John Coltrane Live

One Down, One Up: Live at the Half Note
I just picked up this new Coltrane release, recorded live at the Half Note club in New York in spring of 1965. It's an amazing recording of Coltrane's "Classic Quartet" just months before it disbanded and Trane took off full blast, out of this world on his free jazz space ship.

I love Coltrane's free jazz playing with his wife Alice, and drummer Rashid Ali (check out the studio album Stellar Regions, or Trane's duet album with Ali, Interstellar Space), but I think my favourite Coltrane period is during this last year of the quartet year when One Down, One Up was recorded. He still has the grounding a McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, and the amazing Elvin Jones--a band that played a type of jazz that was aggressive, expansive. and very powerful, but remained anchored in jazz's traditional harmonic and rhythmic structures.

In the last year of the quartet they released two of the best jazz albums ever recorded, Crescent, and A Love Supreme. And, as One Down, One Up shows, the quartet was also amazing live. In the four songs included on this two disc recording--One Down, One Up (27:40), Afro Blue (12:44), Song of Praise (19:39), and My Favorite Things (22:47)--Coltane has time to extend his solos. There are passages, especially during the title track and Song of Praise, where his playing is truly transcendent. You can hear Trane seeking new ground through each solo and pushing himself and the band into new sonic realities during these sessions. It's even more unbelievable when you see a picture of the stage at the Half Note, it's basically an extended shelf over the bar, and is hardly big enough to fit the members of quartet--Garrison's bass neck is pressed against the ceiling and Elvin Jones' drum kit is hanging into off the stage edge. I can't imagine this tiny stage being able to physically hold such a powerful performance.

It's hard not to consider the depth of questing captured on this recording as "spiritual," a word some critics consider overused when it comes to John Coltrane. But witness after witness who saw Trane live testify to similar spiritual or religious experiences at the shows. One is quoted in the liner notes of One Down, One Up that during one show, "En masse, cats started to put their hands up to the ceiling and the whole place stood up. It was like those holy-roller meetings. It was unbelievable."

Can somebody say "Amen"?

Here are two articles I wrote on John Coltrane some years ago if you're interested...

Singing With All the Saints
The Other Side, March/April 1999
http://www.theotherside.org/archive/mar-apr99/gallegos.html

Spiritual Improvision: John Coltrane's Quest for Freedom
Sojourners, July/August 1999
http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=magazine.article&issue=soj9907&article=990731