The Free Jazz Collective

John Coltrane 100: Expression - A Summary of the Final Stage

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Acquaro) — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 04:00:00 +0000

As I already had the privilege to write a feature about the posthumously released album Stellar Regions on this blog, i want to stretch this even a bit further. Here, I take a look at the period to follow, which eventually and fatally turned out to be the last five months in John Coltrane’s life. My focus is on the production of music in this final stage, as far it has been recorded and released, rather than John’s personal or health condition.

On 15 February 1967, John had recorded the tracks eventually released as Stellar Regions in 1995 (see my earlier feature) with the quartet.

One week later, on 22 February 1967, he returned with Rashied Ali for a saxophone – drums duo session, eventually to be released as Interstellar Space (see Gary Chapin‘s feature on this album).

On 07 March 1967, in another session with the quartet again, he recorded two tracks, as far as we know, Ogunde and Number One.

Ogunde is, first of all, a relatively short piece at a few seconds over 3 ½ minutes. A noticeable parallel to Stellar Regions, where the title track and Iris have approximately the same length and concise structure. The track takes its title presumably from an afro-brazilean folk song „Ogundu Varere“, rougly translated as a prayer to the gods. John occupied himself with spiritual traditions especially from Africa. John uses his forceful, cry-like late saxophone sound, overblowing his instrument, which gives an emotional urgence to the piece. The theme starts with a solemn, hmyn-like melody, but breaks out in free, atonal outbursts, before it fades away. In summary, John condenses the intensity of his (at that time) usually half-hour long live improvisations into less than a handful of minutes (but see below, what happened live).

At some time in spring (David S. Wild confirmed in the liner notes for Stellar Regions that this track was not recorded on 15 February, so the actual recording date remains unknown), John must have recorded To Be, where he plays flute and is rejoined by Pharoah Sanders on piccolo flute. He shows a very calm, introspective and meditative side here. At over 16 minutes playing time, this track feels like a spiritual retreat. The two flutes give it an airy, almost floating mood. Alice Coltrane’s flowing piano style provides a mystic, harp-like cushion. Rashied Ali on drums and Jimmy Garrison on bass keep it calm and subdued. All together, the piece lacks a trditional jazz pulse, even leaves traditional jazz structures completely and makes a profound structural switch towards a meditative, open-end spiritual incantation. It stands as one of the most explicit artifacts of the creative partnership between John and Alice at that final stage and already mirrors the „cosmic jazz“ landscapes that Alice would pioneer on her own in the years to follow in her landmark solo releases (Universal Consciousness, Journey in Satchidananda). Not to forget about Pharoah Sanders (Karma).

Also unknown is the exact recording date for the piece titled Expression in spring 1967 with the quartet, which later lended its title to the album.

23 April 1967 is the date of the last live recording, The Olatunji Concert. This performance, originally recorded for a radio broadcast, is featured by Fotis Nikolakopoulos on this blog, so see there. With due respect to Fotis, I will limit myself here to the absolutely striking contrast between the live version of Ogunde and the studio version. Performed live, it swells to 28 minutes playing time. The studio recording’s tight and condensed structure is only preserved in the theme at the beginning to which it returns only at the very end. In between, it gets overwhelmed by a storm-like wave of pure energy. After the introduction of the melody as theme, the structure collapses completely in a ritual storm. A dense, polyrhythmic vortex is unchained in Rashied Ali’s drumming. Alice Coltrane plays cascade-like runs on the piano. On saxophone, Pharoah Sanders adds his bone-rattling, ecstatic overblowing cries. Yes, the quartet has been expanded here. Pharoah Sanders is back at it on the second saxophone. Two additional percussionists joined in, Algie DeWitt and Jumma Santos.

The last ever live gig came at Baltimore’s Famous Ballroom on May 7, 1967. No audio recording of that performance is known to exist.

On 17 May 1967, exactly two months before John’s death, a sextet met for a last studio recording. The master tapes have been lost or at least unissued so two tracks with the titles None Other and Kaleidoscope have been unreleased so far and do not even appear on retrospective compilations.

With the recorded material, a last studio record was conceived during John’s lifetime. It was given the title Expression. John was actively involved in the production and met with Bob Thiele.

On side 1, it had Ogunde as the opening track (the studio version, as above, of course). Track #2 was To Be with John and Pharoah Sanders on flutes (as above). At over 16 minutes, it was the longest track, making up for nearly half of the original album’s playing time, and the only track on the album in which Pharoah Sanders made an appearance.

Side 2 opened with the majestic ballad Offering, the only track chosen from the 15 February session, thus making it the only track on the posthumous album Stellar Regions (see there) that had been released before and had an original title. Hank Shteamer has just featured this track prominently in the New York Times and put it into the larger context of spiritual jazz, for which a piece like Offering „would seem like a perfect prototype“ (Hank Shteamer, Spiritual Jazz Has Turned Cozy. John Coltrane Demanded More. New York Times, September 18, 2026). The original album closed with the title track Expression,John‘s last studio recording to ever be released. In the later CD release only, Number O ne, recorded on the same day as Ogunde, was added as a bonus track (the track, however, had been released for the first time in a 1978 compilation album).

Obviously, the most recent recording session of May 1967 was not considered in the process at all (at that time, the tapes at least should still have been around, I guess?).

John reportedly selected the four tracks for the original album release and their exact sequence himself. On Friday, 14 July 1967, three days before his death, he met Bob Thiele, handed the master tapes over to him and finally authorised the title and the release of the album, but expressed his opposition against liner notes.

Expression, as John Coltrane’s final statement, was released in September 1967, two months after his death, containing John‘s chronologically last audible studio recordings and being the first posthumous release of his music.

John Coltrane 100: Interstellar Space

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Acquaro) — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 04:00:00 +0000

By Gary Chapin

Reading back into the reviews of this recording, from over the past decades, you encounter the word “relentless” a lot, probably more than for any other album in the history of albums. It’s interesting because, when I first heard Interstellar Space, “relentless” was the word that occurred to me — right after the introductory bells of track one faded. Till then, I hadn’t realized that “relentless” was a thing that music could be, and that relentlessness was awesome. Even transcendent.

It’s not a complicated record. You’ve got your tenor and drums. Each piece starts with a theme, enters the improvisation, and then winds down and restates the theme. Each improvisation travels a similar arc, beginning in a saner space, rising intensity and ecstasy, whipping us into a frenzy, then easing off into … well, not serenity, but you get close to it as you hear the shaken bells that begin the next piece.

The joys of Interstellar Space come not from structural intrigue, but from the cascadingly brilliant improvs. Coltrane and Ali were both ridiculously ON that day. (Ali actually felt he had underperformed because he didn’t know they were doing a duet session until he arrived at the session.) And the duet setting makes the music almost transparent. Aside from the beauty of Trane and Ali’s playing, you also get a sense of exactly what Coltrane was trying for. His insistent explorations (relentless) are laid bare. This is an excellent entry to Coltrane’s later works. His playing is like water moving through the ground, trying to find its way through a shelf of granite. Eventually, the water finds the crevices, freezes, expands, thaws, and breaks the stone to pieces. The water always wins. A force of nature.

John Coltrane 100: The Olatunji Concert: The Last Live Recording

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Acquaro) — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 04:00:00 +0000

By Fotis Nikolakopoulos

Truth must be said from the beginning, I’m not, even a little, objective when it comes to John Coltrane’s last chapter in life and in music. Those two are inseparable in any case. Second truth is that this last period that starts roughly sometime in 1964, prior to A Love Supreme, and ends with his death is my favorite music. He and all his comrades, especially Alice, Pharoah, Rashied and Jimmy managed to create a body of music of transcendence –an ascension for the soul and deep meditation for the mind.

My album of choice is this last live recording (where the aforementioned musicians are joined by Juma Santos and Algie DeWitt on percussion), recorded just three months before his death at the Olatunji Center of African Culture in Harlem, N.Y.C. In a quite symbolic move (the place: deep in an African-American neighborhood, the name: African Culture and tradition as a starting point) the music of the players, even though both geographically and in name still black, still jazz but free, is already a new entity.

With this recording, one that the sound is not so hi-fi, Coltrane’s sound seems to be in the final stage of the total freedom that Ascension initiated. Listening to the unrelenting growls, howls and their thick wall of sound created by Trane and Pharoah, one could easily comment that the two tracks, Ogunde of almost half an hour and the total reconstruction of My Favorite Things that clocks in thirty four uncontrollably joyous minutes, are pure noise.

This ferocious a la Ayler attack by the two locked in reeds brothers, provides a rough field, like a magic carpet flying in the air, for the others to give everything they have. And they have to give a lot to the not so big crowd attending, as their collective struggle to follow or lead at some points, or intertwine with small gestures like the polyrhythmic-not-so-rhythmic barrages by Rashied, the lovingly plucked piano chords by Alice and the even though not always audible, monstrous strength by Jimmy on double bass.

Allow me to humbly comment that Coltrane’s music channeled everything in black tradition and went beyond that. He created his own tradition. You also don’t need me to say that this is an amazing recording. One that encapsulates all the stated goals by John Coltrane himself. Total freedom, love, myriads of feelings and a spiritual unity that could be the final Truth.

If there’s something to think about, to question, it could be this: where could his music go after this? Did he, before even turning 41, reached a point of no return?

@fot.isn

John Coltrane 100: Concert in Japan

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Acquaro) — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 04:00:00 +0000

By Martin Schray

The reason I like John Coltrane’s Concert in Japan best out of all my Coltrane albums is that it includes one of my all-time favorite tracks: “Peace on Earth”. And as good as “Meditation/Leo (Part One),” “Leo (Part Two),” and “Part Three” are - “Peace on Earth” outshines them all.

When John Coltrane arrived in Japan in 1966, he was welcomed like a king. He arrived at Haneda Airport on July 8, 1966, along with his wife Alice, Pharoah Sanders, Jimmy Garrison, and Rashied Ali. Ali, who later recalled the trip, said they were greeted by thousands of Japanese fans. At the airport, there were huge, life-size cardboard cutouts of the musicians, a red carpet leading from the plane to the terminal, and bouquets of flowers.

And Coltrane had a message, it was no coincidence that he wanted to perform in Japan. He insisted on traveling to Nagasaki to visit the Peace Memorial at the site of the atomic bombing. He laid down a wreath and prayed for a long time. The place had a profound emotional and spiritual impact on him. On the evening of his concert in Nagasaki, he played “Peace on Earth” - at that time a new piece and a kind of musical prayer for peace. At a press conference during the tour, when asked about the Vietnam War, he said: “I dislike war, period. It should stop, and any other war.”

