[NewMusic] Review: Coltrane: The Story of a Sound"

[Phillip Greenlief]

For what it's worth...
PG



http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2007/09/28/entertainmen
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Coltrane Book Is Brilliant, Economical

By HENRY C. JACKSON, Associated Press Writer
Friday, September 28, 2007
(09-28) 16:14 PDT , (AP) --

"Coltrane: The Story of a Sound" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 250 pages,
$24), by Ben Ratliff: The saxophonist John Coltrane is among the most
celebrated and mythologized musicians of his generation. But he almost
never was.

As Ben Ratliff recounts in his brilliant, economical book, "Coltrane:
The Story of a Sound," the famed jazz artist nearly squandered a big
break, as a player in Miles Davis' band. Coltrane was precocious then,
even the willful Davis knew that. But he was also a drug addict,
disheveled and unreliable, and so he was soon excommunicated.

It would be an inauspicious start to a remarkable 10-year stretch, one
that Ratliff artfully recounts in crisp, judicious prose. Coltrane
retreated, briefly, finding sobriety and then a fruitful partnership
with jazz pianist Thelonious Monk. By the time he reunited with Davis,
he was well on his way to crafting an iconic, signature sound.

A longtime jazz critic for The New York Times, Ratliff has written a
sharp biography not so much of Coltrane, but of his music. As one might
expect with such a premise, there is ample grist for jazz wonks. But
that is not to say this work should be limited to music theory majors,
either.

"Coltrane" is a book of two parts. The first is a detailed and
compelling look at how, more or less, Coltrane became Coltrane. Ratliff
is swift but thorough, taking the reader from Coltrane's musical
beginnings, when he played furtively with whites from a segregated Navy
band, to his ascension into musical lore.

There are precious insights here, particularly into Coltrane's habits
and what made him tick. He was, we learn, a voracious reader with
disparate influences. A man who overcame heroine addiction and one who
comfortably connected Einstein's Theory of Relativity to music in
conversation.

Some of these snippets are myth-busting. Coltrane was as renowned for
his musical improvisations as any musician ever was, but Ratliff is
careful to portray this brilliance as a product of careful craftsmanship
and preparation. The author also never submits himself to idolatry,
dutifully noting periods when Coltrane's music was lackluster, linking
an absence of focus and with a drop in form.

In a second part that is no less ambitious or successful, Ratliff
attempts to parse the lingering questions of Coltrane's legacy. Here he
skillfully and convincingly places Coltrane as something of a man apart
from most other musicians - a cultural comet, as much as a musical one.

Ratliff cites an argument in print between a music critic who offers a
scathing review of Coltrane and a reader who replies with an equally
cutting letter to the editor, one that more or less calls the reviewer a
racist.

The nasty exchange, Ratliff writes, can be interpreted as being about
far more than the music or Coltrane himself, but rather:

"The perception that white people were making ugly, limiting references
in their understanding of black achievement, versus the perception that
the long, driving modal passages of Coltrane's group or, by extension
the 102 points scored by Wilt Chamberlain in a single basketball game in
1962 were all examples of instinctive gluttony."

Coltrane did not necessarily thrust himself forward. Yet his style made
him an obsession for years after he died, so much so that even the
sharpest critiques of his work seemed tinged with "some element of hero
worship of him as the primal masculine machine," Ratliff writes.

The author is characteristically succinct in capturing Coltrane's
laid-back approach to the chatter. "Coltrane was above all of it," he
writes. "Like all great artists, he embodied multiple, often
contradictory aspects. He was Liston and Ali."

Ratliff's assessment of the more haunting aspects of Coltrane's legacy,
including the vacuum he seemed to leave after his early death at age 40
from liver cancer, is no less convincing.

Coltrane's death and his unique brilliance have haunted many, from the
day he died until more recent times. Ratliff takes us into the college
dorm room of Branford Marsalis, one of the finest jazz musicians of
modern years, to illustrate the point. Marsalis, he writes, nearly
forsook jazz to pursue a career as a pop music producer in part because
of fears that much of jazz had become a re-creation of Coltrane's sound.

As one might expect, Ratliff has his own theory on why so many have
chased Coltrane's ghost, and why his specter has proved so elusive. "One
of the kinks in the reception of Coltrane's music is that while it has
become synonymous with technical expertise, it has also become
synonymous with rebellion, and self-conscious rebellion is always
suspect: it matters deeply who is doing it, what they think they are
rebelling against ..."

It's a fair point, but one that also leads Ratliff into a bit of a punt
when he tries to explain why we have not seen another Coltrane-like
figure emerge since his death: The only way to find the next Coltrane,
he seems to say, is to abandon the search.

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Phillip Greenlief
c/o Evander Music
PO Box 22158 Oakland, CA
94623-9991
www.evandermusic.com