Originally posted on sciy.org by Debashish Banerji on Wed 23 Sep 2009 06:33 PM PDT
John Coltrane, Avant Garde Jazz and the Evolution of "My Favorite Things"
A Thesis by Scott Anderson
Introduction
“I’ve found you’ve got to look back at the old things and see them in a new light.â€
— John Coltrane, 1960, Down Beat magazine
In the 1960s, many jazz musicians, such as Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra, Charles Mingus, and Eric Dolphy, expanded the parameters of their music with respect to form, melody, harmony, rhythm, and texture. They broke down traditional techniques and incorporated previously unheard scales, harmonic progressions, and compositional structures. They also brought improvisation to new levels of intensity and complexity, taking greater liberties with respect to the duration, content, and structure of solos, and delving into an unprecedented amount of group improvisation. The resulting music was given many names: free jazz, avant garde, the “new thing.†As the decade ended, however, this style of jazz was largely abandoned in favor of more “psychedelic†electronic sounds and jazz-rock fusion.
Today, many people of a younger generation, musicians and non-musicians alike, are looking for what Michael Bruce McDonald calls “an experience of the sacred†(275). In this search they are rediscovering avant garde jazz for the numinous properties with which it was often consciously imbued by its greatest purveyors, notably Sun Ra (who claimed to hail from the planet Saturn and sought to produce music that corroborated his claim) and John Coltrane (whose fascination with “outer space†themes manifested itself more in mystical and spiritual explorations than in science-fiction fantasies).
Interestingly, one of Coltrane’s favorite vehicles for his combos’ sonic explorations was the Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II tune “My Favorite Things†from the musical The Sound of Music. Coltrane first recorded this piece in 1960 in an innovative interpretation that already sounded radically different from the original, catching Coltrane in the formative stages of his new, modally-based, “avant garde†sound. In the ensuing seven years, until his death in 1967, Coltrane made “My Favorite Things†a regular part of his concert repertoire. At least eighteen of these performances have been released on recording (Cole 228-248). The preponderance of recordings of this single piece, spanning the full development of Coltrane’s work in the avant garde, makes it uniquely suited to careful comparison and analysis, a useful tool for the examination of his stylistic development.
This project will use “My Favorite Things†as just such a tool. Following an introductory exploration of both Coltrane’s musical career prior to 1960 and the “standard†form of “My Favorite Things,†the paper will compare and contrast four of Coltrane’s recordings of the piece: his 1960 studio recording, a more extended performance at the 1963 Newport Jazz Festival, the last recording of the piece by his “classic quartet†at the 1965 Newport Jazz Festival, and a radically evolved 57-minute performance from 1966 in Tokyo by his new quintet. These examinations will reveal the evolution of both Coltrane’s own playing and the dynamics of his group’s interplay. They will also reflect the influence of African, Indian, and Western art music upon Coltrane and the modal and free styles of jazz in the 1960s. Finally, a discussion of the motivations behind Coltrane’s musical “quest†(as characterized by Eric Nisenson) will further illuminate his stylistic development.
John Coltrane before “My Favorite Thingsâ€
John William Coltrane was born on 23 September 1926 in Hamlet, North Carolina. Both of his parents were musicians: his mother was a church pianist and his father played violin (Hardy and Laing 161). Both of his grandfathers were ordained ministers in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. From the very earliest moments of his life, Coltrane was exposed to music both in his home and in the participatory religious experience of the southern African-American church.
The significant presence of religion in Coltrane’s childhood foreshadowed the turn his career would take in the 1960s, when, for both Coltrane himself and for listeners who accepted his new direction, the music became more than just music; it was a religious experience — a means of attaining mystical transcendence. Norman C. Weinstein, in A Night in Tunisia: Imaginings of Africa in Jazz (61), notes the parallel between the southern African-American church and Coltrane’s music. This parallel is vividly revealed in Robert Palmer’s video The World According to John Coltrane, which mingles films of members of these churches entering trance-like states with excerpts of similarly hypnotic performances by Coltrane’s mid-1960s quartet. Most striking are the saxophone’s close mimicking of the wailing of human voices in the church and the correlation between the religious trances in the church and Coltrane’s own self-induced musical hypnosis. Coltrane, in his manners and actions, seems detached from his surroundings and “transported†to a different world, much like the participants in the church ritual. Likewise, in listening to a performance of such intensity and duration, audience members may become similarly entranced. Eric Nisenson, in a personal recollection of a Coltrane performance, explains:
It was probably no more than a single hour, but time seemed to stop or at least become irrelevant; I could sense that the rest of the audience, too, was in the grip of this astonishing performance…. Here was a performance where once could no longer objectively judge aesthetics; the feelings it engendered were closer to the awe one felt for a volcano or a mind-boggling religious revelation. (xvii)
The role of religion in Coltrane’s musical vision will be discussed at greater length later in this paper.
Coltrane’s musical career prior to 1957 is well-documented in numerous biographies, especially Coltrane by C. O. Simpkins and Bill Cole’s John Coltrane. These resources detail Coltrane’s early career, a discussion of which is superfluous in this context. However, a critical turning point occurred in 1957 when Coltrane, a well-respected but as-yet unheralded 30-year-old saxophonist underwent a profound personal religious transformation inspired by his introduction to the beliefs and discipline of Islam by his first wife, Naima (Budds 136). This experience led Coltrane into a temporary retirement during which he overcame his addictions to alcohol and heroin and practiced fervently.
Refreshed and sober, with greater virtuosity, and inspired by his religious awakening, Coltrane returned to the jazz world in late 1957 and produced much of his greatest work. In addition to ceaseless performance and recording, Coltrane began a personal search via the religions of the world, especially those of Africa and India, for what Michael Budds describes as “a universal concept unifying all faiths†(136). As he explains in the liner notes to his 1965 album Meditations, Coltrane sought “to uplift people, as much as I can. To inspire them to realize more and more of their capacities for living meaningful lives. Because there certainly is meaning to life.†Coltrane’s spiritual growth and his quest to express that growth through his music led to the rapid evolution of his music through the 1960s, as will be traced in this paper.
To read the entire paper, go here
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