On Concert in Japan - and on “Peace on Earth” in particular - one can see how Coltrane’s thirst for new sounds is inextricably linked to his desire to view the universe from a spiritual perspective; his music radiates a cosmic aura. The piece begins with an incredibly beautiful melody that floats above Alice’s arpeggios, Garrison’s bass sprinklings, and Ali’s sparse drumming. It seems like the musical embodiment of the Garden of Eden. Nearly six minutes of pure harmony - but then deliberate atonality creeps in, paradise is threatened, only heavenly saxophone lines save it for the time being. Then, however, a dissonant storm is conjured up, shaking this world to its very foundations. The piece is thrown into utter disarray; block chords replace the arpeggios, and the bass and drums throw the meter overboard. At the very end, however, harmony returns, and the melodies resurface, albeit different from how they began.

In July 1966, John Coltrane was just one year away from his untimely death, yet his zest for life was greater than ever. His musical explorations were more adventurous than before, and “Peace on Earth” brilliantly captures the essence of what his music is all about. Or, as my friend Thomas Weber puts it: “On the one hand, it’s utter extravagance and exhaustion, on the other, it’s the dissolution of boundaries. Free jazz with melodies.”

John Coltrane 100: Ascension

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Acquaro) — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 04:00:00 +0000

By Gregg Miller

To celebrate and commemorate John Coltrane’s 100 ^th birthday, drummer extraordinaire Don Berman will reprise at the Chapel Performance Space in Seattle his original composition, 'Ascension Northwest', written in the spirit of Coltrane’s Ascension (Impulse!, 1966). As in the original, Berman has11 musicians playing a series of mantras interspersed with spirited soloing over improvised support from subsets of other players, including a double-bass duet.

A preview of this year’s performance written by Paul Rauch appears in Seattle’s Earshot Jazz magazine: https://online.fliphtml5.com/risyt/Earshot_Jazz_09_2026/#p=13

You can hear earlier versions of 'Ascension Northwest' released here: https://threshold24.bandcamp.com/album/ascension‑northwest

As a contribution for the FJB Coltrane birthday column, I’ve asked the 11 musicians performing 'Ascension Northwest' (myself included) to reflect on Coltrane’s Ascension and its impact on their musical journey. Below, our answers (gingerly edited). The questionnaire is reproduced at the very end.

Tom Varner (French horn)

1. I knew about Coltrane and loved his music from his time with Miles, and also his ‘classic’ quartet recordings, when I was in high school and getting into jazz. I did not know about Ascensionuntil a bit later, perhaps early in college. Even though I loved Ornette Coleman, and even Albert Ayler, I must say that very late Coltrane and Ascension was a bit :”Whoa! This is too heavy for me!” at first listen. I think I wanted to hear the ‘melodic line’ no matter how ‘out’ it was, and this music went beyond that. Eventually I grew to love it, letting go of the ‘I must hear a clear line’ worry and just enjoying being carried away in the power of the SOUND. I.e., that sound of a ‘scary but then NOT scary’ glorious totality of several improvisers all going full steam ahead at once. The JCOA Michael Mantler ‘Communications’ 3-LP set, from 1968, with Pharoah Sanders and other greats, was a kind of bridge for me to the world of Ascension. To a kind of ‘beautiful crying battle’ as opposed to just noise. Within one or two years, I was open to playing in those settings!

1a. Ascension opened up a new world of “multiple new sound-creating improvisers” creating new avenues that were not ‘just’ chord change or single-line orientated. From then on, Coltrane’s world and the worlds of, say, Xenakis and Ligeti, were not so far apart!

1b.Moving into the ‘90s, I worked with ensembles that had 6, 7, 8 winds with bass and drums. I was going for that high energy sound where it was ‘ok’ to not hear individual single lines and just get swept away in the sound. The best example of this is my own “Death at the Right Time,” on “The Mystery of Compassion” on Soul Note (1992). 5 saxes, three low brass, bass and drums.

1c. Ascension kind of gave us ‘permission’ to create beautiful and powerful structures with very little or no written music, just ideas, and trusting that the improvisers will create a lasting artwork on the spot. I love that!

2. This is very corny, but at age 18, I clearly remember thinking “Well, remember, Tom, if things get bad in the future, or very challenging, don’t forget to listen to Coltrane—that music is healing. That music will always be there.” And, I would also simply say, “thank you, Mr. Coltrane.”

Jim Knodle (trumpet)

I heard Ascension when it was released in 1966. I regard it as a companion to Ornette's double quartet project Free Jazz. The interaction between Scott LaFaro and Jimmy Garrison is really something! Perry Robinson told me that the whole thing started at the Federal Prison in Lexington where everyone practiced in the same room at the same time. They didn’t want them to rehearse, so they just played ad hoc .

Kenny Mandell (alto sax)

1. I was probably 19 when I first heard Ascension. 1972 or so. Being in college, I had heard free jazz players in NYC, and I knew Sun Ra’s music. Ascension was way more organized than a lot of Sun Ra’s music insofar as it kept the traditional jazz form where there was thematic material followed by solos. There are motifs but there aren’t any chord changes to speak of, and there is some degree of cacophony. Depending on the player, some of the solos were more traditional, others were, I would say, divinely inspired, like Eric Dolphy’s.

In my listening life at that time, I quickly went from Led Zeppelin to the Art Ensemble, Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp, and Cecil Taylor. Most people thought I was crazy. I related to the energy of it. The dissonance never bothered me per se. Ascension showed me that the big band format could be stretched. The rock stuff was relatively static in comparison. Hendrix was close. Everybody else stayed in the form. I see Ascensionas important but not seminal. It’s certainly part of the canon.

1b. I’ve put many large groups together over the years. Part of the game plan for large group improvisation is to establish a level of trust. I’ve learned to pick people who are comfortable recognizing that the traditional limits or strictures put on playing are actually optional, and one can use or not use those depending on what sort of statement the whole piece wants to make. Murray Bookchin’s Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971, 1986) was pivotal (early 1970s) for me as much as any of this music. I tried to use those principles in music and in organizing. My book some day will be called The Tyranny of Harmony. Piano chords in particular limit your choices as an improvisor.

It’s also the case that as I’ve gotten older and found that the audience just hasn’t been there for totally unstructured, large-form music, I’ve tended to select pieces or write pieces that give the audience some sort of repeated motif to ground their listening experience.

1c. Ascension opened the door. After A Love Supreme (1965), people thought Coltrane took an extreme left turn into the world of sound exploration as it could be manifested in improvisation and group interaction. Ascension put into stark reality the challenges of making and of listening to that kind of music. I don’t think they got to the level that the Art Ensemble of Chicago did over the years, and some of Cecil’s groups that stayed together for years: Jimmy Lyons, Sirone, Andrew Cyrille, they practiced incessantly and got telepathic.

2. John Coltrane had an obsession with achieving a certain sound. Coltrane—his essence for me–is that ceaseless searching. This is what I love about music probably the most, it’s that it never ends.

Dick Valentine (tenor sax)

I reflected at length on the questions you posed, and on the evolution of my attitudes, responses and relations with Coltrane’s music, which I understand in a context of almost 60 years trying to educate myself and participate in contemporary expressions of Great Black Music. In the end, despite that his recorded output made a tremendous impact on my playing ‑‑ and was a singular factor in motivating my drive to make music ‑‑ I think it fair to say Ascension, the recording, has not occupied as big a space in my development or conceptualization as some other works.

I played in Don Berman's three presentations of Ascension Northwest in 2016, and I'm very pleased indeed to get to do it again on the Coltrane centenary. I really cherish the privilege of participating with artists the caliber of those whom Don has persuaded. I look around the room at the assemblage of musical knowledge, emotional depth, technical proficiency, and aesthetic ambition, I am inspired and amazed and humbled.

I’m long past accepting that I will never "understand" society. It seems to me the “order that governs power and human relations” in our real world is founded on out‑of‑date assumptions regarding what humanity needs to flourish. I know that there are many people aware of this damaging misalignment, and I can tell they mostly share my frustration that fixing large‑scale misalignments is not in the offing, thanks precisely to the systems that govern the distribution of power and dictate humans' relationship with real resources.

So, on John Coltrane's centenary, we'll gather musicians, players and audience in celebration. In a sense, a roomful is perhaps a model of “society.” Everyone in the room will have some mental image of what constitutes a successful event ‑‑ in context, the definition of the community “flourishing,” right? As players, we have the responsibility to provide physical, audible inputs to the outcome. There is a bit of magic to what may happen here. Each player contributes to the global fabric, whose nature he may not predict. It’s understood that coordinated inputs are in some sense a prerequisite for success, and communication is required for coordination. How is communication achieved? By the act that constitutes that player’s input. It’s a bit recursive, to say the least!

Neil Welch (tenor sax)

1. Ascension came my way when I was 15 or 16. I picked up the album in cd format at a record store. This was my first experience with Trane’s music on Impulse!. I picked up the album out of curiosity. I was initially struck by three things:

1. The album cover ‑‑ Coltrane the seeker, looking beyond himself, and beyond us to something cosmic.

2. The length of the album: Until this point, I didn't know that a ‘jazz’ album could be +/‑ 40 minutes in length.

3. The cd version had takes 1 and 2, which made it a double album. It was the most expensive CD I had ever bought.

The response for me was immediate. I felt the album opened with a declarative question. Coltrane begins with a theme, but it is incomplete. The tonic is ‘missing’ from the first note he plays. He asks the band a question with only the partial theme, and leaves it to the band to complete that theme.

Ascension felt to me a major and inevitable document in Coltrane’s music from this period. The emotional intensity of his solos, and what he was asking of a small group, had reached a tipping point. I found it deeply humbling and revealing that he used the vehicle of a communal sound to further amplify the concept of the jazz musician as soloist and group collaborator.

1a. After Ascension, I understood that in musical conversation, a powerful theme could be stated with brevity. A short theme can grant space for a complex response of virtually any length.

1b. Ascension helped me to experience song length as a durational mind-set. A song could, and ought to be, exactly the length needed to fulfill its musical and emotional aims.

1c.Ascension is, for me, an album of colliding forces and the unity of embracing those forces towards a common mission. It’s like people in a building. All these souls one floor atop the other. Different lives, worldviews, needs, hurts, wants, but all share the same vertical massing. If that building is on fire, they are invested in each other's outcome. They’ve looked in the eyes of those people in the elevator.

2. Can we as a society still sit with, and grapple with in real time, discordance in art‑making? Can intensity of sound and emotion hold space for us in our lives and aid us in the journey of deeper personal growth?

Steve Meyer (alto sax)

1. I must have been 14 or 15. I was just getting into Coltrane and came across Ascension at my local record store. At that point I’d only known some of his earlier quartet work and work with Miles. Seeing that this was a larger group piqued my interest. And I recognized the names of a lot of heavy players, though I doubt I’d heard most of them at that point, so thought it would be a good album. After getting back home, I’m in my bedroom and put on the album. I don’t know what I was expecting but not too far into the first side (the first ensemble part) I knew it wasn’t for me. I didn’t know what to make of it, and it didn’t speak to me. I think I finished the first side but didn’t listen to the second. A few years went by before I was ready to give it another try. I was still an adventurous listener, so my first reaction didn’t turn me off from listening to other “out”/free musics which I grew to appreciate and enjoy more and more.

