Coltrane's final years were strange to listen to. He stopped locking into a steady beat, started chasing sound itself—texture, the space inside a note. Lewis Porter, who spent years on the definitive Coltrane biography, traces how this happened and why Coltrane kept reaching for beauty even when the music stopped making conventional sense to people hearing it live. It's what makes the late recordings so unsettling to most ears..
Lewis Porter is the author of John Coltrane: His Life and Music, widely regarded as the definitive biography of the legendary saxophonist.
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The word "leisurely" applied to Coltrane is almost an oxymoron. So, to say that Trane jettisoned a steady beat in order to develop his ideas in a leisurely way is hard to buy. The picture is complex, of course. His playing had always created as dense a space as possible (sheets of sound, overblowing, harmonics); techniques with which one could say he was stretching or circumventing chord changes. Then, modal tunes like "Impressions" opened up, to some extent, the space for extended ideas. But at a certain point, it became not about being able to extend an idea rooted in Western harmony or traditional jazz "beats", but about a new way to make each moment as intense and personal as possible. Pharaoh and Shepp, Ali, Alice. McCoy saw the specific tonality of a keyboard instrument was unneccesary and Elvin felt that he too was made unneccesary. If this was about eschewing a "steady" beat to extend ideas, it was only so peripherally.
Spring ... 1966 I visited Chicago and together with Bob Koester, a Saturday night, went to The Plugged Nickel to listen to John Coltrane and his band ...
When we entered the room … the band was gone … no McCoy, no Garrison and no Elvin!
Instead … two drummers, one bassist, Alice on piano and Coltrane and for me one unknown saxplayer …but no rhythm … but a lot of screaming, from both Coltrane and Sanders … AND the audiance!
A very strange experience … especially the fact that the rhythm was gone … for me and probably for most of his fans.
But years later Pharoah Sanders came along … and John Coltrane was back …