A sound supreme
Exploring the lasting, sometimes limiting influence of saxophonist John Coltrane
Coltrane: The Story of a Sound
By Ben Ratliff
Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 250 pp., $24
The history of jazz, Miles Davis once said, could be stated in just four words, "Louis Armstrong" and "Charlie Parker." Were Miles alive today and (something no less unlikely) gracious enough to credit a onetime sideman, he would need to increase his word count by 50 percent. What Armstrong was to the founding of jazz and the Swing Era, and Parker to the bebop revolution, John Coltrane has been to jazz since.
Sonny Rollins, Coltrane's sole contemporary peer on the tenor saxophone, called one of his best-known albums "Saxophone Colossus." For more than four decades, Coltrane has been Jazz Colossus. The classic Coltrane Quartet, with McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass, and the staggering Elvin Jones on drums, began its leader's domination of the jazz imagination in the early '60s. That preeminence continued with his forays into free jazz and a kind of aural spirituality that remain effectively nonpareil.
In less than a decade (Coltrane died of liver cancer in 1967) he transformed the idea of what jazz might be. There was that unmistakable sound he got from his horn, a keening, gleaming, slightly metallic tone that was like a beacon in the night. Even more, it was the example Coltrane set for what the music could mean as a standard of moral, even religious, aspiration - another kind of beacon in the night.
There was a clear connection between the two. "Musical structure," Ben Ratliff writes in "Coltrane: The Story of a Sound," "can't contain morality. But sound, somehow, can. Coltrane's large, direct, vibratoless sound transmitted his basic desire: 'that I'm supposed to grow to the best good that I can get to.' " However unintentionally, he took jazz on that journey along with him.
Ratliff, a
Coltrane was only 40 when he died. Yet the power of his legacy has been such - the power of his music, the power of his personal example - that it's as if he has lived on these subsequent decades. His hold on jazz has been that strong. Ratliff sees that hold finally beginning to fade. "We're still under the yoke of Coltrane but in the process of slipping it off," he writes.
"Yoke" tends not to be a term of praise, and one of the best things about Ratliff's searching and vigorous book is its ability to regard Coltrane with awe but not deference. A career "so unreasonably exceptional," as Ratliff puts it, is not necessarily a good thing for any art, let alone one like jazz, which is predicated on individual expression and ongoing innovation.
In his book "The Anxiety of Influence" the literary scholar Harold Bloom argues that only the strongest poets have been able to overcome the example of their foremost literary forebears. No one with the strength to surpass Coltrane - or get beyond his achievement - has emerged since his death.
"The common wisdom about . . . Coltrane," Ratliff writes, "is that he was the last major figure in the evolution of jazz, that the momentum of jazz stalled, and nearly stopped, after his death." "Common wisdom" is a tricky term. It's a way of insinuating something is false without coming right out and saying so. In this case, that serves a useful rhetorical function. Ratliff is far too smart not to know that the common wisdom really is true - certainly, the first part of that statement is. Coltrane may not prove to be the last major figure in the evolution of jazz (let's hope not), but he has so far. That the immediacy and intensity of his example, both stylistic and personal, have clearly diminished is indisputable. But that jazz has yet to produce a figure who even begins to approach his stature is equally indisputable.
It doesn't require an acceptance of the great-man theory of jazz (something that Ratliff clearly rejects) to see in that failure a threat to the ongoing development of the music. So to accept the common wisdom risks casting doubt on the ongoing health of jazz. In writing his book, Ratliff is offering something that is as much a vote of confidence in jazz to come as it is a study of one of the supreme figures of its past.
Ratliff writes extremely well, with terse, assured brio, as when he refers to Coltrane's "serene intensity" or the "incantational tumult" of his vast, cathedral solos. With a single noun, Ratliff can express how different the "calligraphy" of Ornette Coleman's album "Free Jazz" is from Coltrane's late-period "Ascension." He can go overboard at times trying to locate Coltrane culturally. Noting that "Live at the Village Vanguard" was recorded the same year Dashiell Hammett and Ernest Hemingway died, Ratliff writes, "Now that hypermasculine American succinctness was eclipsed, camp could become a popular mode." Huh? That's a rare straying, though, from the tight stylistic and intellectual control that marks Ratliff's book. The excesses of late Coltrane are nowhere to be found here, in either their sublimity or longueurs. But so much of its forcefulness, directedness, and striving are.
Mark Feeney is a member of the Globe staff. He can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com. 