1a. If I don’t like what I hear on first listen, I remind myself that there are works of art out there that I’m not ready for. Music will speak to us when we’re ready to hear it.

1b. While I was listening to more out music in my teens it was years later before I played free music – at least with others. In high school this wasn’t the kind of music most of my musician friends would be into. Even with the one or two who weren’t opposed to it, we never thought to attempt it ourselves, at least not in any serious way, sticking to more standard jazz and the fusion music of the day. (This is early 80s, btw.) Even later, people I played with tended to be more conventional in the foundation of their music. These days I’m fortunate to have a community of musicians who embrace free/creative music. And, I have more confidence in myself to nudge the conversation that way when playing with others that I think will be receptive to it.

1c. I tend to not view music through a sociological lens, but Ascension and similar music has made me consider the normative orders of music in the US. Mainly, they’ve shown me there are a lot of stories to be told and a lot of different ways to tell them.

2. I want to thank Coltrane for his music and inspiration. The question to ask myself: how can I harness the focus and questing spirit of Trane?

Eric Ring (piano)

While A Love Supreme was life changing at 18, I’d surprisingly never heard Ascension prior to preparing for this performance.

Don Berman (composer, drums )

1. A sax player at my summer Maine resort job, a student of Jackie McLean, had introduced me to Coltrane’s Live at Birdland (Impulse!, 1964). This was 1972. I heard an amazing spiritual element in John Coltrane's music when I heard his quartet play “Alabama.” It struck me incredibly deeply and I have adored jazz and playing jazz ever since. (The piece was a deeply moving eulogy to the victims of bombing of the 16th street Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama.) A couple of years later, in my junior year of college, I heard Ascension and realized that Trane had helped jazz expand its scope enormously to express a wider range of feelings. With the Ascension session, jazz composition and form had evolved light years from the beginnings of jazz decades earlier. After Ascension, there was now a huge universe of possibilities for jazz musicians to explore in their work.

1a.As I got further into jazz I particularly loved Miles Davis and John Coltrane, because I saw how each had evolved continuously throughout their musical journeys, from one period and chapter and style to another. The way I think about music and music making after Ascension is part and parcel of how I feel about music and art in general. All of the art forms have a rich and magical history. If you have studied and played music for years and years, you have to discover who you are and what your aesthetic is.

1b. For me, Ascension is part of what guided me further into freer playing and improvising in the last 20 years. Creating my own compositions has become more important for me. I organize pieces that contain both written and improvised sections. For this I select musicians that can both interpret written compositions and also improvise very well.

2. I would ask others: How does Coltrane’s music move you and make you feel about what feelings or sounds you play and express when you play? The world is full of a truly amazing variety of music. There are masters playing in each of those styles. I would ask others who take music seriously to open their minds and make sure they hear the music of master creators, live when possible, and in as many styles as possible. Master the basic fundamentals, and take music as seriously as Trane did.

For those just seeking fun, that is fine too. A lot of striving people in the arts take things too seriously, especially when they become too self-absorbed and their egos interfere with what they are attempting to do as musicians. As the great pianist and educator Kenny Werner teaches his students and readers, “your value as a human being is not based upon how well you play a musical instrument.”

Gregg Miller (baritone sax)

1. Around 1997 I bought a used CD copy of the compilation, The Major Works of John Coltrane (GRP Records, 1992) which included both takes of Ascension as well as Om, Kulu Se Mama, and Selflessness. I was stunned at the difference in intent between those recordings and Giant Steps. In Giant Steps, I heard a restless cramming of as many notes as quickly as possible within structures that could barely contain them. In Ascension, Coltrane had left that set of problems behind in favor of a compositional form that foregrounded the free-playing (and listening, or not listening) of every other player, a dense maelstrom that produced its own power without regard to or in opposition to or transcending of the traditional tropes of organized sound. To my ears, there was still an evident structuredness to the resultant noise, but full-on interplay was now the method and the lesson. It felt to me like a releasing of mutual respect, a lifting of repression inherent in most musics, and a deliberate shifting of power dynamics from a singular ordered mind that commands obedience (and players willingly, often reverently submitting to that control) to the shared embrace of others who jointly participate. Messy, but beautiful. I was studying a lot of Habermas at the time, and so for me, the link between music-making and communicative action was an easy one to see/hear and understand. I wasn’t playing free music (or any music) at the time, but the seed had been sown without me knowing it.

1a. In the late 1990s I would listen to Ascension and the other tracks on Major Works over and again while studying. It was the kind of music that permitted my mind to roam freely and/or easily concentrate elsewhere without demanding I enter its rhythms, melodies, cadence. There was something liberating in its power to shape time and experience like that. Among other things, it forced me to confront the limitations of pop music and its draw.

1b. As wild as Ascensions ometimes feels, it predicates without having arrived at a music that depends foremost on collective improvisation where listening and meaningful response have overtaken chops and strutting (not that chops and strutting can’t be part of meaningful communication). What opens up, then, is the possibility for music-making where the reception of one’s own and others’ sound while playing is governed by a feeling out of the pulse of the whole, accepting contingency and accident as integral to the flow of making. Musical “intention” in this context becomes an emergent property of the experience of intersubjectivity.

1c. Most (90%?) deliberately made music appears to our ears in strict time, where the musicians aim to become part of a single organism beating in time, and their music tries to compel listeners to imaginatively join that rhythmic organism. There is solace and belonging offered in that vision of unity and unfreedom. I’ve had enough of that music. How else might we imagine and experience collective practices of meaning-making/moving/sounding as individual and collective flourishing/belonging/being-with-others? Ascension.

Questionnaire

1. When did you first hear Ascension, or come to know about it? What was your response? How did this event affect your understanding of Coltrane and what he’s up to, of jazz music, and/or music and what it’s up to?

1a. How do you think about music and music‑making after Ascension?

1b. Has Ascension (or its ilk) informed your practice – of playing, of organizing, of selecting musicians, of conceptualizing the field of music?

1c. Has Ascension informed your understanding of society, or, dare I say it, the normative order(s) that govern(s) our understanding of power and human relations?

2. What question would you want to ask of yourself, of others, about John Coltrane @100?

John Coltrane 100: Stellar Regions

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Acquaro) — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 04:00:00 +0000

By Klaus Kitzinger

Reflections on Stellar Regions (1967/1995)

Around the end of the year 1995, a „new“ album of John Coltrane, posthumous of course, was announced to be released. Alice Coltrane(AC), generally referred to in the press as Coltrane‘s widow and archive keeper, had found a previously lost tape of a 1967 recording date (and given titles to the tracks), we learned.

As a relative newbie to modern, avant-garde jazz, you would generally resort to sources like „Das Jazzbuch“ by acclaimed writer J.-E. Berendt from your local public library (in Lower Bavaria, in my case). As to Coltrane’s music, you would probably have already taken Soultrane and Blue Train as a starting point, passed by Giant Steps und initiated yourself into the Impulse-/classic quartet period with, for instance, Live at the Village Vanguard . You would have learned that A Love Supreme was the peak of his creative work and a great milestone of modern jazz in general. Going on further to Ascension, probably tempted by Mr Behrendt‘s description of it „as an orgasm lasting 40 minutes“, it was, however, not for me. It was simply too much for me to take at that time, especially the lack of any „song structure“, I did not find an orgasm, but a collective, cacophonic mess lasting 40 minutes, to be honest.

With that background, learning that the announced release, titled Stellar Regions , was originally recorded in 1967, it caught my curiosity nonetheless. Not only was this my birth year, it would also be interesting to see: how had Coltrane developed from 1965 on? And, sadly, we could expect to listen to some of his last recorded music, just five months before his death,

Some raw facts: All the music assembled on Stellar Regions was recorded in the Van Gelder Studio in one day’s work on 15 February 1967, and the released material comprises everything recorded in that session*, with his regular group members of that era: AC on piano, Jimmy Garrison (JG) on bass and Rashied Ali (RA) on drums. But at this date in the absence of saxophonist Pharoah Sanders(PS), thus reducing the late period quintet of Live at the Villard Vanguard Again! to a quartet. After this studio date, Coltrane would return there exactly one week later on 22 February for a duo recording with RA (Interstellar Space) and in March for three more tracks to be released in late September 1967 on Expression. All but one of the tracks on Stellar Regions were unreleased before (I knew none of it anyway), as #5 Offering had already been used to complete the Expressionalbum. And by the way, the title track #3 (alternate take #9) was an early version of Venus from the duo session with RA one week later.

What is going on here?

Having my CD copy of Stellar Regionsin hand, what did I get?

As an obvious statement already from the back of the cover: Shortness. A return to a noticeable format and compositional structure. 11 tracks (including 3 alternate versions) with a maximum length of just under 9 minutes (#1 Seraphic Light), well … that sounded fairly familiar to me, even compared to a Genesis or Dire Straits LP (which, in the meantime, had found a place a bit farther behind in the rack).

On first listen: Conciseness. Cohesiveness. Control, even constraint. The contrast to Ascension and even more so (although unknown to me), the sprawling marathon improvisations of his live 1966 work (the non-stop concerts of the 1966 tour in Japan!), becomes evident from the start. These pieces are tighter and more concise, the emotional bursts more focused.

Lyrical clarity. Spiritual atmosphere. Much to my surprise. While intense and free, these pieces are balanced with moments of meditative calm. I found lyrical beauty on #1 Seraphic Light, #5 Offering and #4 Iris -the latter being a gorgeous ballad, pleasant rediscovery on re-listening and easily the most traditionally and melodically accessible track on the album.

Is it „free“ jazz“ actually?

Is this free jazz, I wondered? While I have no doubt, that this is a true free jazz album and the right stuff for the readers and makers of the Free Jazz Blog, this album still sits quite on the border for me. Needless to say, by February 1967, Coltrane had abandoned traditional chord progressions and swing rhythms.

Why it may justifiably be called free jazz:

- The protagonist does of course not abandon the extended techniques he had developed over the years - overblowing, shrieking altissimo notes and multiphonics.

- RA displays his non-metric drumming and plays multidirectional rhythms, creating a fluid, rolling wave of percussion rather than playing a traditional steady swing beat.

- The musicians as a whole are not bound by traditional chord progressions. They play with harmonic openness, outside the conventional harmony.

And what makes it distinct from other works of the period, so it may be not:

- Unlike his live performances of this time, Stellar Regions has clear, distinct thematic melodies at the beginning and end of most tracks, providing structural anchors.

- JG‘s bass playing also acts as a massive anchor. Because he uses repetitive and modal tools to anchor the root note, the musicians never fully detach from a tonal center.

