limited, Archie Shepp would forever be linked to his mentor John Coltrane, in no small part because of the record that the two of them shared, New Thing at Newport. Recorded July 2, 1965, the record featured the two quartets performing independently, rather than together, but demonstrated the affinity between the two saxophonists’ styles. But for me, Shepp’s group is interesting because it features his performing partnership with another undersung musician, vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson, a partnership documented more fully on today’s record, On This Night.

Hutcherson (born in 1941 in Los Angeles) was just 24 the year that both New Thing at Newport and On This Night were recorded, but he had already been playing professionally for years, recording his first session at the age of 19 with the Les McCann Trio. Sessions with Herbie Lewis followed and led to Hutcherson joining Jackie McLean’s group on the Blue Note recording One Step Beyond. More Blue Note sessions followed, including collaborations with Grachan Moncure, Eric Dolphy, Tony Williams, and Grant Green. The rest of the players on this session, Hutcherson’s first with Shepp, included J.C. Moses and David Izenson on the closing track, which was recorded at the same session that yielded “Malcolm, Malcolm, Semper Malcolm” on last week’s Fire Music, as well as Henry Grimes on bass, Ed Blackwell on rhythm logs, and both Joe Chambers and Rashied Ali on drums. (We’ll hear more about Ali another time.)

As with Fire Music, Shepp recorded the album in two sessions, the March 9 session shared with Fire Music and an August 12 session that yielded the rest of the tracks, save one. “The Mac Man,” from the second session, starts the album with a post-bop flavor, Hutcherson and Shepp playing the short theme and immediately dropping into mutual improvisation, Shepp blowing sheets of sound while Hutcherson surfs chromatic waves through the cosmos and Grimes explores different modal scales on the bass. The group comes together into something like a blues that just as quickly morphs into a ballad, if only for a moment, before returning to the blues shuffle that reveals itself as the main tune. The blues morphs back into the opening cosmic exploration over what can only be described as a percussion freak-out led by Ed Blackwell’s rhythm logs, before settling into a final loping exploration in a minor key.

Hutcherson modulates into the opening chords of “In a Sentimental Mood,” conjuring a more familiar tonality out of the chaos, as Shepp’s free explorations similarly lead into a statement of the melody of the Ellington/Kurtz/Mills standard that manages to be both delicate and woozy at the same time, evoking the robust articulation of Johnny Hodges. It’s a stunning tonal shift after “The Mac Man.”

“Gingerbread, Gingerbread Boy,” recorded live at Newport, is much freer. Beginning with a bass line from Barre Phillips, the ensemble improvises around major and diminished minor chords from Hutcherson before abruptly shifting into a fast melody that alternates with a slower section. The band then enters hyperspace, collectively exploring the chordal space of the fast section as Shepp overblows his horn over sustained notes in the vibes. The exploration continues as Hutcherson surrounds the group with clouds of vibes, and Shepp ends his solo with a repeated melodic line (VIII – V – VI – III – IV – VI – II – VII). After Hutcherson takes a turn, the melodic line returns, now played over a slow blues. A burst of the fast melody closes the performance, and the side.

“On This Night (If That Day Would Come)” is another thing entirely. A tribute to W.E.B. Dubois, the opening could easily be a 20th century classical art song, in this case performed by Christine Spencer and accompanied by Shepp on piano. The soprano performs Shepp’s poem that calls for the end of racial injustice: “Now is the time for all men to stand/Rise up you starved and toiling masses/My brothers sister all/We cannot fail, justice is our avenging angel/All hail the birth of truth … And the worker’s voice resounds: Give back the valleys, steppes and the plains./They are mine, they are mine./On this night (if that great day would come)/The dawn of freedom/For the people shall take arms as one/No power can prevail/We cannot fail now…” After the soprano leads out of the melody, the band, now joined by Hutcherson, plays a howl before Grimes leads them into a blues, over which Shepp blows a cool solo that rapidly heats up before relaxing back into the blues. Spencer returns with a reprise of the poem, asking, “Behold the blood from my brother’s veins/How will we remember?” and accompanied by Shepp, this time on the saxophone. It’s moving and completely unlike anything else that we will hear from Shepp.

“The Original Mr. Sonny Boy Williamson,” named after the famed blues harmonica player and singer (of “Bring It On Home” fame), is not a blues, but the melody is easily the most quotable on the record before Shepp begins his improvisation. He burns out over chords that seem slightly familiar—is that a touch of “So What” in Hutcherson’s lines?—before the band comes back to the theme once more. It’s an almost peaceful tune, a peace that’s promptly shattered by the last track, “The Pickaninny (picked clean — no more — or can you back back doodlebug).” Starting with a clownish theme, the band shifts into new melodies and improvisations that take us into new places. As Nat Hentoff says in the liner notes, “Having been picked clean, the Pickaninny now knows where he’s at — and he’s moving.”

Assembled though it may be from a grab bag of recording sessions, On This Night still stands for me as a monument, though admittedly sometimes an inscrutable one. Held together by the interplay between Shepp and Hutcherson, and the mighty rhythm sections on each track, it’s well worth seeking out in the original LP form.* As for Shepp, he’s still recording, putting out new records every few years, many on his Paris-based Archieball label. The 2017 joint recording with Jason Moran, Let My People Go, was a highlight of that year in jazz for me. But his influence on Trane acted like an orbital boost, slingshotting Trane’s exploratory tendencies into a higher gear. We’ll hear an outcome from all that exploration next time.

You can listen to the album here:

* When On This Night was reissued on CD alongside New Thing at Newport, the reissue producers moved “Gingerbread, Gingerbread Boy” onto the latter recording along with the rest of Shepp’s Newport set. They then filled the void in the set with several alternate takes and outtakes from the session, as well as bringing “Malcolm, Malcolm, Semper Malcolm” from Fire Music. While the resulting compilation makes some sense, it hardly resembles the original intention of the compilation. The original LP is worth seeking out—as the price tag on my 1974 reissue copy (top) indicates, it’s even affordable.

P.S. – If Bobby Hutcherson’s playing intrigues you, you can check him out as both a sideman and a leader on the “Positive Vibrations” edition of Exfiltration Radio.