https://socialistaction.org/2017/06/22/films-john-coltrane-lite/
Films: John Coltrane Lite
/ 1 hour ago
June 2017 Coltrane 2By MARTY GOODMAN
“Chasing Trane,” a documentary film by John Scheinfeld.
“Trane is now a scope of feeling. A more fixed traveler, whose wildest
onslaughts are gorgeous artifacts not even deaf people should miss.” —
Amiri Baraka, poet, jazz critic, and activist
In July 1967, I heard on a late night jazz radio show in Miami that
visionary jazz saxophonist John Coltrane had died at the age of 40 of
liver cancer. Doom and gloom was the mood, although the host tried his
best to assure us that jazz would live on—somehow. Now, 50 years later,
a new Coltrane biopic film, “Chasing Trane,” is out. Written and
directed by documentarian John Scheinfeld, it is the first film made in
cooperation with the Coltrane family.
“Chasing Trane” is jazz retrofitted for the mainstream—that is, mostly
white, middle-class jazz fans. But it is an inadequate and misleading
introduction for jazz beginners. It is an anti-jazz avant-garde work
that simultaneously lionizes an avant-garde icon. There isn’t one
complete performance in the entire film, so people cannot judge
Coltrane’s adventurous music for themselves. A “Coltrane lite” film was
apparently what director Sheinfeld hoped for. Mission accomplished.
Coltrane was a jazz revolutionary, the avant-garde’s leading persona in
an era of civil rights and emerging Black nationalism.
To its credit, “Chasing Trane” tells the story of the musician’s early
life in Jim Crow North Carolina. As a boy, John was immersed in Black
church music; two grandfathers were preachers. As African American
Professor Cornell West explained in the film, ”Black music was a Black
response to being terrorized and traumatized … that’s Black music, a
response to a catastrophe.”
Coltrane was never overtly political, although he did attend a Malcolm X
speech on the recommendation of his first wife Naima, a Muslim. But
Coltrane was deeply affected by the Black struggle, Dr. King, and, as
the film highlights, the 1963 racist bombing of a Black church in
Birmingham, Ala., that killed four African American girls. Coltrane
dedicated his mournful piece, “Alabama” to the victims, it is said, set
to the cadence of an MLK speech.
In those times, Coltrane and the overwhelmingly African American jazz
avant-garde were challenging conventional Western music’s structure,
melody, and harmony. In particular, the avant-garde became famous for
discordant, unconventional honks and angry screams. The music was
sometimes overtly political, sometimes spiritual, often a mixture of
both or simply neither. What was always clear was that society must change!
The mostly white jazz old-guard pushed back. In 1962, prominent jazz
critic Leonard Feather, writing in Downbeat, the leading jazz magazine,
called the avant-garde “anti-jazz,” a shot aimed mostly at Coltrane.
Even jazz musicians got up and walked out on Coltrane, as did European
audiences in hearing the work of early 20th-century modernist classical
composers.
Coltrane’s evolution
After the passing of several family members, John took up music. After
high school, he joined his family in Philadelphia, where he enlisted in
the Navy in 1945 and joined a Navy jazz band. By ’45 he had caught live
jazz god Charlie “Bird” Parker, the center of the be-bop revolution.
Parker, and his gifted sidemen, trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and pianist
Bud Powell, played a new, fast-paced jazz tempo that was distinctly
urban and reflective of postwar Black life. Said Coltrane, “the first
time I heard Bird play, it hit me right between the eyes.” John was
screaming.
June 2017 Coltrane sailor
John Coltrane in the U.S. Navy, 1945, when he made his first jazz
recordings.
After playing with lesser bands as a would-be Charlie Parker, Coltrane
got to play occasionally with his idol Parker in the late ’40s. From
1949-51, Coltrane began traveling with Dizzy Gillespie and then in 1955,
with trumpet superstar Miles Davis.
During the 1950s, Coltrane struggled with heroin addiction, as did many
jazz musicians. Drugs were glorified by Charlie Parker as a door to
creativity. By 1951 Coltrane was booted out of Dizzy Gillespie’s band,
and also from Miles Davis’ classic quartet in 1957 (Miles had his own
bouts with heroin), and from the band of pioneer bop composer/pianist
Thelonious Monk.