- AC‘s chord playing on piano provides a harp-like, meditative harmonic cushion. It is free-form, but it’s deeply melodic and highly tonal as well.

Conclusion:

Stellar Regions uses the vocabulary of free jazz (energy, microtonality, open rhythm, non-metrical drumming) but pours it into shorter, concise and deeply spiritual tone poems, finding a balance between freedom and structure. Instead of plainly breaking the rules or „tearing down walls“, it is all about using freedom to achieve an emotional and spiritual state.

What stands out

I like the more lyrical pieces on this album very much. They really define this album and give it a distinct place in Coltrane’s late period timeline. They a show us a side of Coltrane’s final months that makes already a shift to a more spiritual atmosphere. They touch my heart and make me wistfully curious if more of that kind would have come flowing out of that musician.

Offering (# 5) is a majestic ballad, the emotional center of the session and arguably the most structurally complete composition on the album. The track opens with a beautiful, hymn-like melody, played on tenor with incredible tenderness, sounding like a religious lament. AC enters with resonant low-register block chords. Coltrane’s solo moves away from the melody into intense, microtonal and split-tones. However, because AC sustains chords instead of playing dissonant clusters, Coltrane’s own fiery playing never sounds angry or harsh, but soulful, like a spiritual cry. The track concludes with a return to the opening theme. By the time the melody returns, the storm has cleared, leaving a sense of exhausted peace.

Seraphic Light (#1). If Offering is a grounded prayer, Seraphic Light,the album’s starter, is pure cosmic ascension. While it has a more active, rolling rhythm play from RA, it remains one of the most texturally dense tracks on the album. This track begins not with a saxophone melody but with a rumbling of drums and cymbals from RA. AC establishes a continuous tremolo on the piano, while JG plays an aggressive, bowing bass drone. RA provides a rapid, metrically free tapestry of cymbals and snaredrum hits throughout. When Coltrane enters on saxophone, he plays short, declarative motifs that rise upward in pitch, bypassing a traditional jazz melody entirely. On this track, AC abandons all traditional piano performance boundaries. She does not simply play chords to back up a soloist, but creates a massive swirl of sound. The track builds to a peak where Coltrane‘s solo moves into the stratosphere, played in the extreme altissimo register of his instrument. Yet even throughout this peak, JG‘s grounding bass and AC‘s rolling waves prevent the track from becoming exhausting. It remains radiant and luminous.

Does this album show us a path to the (unrealized) future?

Now, as this year marks the 100th anniversary of John Coltrane’s birth and these recordings are almost his last notes to be captured on tape, it is a compelling „what if“-question: Where would he likely have moved to from here? Does this February 1967 recording – especially its lyrical core (see above) - give us a blueprint of what would have come?

That is open for debate. Coltrane, sadly, recorded this music just five months before his death. We will never definitely know for sure how his music would have evolved if he had lived on. In his Allmusic review (4 ½* by the way), Scott Yanow argues that Stellar Regions offers no real hints of a future path.

However, it may as well be stated that these recordings „represent a suggestion of the evolution his music would have taken had his life not been cut so short“ (David S. Wild, author of the liner notes, June 1995). Stellar Regions implies that Coltrane was heading toward a "chamber free-jazz" where total freedom was guided by internal discipline and structured devotion. Also, Stellar Regions suggests that the 1970s version of John Coltrane would have been less aggressive and far more compositional, spiritual and influenced by eastern aesthetics. It would have been intriguing to see him join his wife Alice in making the shift to World and Spiritual Jazz. Coltrane was already moving toward the cross-cultural, transcendent, meditative music of the 1970s, as evidenced in Alice Coltrane‘s (Journey in Satchidananda, 1971) and Pharoah Sanders‘ albums recorded after his death.

This session from mid-February 1967 still proves that avant-garde music can be profoundly beautiful, universal and divine.

*The liner notes from June 1995 by David S. Wild confirm that the track To Be, released on Expression, with Coltrane on flute and PS rejoining him on piccolo flute, was not actually recorded on that same date, although being credited to that date on its original release.

Also note: a contemporary review in German by Konrad Heidkamp from 09.12.1995, DIE ZEIT 50/1995, is still available for registered readers of DIE ZEIT.

---

Klaus Kitzinger, born in 1967 in Landshut, Lower Bavaria, Germany. Still lives and works there in his daytime job as a lawyer specializing in construction law. A faithful follower of FJB, he got his first hold of free jazz as a teenager in the early to mid 1980‘s, when one enthusiastic pub operator actually brought luminaries like Archie Shepp, Sam Rivers, Joseph Jarman, the Sun Ra Arkestra, Jimmy Lyons/Karen Borca and Andrew Cyrille (spelled „Grille“ in the local newspaper) to his provincial hometown. Besides free jazz, he has an interest in (nearly) everything related to Japanese culture, traditional and modern, thanks to being married to Yuka.

John Coltrane 100: Transition and Sunship

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Acquaro) — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 04:00:00 +0000

By Brian Earley

When John Coltrane died in 1967 the jazz world felt a startling void. With the release of Expression, Coltrane’s final studio album, it must have felt like a narrative had been cut short of its intended ending. After all, unless Trane had recorded material that had never been released, that was it: no more new music from John Coltrane.

We know the story 100 years after Trane’s birth, however. And did he ever record material that had yet to be released! Alice Coltrane worked relentlessly to preserve John’s towering musical legacy, and we know from Andy Beta’s incisive book on her life that after a long day of raising four children on her own, she would put the kids to bed, sit in meditation, and practice the music that meant so much to her and her late husband. What she also did was listen to unreleased recordings by John and prepare them for release.

Among the recordings made public in the immediate years following John’s passing were two absolutely stunning (I can’t emphasize this word enough–stunning!) recordings by the famed Classic Quartet of Trane, McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, and Elvin Jones: Transitionin 1970 and Sun Ship in 1971.

Transition

McCoy Tyner related to writer David Wild that sometimes John would give them two notes, or maybe just a scale, as the basis of a composition before they recorded. The title track to the album Transition,recorded in the spring of 1965,certainly could be such a piece. The work features a tightly focused quartet that absolutely opens up the gates and begins to tear down the fences. “Transition” is one the group’s wildest, most ferociously open pieces. It’s as though the catalytic power of Ascension or Om has been concentrated into a narrow and controlled conduit. Both the kinetic energy coursing through that conduit and the narrowness of the channel itself create the conditions for tension and combustion.

The “Prayer and Meditation Suite,” on the other hand, is an absolute masterwork. I am of the persuasion that comparing works of Trane to other periods in his life can dangerously undervalue some of his accomplishments. Any suite, be it Meditations or “Prayer and Meditation” would beg comparison with A Love Supreme. Forget all that. “Prayer and Meditation” would stand as one the great works in the jazz canon if it were the only piece Coltrane and the Quartet created. Movement II: “Peace and After” is the sound of a quest for peace complete with all the pain inherent in that search. Movement IV: “Affirmation” picks up where “Transition” left off and rings with crisis, explosiveness, and spiritual urgency.

Violence was always slinking nearby during Coltrane’s life, as it is for us today, and his music embraces this reality, but I would never describe his music as “violent.” Just note the third remaining song on Transition : “Dear Lord.” It is hard for me to imagine there ever existed a world without this vulnerable dedication to peace. Urgency and catharsis. Peace and vulnerability. The circumstances without and the transition within.

Sun Ship

In the nighttime hours of August 26, 1965, John Coltrane and his classic quartet walked into an East Manhattan studio. That year Martin Luther King and hundreds of peaceful protestors were arrested in Selma for wanting voter registration fairness. Malcolm X was shot to death. The first massive contingent of US ground troops landed in Vietnam, and the United States would slaughter tens of thousands of people before the year ended using machine guns and missiles fired from military jets. In Los Angeles, unemployment rates for black Americans grew to levels greater than during the Great Depression, housing discrimination was bolstered by law, and Watts exploded in rioting after a violent encounter between police and a black man.

John Coltrane placed his mouth around his horn and blew. The sound that emerged, a passage of lyrical melody deeply tender and filled with solace, titled “Dearly Beloved,” lifted into the air. John embodied serenity and the path to it. People were dying and being denied their humanity by a power structure that required their destruction, and John never pretended this was not the case. The path to peace traveled through pain, not around it. People are dying right now as you read this, but life’s powerful play goes on, in all of its tragedy and real joy. Afterall, John’s baby boy Ravi had just been born, and John had assembled this collection of musicians to record at night because that day he was busy celebrating his first son, John Jr. 's, first birthday.

Attaining does not come without suffering, but it also arrives with beauty.

Attaining. Sun Ship. Ascent. Amen.

John Coltrane 100: Live at the Village Vanguard Again

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Acquaro) — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:40:00 +0000

By David Cristol

So much has been written about John Coltrane and he's such a widely acknowledged and worshiped figure - one of jazz's top two most iconic artists, along with his once employer Miles Davis - that I don't feel I have anything new to bring to the table. Asked to comment on a favorite Coltrane album, however, I comply, for what it's worth. The first Coltrane album I purchased - a secondhand 1987 CD release - was Live at the Village Vanguard Again, recorded May 28, 1966. Prior to this, I had only heard Coltrane on Miles Davis' Kind of Blue.

Village Vanguard Again was a punch in the gut, a puzzle for the mind and the record that won me over to free jazz for good, although it didn't happen overnight. I initially didn't understand what was going on, what to make of it. But was soon repeatedly attracted by the unhinged, torrential sounds unleashed on lengthy versions of "Naima" (a tender ballad with exquisite chords, here exuding rage and sorrow) and "My Favorite Things" (a distinctly lighthearted song from the movie "The Sound of Music", here given a terminally outrageous, or wonderfully out there treatment, according to your inclinations) interspersed with a six-minutes Jimmy Garrison bass solo. Each time I pressed the play button, I was unable to stop listening until the end of the total running time. The album held some arcane truth I couldn't live without anymore. It was music I had to sort out for myself, keep to myself, not music I could share with friends or relatives, let alone spin at parties... The line up had Alice Coltrane on piano, Pharoah Sanders on tenor sax and flute, Rashied Ali on drums, with Coltrane on tenor, soprano and bass clarinet. I was unaware there was a much-loved Coltrane "classic quartet" then, and that this was not it! Some of the Impulse! catalogue was being reissued at that time (the mid-90s), Sanders' "Tauhid" and "Karma" among the batch, both also expanding my musical outlook. Coltrane's albums and archival releases were dropping in quick succession, each new one a mandatory listen. I stumbled on small-priced, worn out LP copies of "Transition" and "Kulu Se Mama" (both recorded in 1965). I was hooked, although none of those albums, and no other Coltrane record I heard after the 1966 live set, had the same definitive, life-altering effect, or reached the same high as that first exposure to the work.

