Archive for October, 2007
Speaking of Coltrane: Five Conversations (3)
Alain Pacowski
Alain Pacowski is a French-born, French-accented jazz guitarist, who grew up in Biarritz, the son of a professional horn player, hearing jazz as the sound of America. He is, as I’ve said before, the most flattering of distant mirrors on our culture, and an obsessive devote of John Coltrane in particular. His taste is for that broad streak of gorgeousness in Coltrane, starting with “Bye Bye Blackbird” and culminating in his solo recording of “Lush Life.”
Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Alain Pacowski(20 MB MP3)
The conversation continues… If you feel a Coltrane sermon coming on, we want to hear it.
Speaking of Coltrane: Five Conversations (4)
Bill Pierce played tenor saxophone for three years in into the early 80s with Art Blakey -- before that with Stevie Wonder, and with the drummer Tony Williams into the early 90s. He has the authority of a player who's also the teaching chairman of the reeds department of the Berklee College of Music in Boston -- and co-author of the Berklee Practice Method for tenor and soprano saxophone. The hallways and practice cubicles outside Bill Pierce's Berklee offices are thick with 19- and 20-year-olds who've made a desperate bet that they can approach Coltrane's sound, and pull some of his phrases together. One of those students, Russ Thallheimer, from Eureka, California, was wearing a Coltrane T-shirt when we passed through Berklee the other day. Smiling, without irony, Russ referred to Coltrane as "Dad." There are other saxophone inspirations : Russ mentioned Zoot Sims, Paul Desmond and Michael Brecker -- "he's the really cool uncle," Russ said. "But none of them do what Coltrane did. Nobody can repeat things that he did." How did it feel that John Coltrane was "back," I asked the drummer Roy Haynes a dozen years ago, when Impulse reissued his classics and Whitney Balliett in The New Yorker solemnized a Coltrane revival. "I didn't know he ever left!" Roy shot back -- all we needed to know, delivered with Haynesian snap, crackle and pop. In this 40th anniversary autumn after his death, at 40, what lives with Coltrane and his music is the idea of love's forgiveness, of redemption through suffering, and the excruciating sort of beauty that Dostoevsky thought "will save the world."
Speaking of Coltrane: Five Conversations (5)
Michael S. Harper, emeritus professor at Brown University and first poet laureate of Rhode Island, wrote the most famous of the many Coltrane poems, "Dear John, Dear Coltrane," a year before Coltrane's death. In our conversation -- and in his own digressive, virtuosic, dare I say Coltranean style -- Michael Harper weaves threads of racial brutality and family memory, black church music and profoundly engrained Christian doctrines of forgiveness in the North Carolina tapestry of Coltrane's imagination. Harper's connections with Coltrane are musical and also personal: he has been a friend for many years with Coltrane's pianist, McCoy Tyner. But above all he is listening to Coltrane as spiritual teacher on tracks like "Alabama," "Spiritual," "Dear Lord," and of course "A Love Supreme." How did it feel that John Coltrane was "back," I asked the drummer Roy Haynes a dozen years ago, when Impulse reissued his classics and Whitney Balliett in The New Yorker solemnized a Coltrane revival. "I didn't know he ever left!" Roy shot back -- all we needed to know, delivered with Haynesian snap, crackle and pop. In this 40th anniversary autumn after his death, at 40, what lives with Coltrane and his music is the idea of love's forgiveness, of redemption through suffering, and the excruciating sort of beauty that Dostoevsky thought "will save the world."
