Smashing the Idol of Trane

            I suppose I should begin with an apology, to those faithful who have been baptised in the waves of timbre St John blessed this Earth with some decades past. John Coltrane was probably the first jazz artist I came to dig, back in high school, and the first time I heard Coltrane, I mean really heard him, from my record player when I was fifteen years old, stoned and eating strawberries with the lights out in my room I saw such blue and green swarming in the dark; I have never quite had an experience like that before or since. I have in fact heard of almost identical experiences, from Carlos Santana, and in a song on Tribal Jazz, by John Densmore, original drummer of rock group The Doors.

            It was in fact The Doors who influenced me to dig Trane and Miles, specifically Ray Manczarek, in his autobiography “Light My Fire”. Many white rock groups of the 60’s and 70’s were highly influenced by Miles Davis and John Coltrane, particularly their modal period. While this is all a good thing, I have since discovered how much public opinion of jazz had been shaped by the supposed authority of white people, critics and academics as well as performers and businessmen.

            Of course, it would be transcendentally ridiculous to claim that Coltrane’s music was in any sense ‘white’ – while he drew inspiration from all cultures and every source, John consciously sought to advance, and purify, the medium of Black American Music, and his stature is colossal (no offence, Sonny) upon black culture, as both an artist and a symbol of defiant freedom to the ongoing struggle for civil rights and human dignity.

            Still, much of the academic and critical focus on Coltrane has been dictated by an elitist white collegiate culture, which is far removed from the source of Black America, even if it has drawn a large influence from it. As a white man myself, with a bit of pomposity to boot, perhaps my own aesthetic prejudices are not worth pondering too deeply: on the whole, I am more drawn to his work on the soprano saxophone, and my favorite tenor moments of his are with Miles and right after leaving the 2^nd time, when he was still utilizing Davis’ incredible rhythm section, particularly the immortal Red Garland. He was also unbelievable with both Monk and Duke.

            So why the hell would anyone want to overthrow such a rich artistsic legacy? The fact is that once Coltrane had already taken both the soprano and tenor saxophones beyond the limits of Earthly perfection, he kept seeking, and while his seeking was by no means in vain, those who have attempted to follow in his Footsteps (Shorter excluded, for sure) have for the most part been stumbling blindly, and the plethora of formless forms engendered by imitators who lacked the grounding in bop, rhythm and blues, and the guiding signal of past tenor greats like Dex and Prez, and soprano Sidney Bechet, have contributed greatly to the disunity that characterized jazz music through the rest of the 20^th century.

            But just as the Catholic Church helped to preserve the wisdom of the ‘pagan’ Greek philosophers of Asia Minor and Sicily, Trane can serve to function not only as the beginning of post-modernism in jazz, but as a wonderful culmination and apotheosis of the history of this great music that travelled from New Orleans to New York over the course of a century, and in so doing transformed the world forever.

Smash that!