Could it be that I had started with a peak, a logical conclusion to what had come before? The music was

equal parts perplexing, intimidating, meaningful, dark, luminous, an unrelenting war machine yet brimming with sensitivity, not quite inviting if you were not ready to surrender to its revolutionary approach, but fully uplifting and cleansing if you were.

John Coltrane 100: John Coltrane in Detroit, June 1966

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Acquaro) — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 04:00:00 +0000

John Coltrane Memorial in Hamlet, N.C.
Photographer unknown.

By Stuart Broomer

If I can write anything meaningful about the music of John Coltrane, it may be about the context in which I came to experience his work live, in 1966, after listening intently to his work for four years on record and writing reviews of some of it as well. One’s juvenilia is embarrassing almost by definition, but that’s my particular gateway here to a world in which Coltrane was playing live a few feet in front of me. 13 months later he passed away. I write this hopefully to communicate something of the challenging world in which Coltrane made his music, that ever more intense, more radically free music, as testimony to his courage and vision as a great artist, as large a person as one might be in that world.

The John Coltrane Reference (Routledge, 2008) by Chris DeVito, Yasuhiro Fujioka, Wolf Schmaler and David Wild, edited by Lewis Porter (Routledge, 2008) is a monumental work of scholarship. After the introductions, there’s a Chronology of Coltrane’s life and career that runs to 357 large pages of fine print, followed by a Discography of 404 similarly sized pages in identical print, followed by 49 more pages of appendices, index, etc.

Very near the Chronology’s conclusion, there’s an entry for the John Coltrane Quintet’s appearance at Detroit’s Drome Lounge from June 17-26, 1966. The personnel, then consistent, is identified as Coltrane, tenor and soprano saxophones; Pharoah Sanders, tenor saxophone; Alice Coltrane, piano; Jimmy Garrison, bass; Rasheid Ali, drums, Friday to Sunday, matinees on Sunday. Reviewed in Coda (“John Coltrane Quintet – Drome Bar—Detroit” by Stu Broomer, Aug-Sept., 1966, pp.32 - 33). The review is represented by just a few of its sentences, but I’ll restrict myself to the Reference editor’s choices and their punctuation as well.

“This is probably the most moving working band in America (…) Tenor saxophonist Farrell “Pharoah” Sanders is now the most important soloist in the group. (…) When (Coltrane) first heard Albert Ayler in 1962, Coltrane told him he had heard himself playing like that in a dream once. (…). This band has recorded five times but nothing has been released. Perhaps Bob Thiele is hoping Coltrane will return to his old-time sanity. I for one hope he will not”. (Reprinted by permission of the author. All Rights Reserved).

What I’m trying to get at here about John Coltrane is an essential drive for expression and liberation, for liberation from every constraint to discover what’s real or what’s at least possible. If my memories from 60 years ago mean anything, they’re about the value of revolt and the horror of the norm, the judgmental restriction of cultural norms, in some places becoming more restrictive than anything I might have felt 60 years ago (a festival of liberalism by comparison). As a result, I want the music more intense, more personal, more unpredictable and I’ll stand up for it anywhere. But it is not without ambiguities.

As a teenager in the 1960s, I became obsessed with free jazz. It was a promise of freedom from restraint as well as constraint, an explosion of mixed emotions from great sorrow to ecstasy, in effect, perhaps, a promise too far. My absorption in jazz had begun in childhood with the 1957 TV special The Sound of Jazz and followed with the eventual LP. More television: I saw the Robert Herridge Presents episode with Miles Davis and John Coltrane in 1960 and loved it. My brief initial puzzlement and rapid-onset rapture with free jazz started when I picked up the September 1961 Metronome at the corner variety store. It included an epic essay on the jazz avantgarde by the then LeRoi Jones (I still have the essay somewhere — stapled together — the issue is gone). The writing was abstract, mannered and strange but also enchanting (I had already read a paperback of Kerouac’s Tristessa), its subject an arcane revolution. By the time I had purchased Ornette! and Free Jazz a few months later, Metronome had ceased to exist. I had only Down Beat, a magazine at the time sufficiently reactionary to condemn John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy as anti-jazz in a cover story. A few years later, circa 1965, I started writing for Coda, then Canada’s only jazz magazine.

If there’s a shock in that original account (in bowdlerized form), it’s likely the ranking of Sanders’ performance over Coltrane’s. Without digging for the original, I recall moments from that night when I was listening to the dense, tumultuous music and focussing on the brilliant screaming mayhem of the two saxophones, only to open my eyes and discover that John Coltrane was intently hitting a cowbell with a drumstick and Pharoah Sanders was the only person playing a saxophone. This isn’t a criticism of Coltrane. He was one of the greatest musicians who ever played jazz, but we all know now that he was seriously ill and still carrying a heavy musical load. Other memories: I already had certain knowledge that Jimmy Garrison’s solos, as memorably powerful as they were, depended heavily on the bass’s tuning in fourths, and the complex, droning solos dependent to a significant degree on the use of open strings (I was a bass player at the time). At one point in the evening, Coltrane spoke quietly to him (I was sitting at a piano-shaped stage, my ear within four feet of their mouths) specifying the key for one of his extended introductions. Garrison then looked upset, arguing for another key. I wasn’t surprised by the issue. I was surprised that it was happening about four years into Garrison’s tenure in the band.

Another and crucial surprise goes to the heart of the history of free jazz. My party (myself and three others, young musicians from Toronto, three Caucasian, one Japanese) were, in effect, insiders (however “out” we might feel in the Drome). We arrived early, conveying Rashied to the venue since we were staying in the same place, the Detroit Artists Workshop. Arriving early, we found a strange mix of conviviality and formality. Standing just inside the foyer, Jimmy Garrison was shaking hands with patrons as they entered. Even to a bass player, Garrison’s right hand (the plucking one) came as a shock: it felt like a bundle of sticks.

As popular, as great, as John Coltrane was, there was a fundamental divide in the audience about the shape his music was assuming, that was apparent from the time the music began (a shock perhaps influenced by the very music that Impulse was choosing to release). In essence there were two audiences. In the Drome it happened largely along racial lines, generally slightly older blacks on the one hand, and the white audience, many significantly younger, significantly suspended between hip and hippie. One audience looked disgruntled, offering spare, obligatory applause; the other clapped wildly with exclamatory shouts. Late in the evening, Coltrane broke into the opening phrase of his anthem, “My Favorite Things”, its bright coiling phrases instantly recognizable from the first note. It was amazing. With my back to the rest of the audience, I could actually feel the room lift, so strong was the shift in mood, comparable, for a brief instant, to the sun breaching a cloud cover. Within a couple of minutes, the sonic tumult had taken over again, and one could feel, even more intensely, the mood of the room dropping, to frustration and disappointment, perhaps, and most intensely, I felt, the abandonment, the sense of betrayal.

In total, (expanding on Coltrane's grimly disappointed Black audience) the trip seemed at times to be about race but things would get much darker, or should I say lighter (toxic metaphors lurk in our tongue) -- I had gone there with three other young Toronto musicians with whom I played. I had an association with John Sinclair (then in jail on drug charges -- not sure how current John's name is, but his greatest moment of celebrity came when imprisoned during Woodstock: Abby Hoffman interrupted the beginning of the Who's performance with a comment to the effect that Woodstock didn't mean shit while John Sinclair was in jail; then Pete Townsend hit Hoffman with his guitar for trying to take over the Who's stage). In John’s absence, his partner Leni Sinclair was running the Workshop.

I knew The Detroit Artists Workshop through shared performances between Detroit and Toronto, performances arranged by John Sinclair and the Toronto poet Victor Coleman of the Bohemian Embassy, a Toronto coffee house and performance space. Shared performances had included members of Detroit trumpeter Charles Moore’s MC5 with featured musicians that had included Marion Brown and Andrew Hill (through which I got to play bass with Andrew for a weekend among other playing associations). I had also published a poem and a record review in John's mimeo'd music journal Changes, which I think may have only gone to two (or maybe three) issues.

The Workshop was the epicentre of radical culture in Detroit whether the issue was music, race, drugs, economics or language. Later it was the spawning ground of the MC5, of "Up Against the Wall Motherfucker" fame, who John Sinclair managed. He later was a founder of the White Panther Party, a Black Panther support group. When I met the members of [Ahmed] a few years ago in Guelph, talk turned to Detroit. Some members were thinking about visiting Detroit, and Pat Thomas and I found ourselves reminiscing about John, whose poetry Pat had accompanied during an Amsterdam performance. John's contract, Pat recalled, required a private pot smoking loft.

A few days before our group arrived in Detroit, a young inter-racial couple from the Workshop had been violently attacked on the street by the sons of a former Mississippi sheriff whose property adjoined the Workshop at the rear. While we were staying there, the sheriff had invited the residents of the Workshop to a get together/ barbecue to make peace. None of the Workshop residents (naturally) wanted to go and Leni Sinclair asked our Toronto group (whom they were temporarily housing, four males sufficiently groomed to get across the border without close scrutiny) to go as their representatives. We accepted with a certain reluctance, though things (barbecue, blanched pleasantries) went civilly enough.

An hour later, on the way out of Detroit, we stopped at an ice cream outlet before we hit the border. The sons and their wives and children were there as well. On neutral ground, none of us acknowledged the existence of the other.

Charles Tyler, Stuart Broomer + Perry Robinson, 1966
©2014 Bill Copeland

AN AFTERWORD: 60 years on, I frequently listen to John Coltrane recordings, probably more than to any other historical jazz artist. I have the complete runs of the Prestige and Atlantic recordings and most of the Impulses on CD and the recordings with Monk and Miles Davis and isolated one-offs like Blue Train on Blue Note. My usual listening choices run the gamut from the Prestige and Atlantic recordings (especially Olé, the last of them, with Freddie Hubbard, Eric Dolphy and Art Davis added to the working quartet of McCoy Tyner, Reggie Workman and Elvin Jones). My listening range ends with one of my favorites, Meditations, with the “classic” quartet augmented by Rashied Ali and Pharoah Sanders. I hardly ever, if at all, listen to much that came later. Whether that’s because the actual experience of the last quintet live was enough – sufficiently intense -- to satisfy my need for that music, or that the music is so unstable or destabilizing that I don’t feel a need to hear it in its “frozen” form. The sole exception made among recordings of the last stage is Interstellar Space, the recording of four duets with Rashied Ali, recorded in February 1967, though it too is rarely played, singled out perhaps for the relative coherence of the music and the focus of its intensity.