Charlie Parker’s drug-ravaged body succumbed in 1955, but Coltrane cold
turkeyed on his own. Coltrane was back with Miles in 1958 in time for
the all-time classic Miles album, “Kind of Blue” (1959).
But with Miles, Coltrane was feeling a creative impasse. At the risk of
oversimplification, Miles represented “cool jazz” to whites, a less
threatening alternative to bop and the drug culture of Parker. Trane
felt confined artistically and left Miles. In 1958, jazz critic Ira
Gitler coined the term “sheets of sound” to describe the unique,
evolving Coltrane style as he worked with Miles.
July 2017 Coltrane Blue Train 1957
Recording “Blue Train” in Hackensack, N.J., 1957.
In the early 1960s, radical stylists appeared around Coltrane and within
the broad avant-garde. The “radicals” (my favorites) included alto sax
man Ornette Coleman—on a different path than Coltrane but an
anti-establishment hero, particularly after his pivotal “Free Jazz”
album (1960). Collaborators with Coltrane were the short-lived
experimenter, saxophonist Eric Dolphy; the angry, political tenor sax
man, Archie Shepp; the fearless Pharoah Sanders; bombshell innovator
Albert Ayler; and pianist Cecil Taylor, whose volcanic style first took
shape in the 1950s.
Several of these ground-breaking artists are still alive today—Sanders,
Shepp, Coltrane bassist Reggie Workman, and Cecil Taylor. Archie Shepp’s
classic first album “Four for Trane” showed Coltrane standing next to
him on the cover. Yet Shepp and the others do not speak a word in the film.
A few weeks after the film was released in April, I spoke with David
Murray, thought to be the best of the 1970s post-Trane tenors, rooted in
Coltrane and the avant-garde. Murray dedicated an album to Coltrane tunes.
Murray was playing at the world famous Village Vanguard with his
provocatively named unit “Class Struggle.” I snatched an opportune
moment as Murray walked past, sax in hand: “David, quick question. Did
they call you for the Coltrane movie?” He answered, “Nope, they went
straight to [Wynton] Marsalis!” I shot back, “Why am I not surprised!”
To jazz radicals, trumpeter Marsalis is musical neo-conservatism
incarnate, but he appears several times in the movie. Marsalis came into
prominence during the Reagan era and is the longtime artistic director
of “Jazz at Lincoln Center” in New York. Marsalis has been sharply
criticized for his systematic exclusion of today’s talented free-jazz
musicians. Marsalis has said, “post-1965 avant-garde playing is outside
of jazz,” calling some avant-gardists ‘“charlatans.” That apparently
sits well with Lincoln Center’s wealthy funders and cultural Czars.
Also in the film was jazz fan and ex-president Bill Clinton, who
represented what Coltrane despised—war, racism, corruption and lies.
Clinton, an untalented saxophone player, contributed little other than
star power. What is this guy doing here, I asked myself?
Somewhat more palatable was Cornel West, the African American writer and
supporter of liberal democrats. But West got with the underlying motif,
dissing the avant-garde. West portrayed Coltrane’s late works as
indecipherable and ultimately dismissible. “I still don’t understand
it,” said West. Okay, but what are you doing in this movie?
Let the music speak for itself!
For those new to Coltrane, his creative highs include: “Giant Steps”
(1960), Coltrane playing his own compositions; “My Favorite Things”
(1961), a cover of the sappy Broadway tune, radically transformed into a
searching, almost eastern sound; “A Love Supreme” (1964), a
non-sectarian musical prayer for peace and tolerance that is Coltrane’s
most revered album; the daring free-jazz “Ascension” (1965); and “Live
at the Village Vanguard Again!” (1966), which includes a soul-stripping
solo by Sanders.
In his book, “Black Nationalism and the Revolution in Music” (1970),
Frank Kofsky quotes Archie Shepp’s brief but apt description of the
music capitalist, “You own the music and we make it.” Kofsky added,
“Part of the ownership Shepp refers to includes ownership of the means
of mental production,” that is, club owners, the record producers and,
of course, jazz filmmakers.
The genius of Coltrane will outlive the cultural mediocrity of late
capitalism. Coltrane lives!
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June 22, 2017 in Arts & Culture, Black Liberation. Tags: Coltrane
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