|
Francis Davis
Philadelphian Francis Davis is the author of several books, including The History of the Blues, Bebop and Nothingness and a forthcoming biography of John Coltrane. A
contributing editor of The Atlantic Monthly, he also writes regularly about music for the New York Times, among others.
_________________________________________
JJM You are working on a biography of John Coltrane now.
Why write a biography on him and not one on Ornette Coleman or Sonny Rollins
or Thelonious Monk?
FD On a very practical way, when I first proposed
this, I realized that I had a head start over most people by being in
Philadelphia. In fact, I had done some of the work already. When talking
to most older musicians in or originally from Philadelphia, inevitably you
end up talking about Coltrane. I will probably talk to Jimmy Heath again,
but in a way I won't have to, because I have talked to him about Coltrane
at times in the past. I think also that if you want a jazz biography to double
as a social history, then Coltrane is your man. I think Coltrane's relationship
to the 1960's is so provocative in a way that Sonny Rollins, as much as I
love him, isn't. Even Ornette isn't. Coltrane just seems to have influenced
things in the 1960's, and be influenced by them. Also, events and cultural
trends influenced the way he was heard. Coltrane is this way into discovering
other things…
JJM He helped define the era, is what I am hearing
you say…
FD And defined by it, yes, it worked both ways.
JJM What special memories do you have of A Love
Supreme? Is that a recording that holds any special moments for you?
Meditations |
FD I don't know if I can relate it to anything
that was happening to me at the time. Meditations, I remember, when
that came out. I was in college and I recall being especially blue and listening
to that record, feeling as though, at the end, that whatever it was that
was ailing me, I had sweated it all out. That music can almost break
you out into a sweat. |
JJM
His goal was to move people in ways that were deeply felt and perhaps
take them to places that were deep within themselves, assisting in some sort
of self-discovery process…
FD Yes, but I don't think you can divorce that
from the mechanics of his musicianship. In another way, his goals were musical.
I think he was very influenced by the avant-garde of that period. I know
he had an influence on people like Albert Ayler and Pharoah Sanders, but
I think that was such an interesting period because people like Coltrane
and Cecil Taylor, who even though they weren't very old, were like father
figures to these guys. They became caught up in it. You notice Coltrane's
music changing around in the recordings following A Love Supreme,
but Cecil Taylor's did also.
JJM Was that due to some political influence or
was it strictly musical?
| FD I think it was both. I think everybody so
believed in the whole idea of revolution and music at the time. Bop
had come along only 15 - 20 years earlier. Everybody thought that something
else would come along. People were always looking for stirrings. There was
also a cultural revolution happening and it is natural to think that would
be reflected in the music. The other thing is that around that time, the
classical composer Milton Babbitt had written a piece for High Fidelity
Magazine, which he wanted to call "The Composer as Specialist." The magazine
retitled it "Who Cares If You Listen?" There was a real sense in the avante-garde
of cross-musical disciplines. The avant-garde in every art form has the sense
that they are leaving their audience behind. At the same time though, there
is a two-fold pressure on jazz musicians. They want to move ahead, but they
weren't in the position to say "who cares if you listen?" because black
musicians, especially, felt a real pressure to be representatives of their
people. So there was this populist sort of thing happening at the same time
that there was this vanguard artist thing happening. It creates a kind of
fabulous and, in some cases, a sort of unbearable tension in that music.
If you listen to the Coltrane thing that came out, the Olatunji Concert,
it's almost unlistenable in part because of the recording quality, which
is pretty bad, but also because of the intensity and perhaps the chaos of
the music. I consider myself a fan and defender of this period of Coltrane,
but it is really intense stuff. |
Olatunji
Concert |
JJM You said this about Charlie Parker, "Listening to
him changes the way one hears what came before him and what came after him."
Could the same be said for Coltrane?
FD I think so. The combination of Coltrane and
Ornette Coleman, yes. Those two artists happened simultaneously and overlapped.
The more I think about it, as years go by, I realize free jazz wasn't really
a movement in the same way that bop was, it was a bunch of people who did
things differently, and they seemed to happen at the same time. Coltrane,
Sun Ra, Ornette, Albert Ayler…When you hear Parker and then you go back
to something else, you listen to it in terms of how the past led to Parker.
I think you can do the same thing with Louis Armstrong, when you listen to
Fletcher Henderson's band before Armstrong, you notice they don't swing in
the same way they did once Armstrong's way became the way of doing things.
You do that with Ornette too, when you listen to people from the 50s making
tentative motions that Ornette and Coltrane opened up. Sure, you listen to
the stuff that came after. One of the reasons that we tend to be bored by
a lot of jazz, by a lot of stuff that comes out of the major labels, is because
we have gone through Coltrane. We know how intense this music can be, and
how creative it is. Consequently, the new stuff just doesn't quite make it.
JJM Major labels' view of jazz is centered around
how much money they can or can't make from it…
FD Well, Coltrane made a lot of money for Impulse.
He sold a lot of records. He was popular, he may not have been as popular
as Ramsey Lewis playing "In Crowd." Record companies have always been in
the business of selling records. In a way, it's easier now for musicians
to put their own albums out than it was during Coltrane's era.
JJM Do you think that A Love Supreme it brought
Coltrane's life a new perspective? How was his life after the release
of A Love Supreme different for him?
John Coltrane Quartet
painting by
Kevin
Neireiter |
FD I think that A Love Supreme is like
a perfection of something, both in terms of the sound he was looking for,
and in terms of using, on face value, relatively simple material, but using
it in a way that wasn't so simple. Also, it was a kind of culmination of
work he did with that group of musicians, his Quartet. After A Love
Supreme, he abandons that, in a way, but Coltrane was really paying attention
to what else was happening in jazz, especially around New York, with Albert
Ayler and Pharoah Sanders and people like that. In a way, he could have gone
on and on making A Love Supreme over and over, but he didn't. Or,
for that matter, he could have gone on making "My Favorite Things "over and
over. Probably, in some way, with the encouragement of his record companies,
he did. I can't think of any other reason why Coltrane would have been playing
"Chim Chim Cher-Ee." They were trying for another "My Favorite Things"
there. When he played "My Favorite Things "in concert, it wasn't like he
played it as his "hit," he really stretched out on it. In fact, the one time
I heard Coltrane, one of the things I will remember is that there were a
lot of people walking out in droves, and one of the complaints I remember
hearing from someone was that "he didn't even play 'My Favorite Things.'"
What was so funny about this was this complaint came in the middle of "My
Favorite Things! "The point is, unless you were there at the beginning or
the end, you would never recognize it as being "My Favorite Things." |
JJM What have you discovered about Coltrane during
this process?
FD Something I have noticed when I talk to people
who knew him is that his older friends and the people who were really close
to him call him John, and the younger musicians who played with him call
him Trane. In a way, the trick of the biography is representing both those
things. Because, fans call him that too.
Excerpted from the Francis Davis Interview
________________________________
Francis Davis products at Amazon.com
John Coltrane products at Amazon.com
_______________________________
Interview took place on December 10, 2001
Other
Jerry Jazz Musician interviews
The A Love Supreme Interviews
John Coltrane@All About Jazz
|