John Coltrane 100: Exploring the Archives

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Acquaro) — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 04:00:00 +0000

John Coltrane - One Down, One Up: Live At the Half Note (recorded 1965, released 2005), My Favorite Things: Coltrane At Newport (recorded 1963 and 1965, released 2007), Offering: Live At Temple University (recorded 1966, released 2014), A Love Supreme: Live In Seattle (recorded 1965, released 2021), Evenings At the Village Gate: John Coltrane with Eric Dolphy (recorded 1961, released 2023)

By Lee Rice Epstein

1965 was remarkably transformative year in Coltrane’s history. Thankfully, through its ongoing archival releases, Impulse Records has continued to fill in the picture of how, as an artist, he continually pushed himself and his band, deeply and passionately giving his all at all times. One Down, One Up takes us right to March 26, 1965, where Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, and Elvin Jones play an astonishingly high-wire, high-energy “One Down, One Up” that runs nearly 30 minutes. The electricity crackling between players says exactly why Coltrane still matters, why he’s still adored, and why countless players of all kinds continue to study and revere him. The set’s recapitulation on the Newport stage months later (the second half of My Favorite Things: Coltrane At Newport), more clearly shows how the group was thinking about and working through their headiest ideas. That the Newport set was released with a 1963 performance featuring Roy Haynes in the drummer seat gives some additional dimensions to the quartet’s changes over time. Tyner and Jones moved on by the next year, while Garrison held down the Alice Coltrane, Rashied Ali, and Pharoah Sanders group. Reportedly, he didn’t play with them in the fall of

1966, when Coltrane led a phenomenal set at Temple University. Offering has been alternately reviled and lauded, cited by some as a polished but unnecessary bootleg for completists only. But, if one just takes a step back and considers Offering happening the same season as Albert Ayler’s seminal European tour—with the quintet of Ayler, Donald Ayler, Michel Samson, Bill Folwell, and Beaver Harris—and if one wants to get really interested in sympathetic wavelengths, you hear Coltrane singing reportedly for the first time ever during “Leo” on November 11, 1966, while Ayler was recorded doing the same on a performance of Sanders’s “Japan” the previous night, November 10, 1966. That Ayler later screamed during his memorial performance for Coltrane would be too on the nose if someone manufactured it. The two shared both intellectual and spiritual bonds, a beautiful thing we’re scarcely able to know of or understand even partly.

As the saying goes, it would have been enough to get these first three albums, but the 2020s has produced two seemingly impossible sessions: a live recording of “A Love Supreme,” also from 1965, and an unissued session with Eric Dolphy from 1961, featuring “Greensleeves” and “Africa.” What, truly can be said about Coltrane and Dolphy that doesn’t lead to a mountain of what-if or if-only hypotheticals? The hour-plus set is fiery and rich with ideas in motion. If someone told me this was 1963 or ’64, I wouldn’t doubt it. By ’61, both Coltrane and Dolphy were already well out in front of many contemporaries, and the mutual support demonstrated during their brief time together is beautifully realized here. On A Love Supreme (fascinatingly, recorded a couple days after Live In Seattle),Coltrane leads a kind of crossover group, with Tyner, Garrison, and Jones as the core quartet, joined on the tour by Sanders and Donald Garrett on bass, with Carlos Ward jumping in on sax at Coltrane’s invitation. Both Coltrane and Sanders add percussion along with Jones’s drumming, and if Offeringrepresents some kind of approaching end point in Coltrane’s art, the Seattle performance of “A Love Supreme” leads in the same direction, ever forward.

John Coltrane 100: The John Coltrane Quartet Plays

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Acquaro) — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 04:01:00 +0000

**John Coltrane – The John Coltrane Quartet Plays (Impulse, 1965)**

By Dan Sorrells

Most of my listening hours are spent on freely improvised music. But when it comes to Coltrane, I love the classic quartet, 1965, right before things broke open (and the group, apart). The John Coltrane Quartet Plays is what I reach for most often. “Chim Chim Cheree” starts like another “My Favorite Things,” but less than a minute in, Coltrane’s already chafing against the melody, and after two he and Jones are fairly bursting out of Tyner’s measured vamp. “Brazilia” and “Nature Boy” enticingly point toward the searching explorations to come, where ideas were turned inside-out in dizzying, kaleidoscopic epics (something further evidenced by various surfaced recordings from the Half Note during the same period, where “Chim” and “Song of Praise” stretch to twice the length). The sense that traditional song forms must still be made to contain Trane’s increasingly frenetic probing lends indelible tension to the music; these songs are like swelling water ballons, but they’re filled with boiling water. For those of us in the future, it’s all the more heightened when you know just how far things will get pushed, even before the close of the year.

John Coltrane 100: Live at the Village Vanguard

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Acquaro) — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 04:00:00 +0000

John Coltrane – Live at the Village Vanguard (Impulse, 1997)

By Kenneth Blanchard

There are certain recordings that stretched my grasp of jazz (and indeed music). Andrew Hill’s Point of Departure comes to mind. Coltrane’s LVV collection is another. Recorded over four nights in 1961 at the Jerusalem of Jazz, only five of the originally recorded numbers were released in the following two years. The 1997 box set is a genuine treasure. The structure of the music remains within standard hop bop spaces, but the moods blossom into an entirely new ecosystem. The inclusion of Eric Dolphy was one of Trane’s most brilliant moves. On Naima, Spiritual, India , his low horns (also sax and bass clarinet) perfectly match Trane’s tenor and soprano sax. Trane’s interest in alternative spiritual and musical traditions is obvious enough. His famous “sheets of sound” slide in and out of every line. I find the articulation of Coltrane’s own personality to be as vivid here as on any of his recordings.

John Coltrane 100: A Sunday Morning Record

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Acquaro) — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 04:00:00 +0000

DUKE ELLINGTON & JOHN COLTRANE - s/t (Impulse!, 1963)

By Ferruccio Martinotti

Sunday morning. We weren't even looking through Trane’s records, we already had a clear plan for the centenary. Then we spotted it. Or rather, it was almost as if IT was looking at us. There it was, humble and elusive amidst some truly gigantic "neighbors": “Duke Ellington & John Coltrane”. When a title says it all. How long had it been since it last took a spin on the turntable? A long, long time. So, we not only dusted it off, rescuing it from obscurity and oblivion but also cast it as the star of our own humble contribution to the Coltrane forum’s tribute. A quick preamble. Our favorite Trane is the one who burned all his bridges behind and embarked on the Path of Spiritual Ascension alongside Alice, Pharoah, Garrison, and Ali: for us, THIS is John’s definitive group. Since we are certain that our colleagues will, as usual, handle albums like ‘Interstellar Space”, “Olatunji”, “Live in Japan” et al, with the utmost mastery, we opted for a record you won’t find on "100 all-time best" playlists or among the essential albums by either Duke or Trane, yet one that is nonetheless deeply compelling. First things first: when and how did this encounter (the only one, if we’re not mistaken) between two of the greatest musicians of all time take place? The date: September 26, 1962. The setting: Rudy Van Gelder’s Studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, a place so legendary that, like Atlantis, one wonders if it ever truly existed. The mastermind: Bob Thiele, a producer at Impulse! The Maestri arrived at the meeting from different trajectories, not just in terms of age, but artistically as well. Duke, at 63, as the old king of the jungle, having already changed the course of music history in the 1920s and 30s, he wanted to show the "young lions" that the time to end up in the zoo hadn't arrived just yet. And judging by the extraordinary “Money Jungle”, recorded right some weeks earlier along with Max Roach and Charles Mingus, he had every right to feel that way. Trane, meanwhile, aged 35, was in a transitional phase. Leading one of jazz’s most sensational lineups ever (Jones, Garrison, Tyner), he had just released his first album for Impulse! in 1962, a record where modal structures were handled sublimely, yet he had not entirely cut ties with a more “mainstream” approach to his music (though, given the musical context, quotation marks are essential here!). It was as if, mid-journey, he had paused to catch his breath and look back one last time, before lighting the fuse and blowing everything wide open. The two arrived at the studio bringing their respective rhythm sections: Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones for Coltrane; Aaron Bell and Sam Woodyard from Ellington’s orchestra. To glimpse a moment of that historic occasion, we can turn to bassist John Lamb, who was present that day: “There was no music on that whole date. Nobody had a chart. We came in and we were standing there, waiting to see what would have happen. Trane would go and sit on the piano bench with Duke. They didn’t talk but Duke would be singing and Trane would go. Then, after they did that for a few minutes, they got up. Trane would go to his microphone, Duke would start playing and the rhythm section, we had to do for ourselves, you know. That’s it. He didn’t even tell you the key. He could communicate without words and Trane could hear it.” The eight-hour session yielded seven tracks: “In a Sentimental Mood”, “Take The Coltrane” and “Stevie” (two sketches composed right there in the studio), “Angelica” and “The Feeling of Jazz” by Ellington; Billy Strayhorn’s “My Little Brown Book”; and Coltrane’s “Big Nick,” a tribute to tenor saxophonist Big Nick Nicholas. At work here are two living legends who set out not to change history, but simply to experience, with mutual respect and admiration, the intimate joy of music. No overbearing displays, no pointless academic showing-off or gratuitous virtuosity. Pure Magic. Even Elvin Jones puts down the sticks of dynamite and picks up the brushes. It is a "Sunday Morning Record", relaxed, atmospheric, and straightforward, reminding us that in our constant search for the ultimate, mind-blowing thrill (which, by definition, is NEVER the last one), we often lose sight of the wonder of simplicity. This is the perfect album to set that right. Let us leave the final word on this experience to Trane: “I was really honored to have the opportunity of working with Duke. It was a wonderful experience. He has set standards I haven’t caught up with yet. I would have liked to have worked over all those numbers again, but I guess the performances wouldn’t have had the same spontaneity. And they mightn’t have been any better.”

May the Journey be light for you, dear John.

John Coltrane 100: Olé & Monk

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Acquaro) — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 04:00:00 +0000

By Paul Acquaro

John Coltrane - Olé (Atlantic, 1961)

In the mid-1990s I had just graduated from undergrad with a degree in Journalism and absolutely no idea what to do next. I spent the following summer living in a shared house with five other people about my age, one of whom was a good friend and musical partner in our band called “Joe Joe the Dog Face Boy.” We were working, we were playing music, all in all, it was fine even if a bit of a confusing time in life.

In the living room of the house, next to my room, was a shelf with a bunch of records on it. The records belonged to my friend, who had just been gifted them by his father. He had placed them on the shelf not knowing what to do with them - I am not sure that he even had a record player at this point, as it was the heyday of CDs afterall. I, however, did have a record player that had been accompanying me all through college and would be my only constant companion for the next twenty years or more, so the records, a rather eclectic mix of music from the 60s and 70s, would end up often on my stereo. This was how I encountered Olé.

Olé, John Coltrane’s last album for the Atlantic label, released in 1961, was recorded with his long-time associates MyCoy Tyner on piano and Elvin Jones on drums, which already likely brings certain harmonic and rhythmic sounds to mind. Joining them was trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, bassists Reggie Workman and Art Davis, and the great Eric Dolphy on flute and alto sax.

