SF Chronicle’s Greg Tate pays tribute to John Coltrane on his 80th birthday.
[McCoy] Tyner has said he knew it was time for him to leave the band when he saw Trane bleeding from the mouth while blowing and not even seeming to care. That degree of indefatigable discipline and unbridled passion can still render so many fans of the quartet speechless, enchanted, focused, uplifted. An avowed atheist and libertine friend once told me that when he wanted to hear God, he listened to Coltrane. He was hedging his bets that the religious ardor Trane’s music invoked in him would be deliverance enough for his sins.
Miles and Coltrane share a birthday. On the eve of Miles’ “fourthest” birthday, Miles greeted me home from work with a lovely bush in a rattan basket, so that “When you die and go away you won’t get lonely” (seems to be some Egyptian philosophy going on here). We then talked about life and death for a while, on the way to the park. Suddenly he stopped at a corner, looked around, and asked, “But daddy, why is our world THIS world and not another world?” Always knew kids ask a lot of hard questions, but was unprepared for this kind of cosmological probing.
I saw the Alice Coltrane Quartet (Roy Haynes, Charlie Haden, Ravi Coltrane) Saturday night (9/23) at Hill Auditorium in Ann Arbor, Michigan — celebrating the 80th birthday of JC. It struck me as Alice was soloing on a Wurlitzer organ (no joke) that Trane especially after 1965 simply took the innate spirituality of Jazz to an incredible extreme, sacrificing nearly all structure, nearly everything. An almost ascetic interpretation of Jazz. The concert ended with a 45-minute rendition of “Leo” — sappy it was not.
A bit young for Kant, no?
On a Wurlitzer! Sounds like an incredible show. Wow.
Never too young for Kant, momma used to say.