“Wait! The good part’s coming.
Wait. Wait. This is it.
Here.” At some point, from around
the age of seventeen, discovering, savoring, comparing artist’s ability to solo
became an all-important pursuit. Improvisational majesty was the divine. Curating and debating, imitating and
experiencing solos was how I spent my free time. Once positioned properly, nothing to follow
would ever properly dethrone the solos of John Coltrane.
Listening to a recording
of him playing with Miles’ band of March 21st 1960, in the Olympia
Theatre of Paris. I was reminded of all
this around minute twenty into the set. Typing,
to-do-ing, at some point I need to stop.
JC will not be ignored. When he
begins to properly unpack the universe, when he connects fire to fuel, there
really is nothing that quite compares.
The tune is one we all
know. But his entrance around minute
21.33 of the evening’s set, is hardly predictable. “So What?”, the tune. Heard it two hundred times before? So what? Coltrane is about to do the opposite
of stitching a wound. He steps up with
long tonal sheets of sound, that are thoroughly demanding as they quicken and
become flourishes that extract thread, pulling yards of binding, leaving the
mind’s mass open sponge-like, absorptive.
His lines drive up and then
down circling wildly like saturnal rings, perfectly balanced, pushing blood
through octaves we can feel. Careening
down, and holding emphasis, suggesting all possibilities at once and then
cutting, on time, to force the lowest note possible.
How mighty. How sustained. How deliberate. An improvisational apex reasserted,
convincingly.
Saturday, 09/09/17
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