It was the title track that caught my ear. Extending over the whole side A of the album, it’s a modal feast that builds on a vamp derived from a Spanish folk song. Here, it starts with a single churning bass line and Tyner’s pulsating chords balancing on Jones' driving swing. Soon, Coltrane joins on soprano sax with an approach reminiscent of his playing on ‘My Favorite Things.’ Then, Dolphy lends his flute to the mix, paving the way for Hubbard’s solo, from which the track really takes off. It was rhythmically dense music, but not overly dissonant or harsh; however, for ears that could listen to jazz but were more attuned to rock, it was the perfect hook - a little more advanced than what I was used to, but not too steep of a climb. The B-side’s, ‘Dahomey Dance’ and ‘Aisha’ were a bit more rooted in the ‘jazz’ I knew. I enjoyed them, but it was the A-side that pushed me as a listener.

Critics have called Olé a transitional album. Aside from the label change, Coltrane was also headed towards more experimental realms. For me, Olé and that pile of records also came at a transitional time, and helped reveal new paths and possibilities.

Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane (Jazzland, 1961)

My plan was to next dig into something in that experimental realm. I had my sights on Offering: Live at Temple University, a live album recorded in 1966, shortly before Coltrane passed away, and released posthumously by Resonance Records in 2014. A funny thing happened, however, along the way. As I was pulling up the recording, I passed by Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane and stopped in my tracks. Also released in 1961 on the Jazzland label, this set of evergreen Monk tunes that had been recorded by Coltrane and Monk in '57 and '58 with changing rhythm sections. Two seconds of the opening ‘Ruby, My Dear’ and I knew I’d wanted to spend a little time awith this one again before moving on.

As the story goes, Coltrane was addicted to heroin and had just been fired from Miles Davis’ group. He took this break, and cleaned himself up and started to play with Monk. A residency at the Five Spot in NYC in ‘57 is the stuff of legends and a concert recording of the two from 1957 was discovered and released in 2005 by Blue Note, lends credence to the stories. Entitled Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall, it underscores the copacetic musical relationship found on the original release.

Back to that recording: the tune that stopped me in my tracks, the slow moving ‘Ruby, My Dear’ begins with such a melancholic saxophone playing the yearning melody that it instantly romanticizes any space where it’s played. ‘Tinkle, Tinkle,’ with its playful and up-tempo melody gives Coltrane a chance to unfurl those ‘sheets of sound’ that he’s famous for. Similarly on ‘Nutty’, the sheets return in a generously flowing solo, studded at key points with with reminders of the melody. Drum and bass outlining the tune, Monk waiting to come back in with the melody, before abstracting it into Improvisational flurries.

This album album is a high point in two musical catalogs that are festooned with them.

John Coltrane 100: Blue Train & More

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Acquaro) — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 04:00:00 +0000

By Nuno Catarino

Like many others, my gateway into the Coltrane universe was the inevitable Blue Train, a 1997 CD reissue, with the cover altered with different tones from the original edition. I was beginning to discover jazz and, beyond the variations on the title track, it was the vertigo of “Moment’s Notice” that must have won me over at that early stage. And, of course, the free sound of the saxophone, and the fascinating process of its discourse construction in real time — fascinating for someone who, until then, knew nothing of any form of improvised music. From there, there were several landmark records, in a process that did not follow chronology: it went through the duet with Johnny Hartman, Live at Village Vanguard , the space journey of Meditations, all the way to the devotional magic of A Love Supreme, reading the booklet while following the music, and the pinnacle of Ascension. Along the way, an unavoidable landmark, Giant Steps (as with Ornette’s records, the title also announced the jazz that was coming) with its timeless title track and the melancholic sweetness of “Naima”. I was discovering the albums in no particular order, finding the records or having them find me in a random way, and then gradually organizing Coltrane’s journey in my head, as if piecing a puzzle together. In that process, my favorite album then remains my favorite to this day: My Favorite Things. Too mainstream, too easy, some might say. On ’Trane’s path, a milestone. Not yet the classic quartet, but almost there: McCoy Tyner on piano, Elvin Jones on drums, Steve Davis on bass (Jimmy Garrison would join shortly afterwards). Coltrane takes up the soprano saxophone and transforms a well-known popular melody into a piece of his own; starting from the original melody, he transforms it through a profound process of unfurling. From this point on, it would become one of his signature tunes, evolving into other, much more advanced and deconstructed versions. But this is the start. The LP setlist also has three songs that touch the soul of anyone who loves the history of jazz: one by Cole Porter, “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye”, and two by the Gershwins: “Summertime” and “But Not for Me”. In the context of Coltrane's quest and discography, My Favorite Things is a turning point. And, in my own listener's journey, it's music that affects me deeply.

Nuno Catarino is editorial coordinator of jazz.pt since 2022. He contributes to the national newspaper Público, where he has written since 2007. He is the author, with Márcia Lessa, of the book Improvisando (2019).

John Coltrane 100: Soul Junction & First Meditations

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Acquaro) — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 04:00:00 +0000

By Richard Blute

The Red Garland Quintet Featuring John Coltrane and Donald Byrd - Soul Junction (Prestige, 1960)

Culinary writers frequently refer to comfort food. Soul Junction is my comfort music. I go to this album when I’m not in the mood to be blown away by wild flights of improvised fury or complex compositions or arrangements. This is an “end of an exhausting day” or a “reminder that maybe all will be well” kind of an album.

I love the relaxed, bluesy feel of it. Listen to Garland’s piano on the opening title track. It’s pure bliss. George Joyner’s bass is understated perfection. The piano trio portion of the track goes on so long and is so hypnotic that you’re to be forgiven if you forget there’s a sax and trumpet still to come.

Hey, there’s the saxophone. It feels like Trane was digging Garland’s playing and was dying to join in. Recorded in 1957, Trane hadn’t perfected his style yet. But his genius is right there to hear. He’s fantastic on Dizzy’s classic Birk’s Works. Donald Byrd doesn’t get much mention on this website, but I love a lot of his Blue Note music. He’s the perfect trumpeter for this session. Garland wisely gives the two of them lots of space to play, and they take every advantage of it.

John Coltrane- First Meditations (For Quartet) (Impulse!, 1977)

As far as I’m concerned, A Love Supreme is the greatest jazz album of all time and Coltrane’s classic quartet the greatest group. First Meditations (For Quartet) is a beautiful piece of music and a fascinating document of a band just on the verge of transforming, both in terms of its personnel and its approach to music. (I prefer to say “transforming” to “ending”.)

The first track, Love,clearly recalls A Love Supreme,as if that classic album is the starting point of this new music. Trane is stunning as always and McCoy is the perfect accompanist. The best track, Joy, is relatively calm and peaceful, until it isn’t. It begins as any number of other tracks from this quartet and then Trane sits out. He’s let the remaining trio play some (for this group) fairly straightforward piano trio music. But then he returns with an absolute roar, as if he wants to break constraints the rest of us can’t see. This is one of several places you can see the seams of the band starting to tear. It’s fascinating to hear.

Much of this music was reconsidered on the subsequent album Meditations with Trane’s new group. A comparison of the two albums and the approach of two different groups to the material is fascinating, the second album justifiably being the more renowned of the two. But I find the first to be the one I keep returning to, as if I don’t want to say goodbye to this quartet.

I genuinely love this album, but I had an ulterior motive for writing about it here. It gives me the opportunity to tell the story of the time I met Elvin Jones. He had been doing a drum demonstration and a line formed afterwards for autograph seekers. When I arrived at the front of the line, I barely refrained from doing “We’re not worthy”, but I did tell him how much his music meant to me and said I’d be honored if he’d sign this album. He took the CD booklet from me, looked at it and asked “Did I play on this?”. (I assume that since the album wasn’t released until 10 years after it was recorded, he never saw the album cover.) I showed him his name in the booklet, he laughed and signed it, making this album all the more special to me.

John Coltrane 100: A Celebration

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Acquaro) — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 16:00:00 +0000

As you are likely well aware, this week marks the 100th anniversary of John Coltrane's birth and writers and friends of the Free Jazz Blog were asked to contribute their personal thoughts on his music and influence. The parameters for the contributions were loose, only that it should be something personal and if it so happened that an album appeared more than once, that was fine, as what it meant to the writer was surely different. We ended up with our biggest feature ever! For the next two weeks we will be featuring reflections, reviews, and anecdotes about Coltrane and his groundbreaking music. We begin today an introduction from Sammy Stein.

Enjoy!
Paul Acquaro

John Coltrane. Src: wikipedia

By Sammy Stein

FJC is celebrating John Coltrane’s 100^th year. For anyone unfamiliar with his music, the following offers a brief overview of why Coltrane is ranked amongst the greatest of musicians.

Through his approach, style, delivery, and unmistakable sound, Coltrane powered through the door that Ornette Coleman and others had left ajar, revealing jazz’s powerful, emotive, and transformational heart. Nothing post-Coltrane is untouched by his influence. His was not a deliberate subversion of traditional jazz, but an uncalculated stream of events, personal, spiritual, and historical, that converged in a confluence that formed his music.

Coltrane’s mother bought him a saxophone when he was sixteen, and he was influenced by players including Illinois Jacquet. His grandparents were ordained ministers, his parents met through the church, and Coltrane grew up influenced by religion. He chose a different path – that of music and was not discouraged by family, yet later in his life, it was God who helped him save his music and career.

Without his spiritual reawakening, Coltrane’s career may have faded. Early on, he was supported by musicians who recognised his prodigious talent. However, he became addicted to drugs and would arrive for gigs unshaven and in smelly, wrinkled clothes. He might fall asleep on stage. Miles Davis fired him, and Dizzy Gillespie didn’t follow suit only because of their friendship and his respect for Coltrane’s talent.

At the nadir of his life, Coltrane reached out to God. He described a revelation he had when God spoke to him, and he set about composing exquisite music, praising God and teaching his followers. He said, “My goal is to live the truly religious life and express it through my music. If you can live it, there’s no problem about the music, because it’s part of the whole thing.”

Coltrane’s first wife, Naima, was central to his early spiritual journey. A practicing Muslim, she helped him understand God’s presence in their lives. With her support, he overcame addiction within a year. His second wife, Alice, became his spiritual partner and musical collaborator. A pianist and harpist, she understood Coltrane’s desire to contribute to a greater purpose through music.

Some of Coltrane’s music has an intangible quality. He understood the spiritual and temporal worlds, and his music fused the two, expressing deep spiritual inquiry alongside the mortal complexities of personality. Jazz became a place where the human condition could be expressed with unflinching honesty and transcendent beauty.

Coltrane was playing at a time when conditions were ripe for rebellion and change, and he was profoundly affected by events of his time, especially the civil rights movement, initially siding with Malcolm X before aligning with Martin Luther King Jr’s belief in peaceful but persistent protest. He performed eight benefit concerts to support Martin Luther King Jr’s cause.

His music channeled anger at racism and discrimination, despair at humanity’s darkness, and the beauty of praise and worship. He had faced the demons of addiction and won, and his music reflected beauty, was personal yet spoke to millions.

The murder of four African American girls in the KKK bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963 profoundly affected Coltrane. Two months after the event, he took McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, and Elvin Jones into Rudy Van Gelder's studio and recorded ‘Alabama’, later released on the album Live At Birdland (Impulse 1964).

As discontent rose, Coltrane’s modal technique challenged preconceived ideas about traditional jazz. Under his and other musicians’ tenure, jazz, ever the mirror of society, became more dissonant and unruly.

Coltrane’s music is as relevant today as it was in the 1960s. The messages are clearly and profoundly expressed and cut to the core impulses of humanity. Because of his uncloaked humanity, listening to Coltrane feels as emergent and alive for someone encountering the music today as it did to listeners forty years, or ten years ago.

Coltrane’s near-mythical status was helped by the Blue Note label, which signed Coltrane and other players, seen as risky at the time, and some iconic images, notably photographs by Francis Wolff, a skilled photographer and executive of Blue Note. Of over 33,000 pictures Wolff took (probably more), his images of John Coltrane in moments of intense concentration or creativity seem to capture the musician's essence.

One of Coltrane’s gifts was his ability to perform as a soloist or as part of an ensemble. Pieces like Davis’s’ ‘Milestones’ with ‘Cannonball’ Adderley (alto sax) and Coltrane (tenor sax) responding to Davis’s trumpet with twists and turns within the original mode laid a template for modal playing (try also Coltrane's’ Spiral’ and ‘Naima’ from Giant Steps (Atlantic 1959)). Modal jazz led away from traditional jazz and toward free jazz. Free playing was where Coltrane was headed.

In the 1960s, some journalists described early free jazz as a poison to jazz, and Downbeat critics described Coltrane and Dolphy’s playing as ‘nihilistic exercises’ and ‘anti-jazz.’ Miles Davis found free jazz difficult to embrace initially. However, a few years later Davis, like Coltrane and others, found free jazz liberating. Coltrane, like many free-playing musicians, connected the evolution of the music with a deepening of self-realization and the strengthening and expression of their beliefs. Alongside fellow musicians Yusef Lateef, Sonny Rollins, and others, Coltrane pursued musical mastery and self-realization.

In his suite A Love Supreme (Impulse, 1965), Coltrane expressed his love and awe of God, and the final movement is based on a devotional poem he wrote. He studied different religions and philosophies, including the Indian philosophy of Jiddu Krishnamurti, which he was introduced to by Bill Evans.

Coltrane perhaps expressed his love for God most during his free playing. His tracks ‘Love’ and ‘The Father, And The Son And the Holy Ghost’ on Meditations (Impulse 1965), albums Ascension (Impulse 1966), Om (Impulse, recorded 1965, released 1966), and ‘Peace on Earth’ from Infinity (Impulse, recorded 1966, released 1972), reflect his beliefs.

Coltrane used the ferocity of his playing and complex techniques as a way of worship. He said he created music for God and others and wanted to be the opposing force to evil. Even those unaware of his driving beliefs find something special, untouchable, and unique in his music.

Coltrane, Art Blakey, Yusef Lateef, and other musicians became part of the Ahmadiyya sect of Islam, which forbids the intake of drugs and alcohol. Coltrane said, "My music is the spiritual expression of what I am - my faith, my knowledge, my being. When you begin to see the possibilities of music, you desire to do something really good for people, to help humanity free itself from its hang-ups…I want to speak to their souls.”

Some found Coltrane’s later music, with its contradictions and unresolved transitions, less pure than his earlier recordings, but for many, they remain some of the best work produced by any jazz musician.

Two weeks before his death, Coltrane discussed opening a music venue without alcohol as he realized this had masked his creativity.

After Coltrane died in 1967, aged just forty, Alice kept pushing musical boundaries, and her music took on a profoundly spiritual element. She collaborated with Ornette Coleman, Pharoah Sanders, and many others, and her music traversed from blues-infused melodies to unfathomable sonic journeys, but it was beautiful, and her talent won armies of devotees, so, partly through Alice, Coltrane’s legacy remained. Also through his sons. John Jr, Ravi, and Oranyan. Oranyan started playing jazz with his brothers but has gone into trance and electronic music production. John Jr was a promising bassist but was killed in a car accident when he was 17, and Ravi is a jazz musician. Alice’s grandnephew, Steven Ellison, AKA Flying Lotus, is a record label owner, producer, rapper, and DJ. Many of his recordings feature jazz samples.

Coltrane’s music and persona continue to influence music and musicians. From those who followed directly, including Pharoah Sanders, Lonnie Liston, Sun Ra, Don Cherry, and John McLaughlin, to nearly every jazz musician today.

In 2016,’ Alabama’ was included in John DeJohnette's 2016 album In Movement (ECM), and on this recording, sons of the original artists, including saxophonist Ravi Coltrane (son of Coltrane) and bassist Matthew Garrison (son of bassist Jimmy Garrison), played.

Coltrane’s music has been sampled on recordings by hip hop artists, younger jazz musicians, and many others. FJC is celebrating the fact that Coltrane left his influence, and there are some great pieces following this introduction. It is impossible to adequately record the influence of John Coltrane on the music that followed, but we can try. As a jazz musician recently said to me, ‘Don’t worry, just stick on some ‘Trane.”

Perhaps more than any other jazz musician, John Coltrane showed there is a way to play from the heart without constraints. When you can do that, you allow your true spirit to reveal itself. Like ‘Trane.

Pendulum (Benoît Delbecq, Jonas Westergaard & Peter Bruun) - Opening Arcs 1-8 (Ilk Music, 2026)

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Acquaro) — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 04:00:00 +0000

By Eyal Hareuveni

Pendulum is a singular piano trio featuring French pianist Benoît Delbecq with Danish double bass player Jonas Westergaard and drummer Peter Bruun (both Westergaard and Bruun have collaborated before with fellow Danish pianist Søren Kjærgaard). Bruun initiated this trio in 2024 as part of his ambitious research project exploring new approaches to musical time (Multitemporal movement and embodiment through Rhythmic Design at The Danish National Academy of Music).

The Pendulum trio investigates all aspects of this classic format, including the most basic sensibilities of space and time, avoiding rigid structures, allowing instead for balance, elegance and fluidity. It challenges us to listen to its music as resonant arcs or shared fields of presence rather than defined by linear time, and explores new ways to transform free improvisation gravity into groove. Delbeq suggested that the trio will play with the presence of physical pendulums on stage, symbolizing the elasticity of time and giving a sense of pulse. These oscillating bodies guide the subtle, cyclical shifts in the music, which, paradoxically, feels familiar: music that sways and breathes, while finding rhythm in the inevitability of motion.

The trio releases its eight-volume EP series, Arcs, nearly three hours of music, in a monthly release cycle that began in May and will conclude in December 2026. These Arcs offer Pendulum’s idiosyncratic, enigmatic, lyrical universe, in which metric relations, shifting balances, and elastic phrasing are woven together in a kaleidoscopic manner. Each volume swings on its own terms, with no intention to offer a linear narrative, and uses distinct compositional fragments, notated and graphic scores. But the whole project accumulates into an open body of work that allows us to feel how time bends, breathes, and searches for an elusive balance. The Pendulum trio invites listeners to form their own path through the eight volumes and discover different insights and relations in their own time.

Arc No. 1

Pendulum describes this volume: “Time leans before it moves. Motion unfolds patiently, stretching and rebounding with quiet elasticity. What propels the arc is not force but attentiveness, which allows duration to bend and return without breaking. Each swing carries clarity and restraint, revealing time as something more shaped than measured”.

The trio suggests sparse, deep listening, labyrinthine architectures with patient and subtle, cyclical-rhythmic shifts, best captured in the aptly titled, 17-minute minimalist “Exercice Elastique”, that patiently gravitates into a most delicate, vulnerable, quite irreverent groove.

Arc No. 2

“Afterwards appears before it is recognized. Movement writes itself into space, leaving subtle traces that guide listening rather than direction. Rhythms form paths, both adaptable and responsive, where perception stretches between memory and anticipation. The arc remains fluid, shaped by change rather than arrival”.

Pendulum sketches an almost abstract, empty map, from which it begins to imagine possible contours and paths, and how to find its inner, spatial logic, and its subtle rhythmic shifts, finally realized on “Plasticity”.

Arc No. 3

“Movement turns inward. Each gesture is weighted, deliberate, and reduced to necessity. Time thickens as motion slows, inviting attention to settle inside the smallest shifts. The arc transforms discreetly, as intensity is held beneath restraint. Balance is discovered through presence, not display”.

The 31-minute “Buto” corresponds with the hyper-slow and hyper-controlled motion of the Japanese avant-dance theatre, Butō (舞踏), that resists and fixated conception of time. Pendulum’s fragile balance was realized through an austere, cryptic, and often almost silent presence that keeps triggering our imagination, and not by technical display or mastery.

Arc No. 4

“Wooden time moves with grain and resistance. Motion creaks, sways, and negotiates its own structure. Oscillation becomes tactile, shaped by friction and patience. The arc holds multiple possibilities at once, allowing form and freedom to coexist without resolution. The rings of time are both counted and counting”.

The trio focuses on its essence, the ever-negotiated arcs that blur the distinction between form and freedom, and question our conception of linear time, turning it into a spiritual riddle, a kōan.

Arc No. 5

“A phase shifts nearly unnoticed. Motion lightens, stepping carefully through softened contours. Layers thin and overlap, revealing phrasing where gestures begin and fade. The arc listens closely to its own balance, finding meaning in nuance rather than emphasis. The push and pull are their own reason for being”.

Pendulum refines its fragile, nuanced equilibrium with melodic threads that patiently, hesitantly flirt with familiar, playful, and resonant piano trio dynamics.

Arc No. 6 (to be released on October 10)

“Momenta accumulate through return. Motion becomes practiced, framed by shared gravity and memory. Energy circulates without urgency, shaped by repetition and transformation. The past is present and future at once”.

A further, urgent, cyclical rhythmic refinement is offered, faithfully captured in the short pieces “Arc” and “Dance”, shaped by nuanced repetitions and transformations.

Arc No. 7 (to be released on November 9)

“Time folds into itself. Multiple cycles coexist, asymmetrical yet connected. Movement breathes across layered durations, allowing contradiction to remain unresolved. The arc sustains density without weight, continuity without uniformity. Listening is wide enough to hold all the all of it”.

Pendulum’s music plays a touch-and-go game in its own fragmented musical continuum, sustaining density without weight, continuity without uniformity, but with more structural focus.

Arc No. 8 (to be released on December 9)

“Strange tools reveal their logic through use. Motion disperses, leaving resonance rather than momentum. What remains feels everywhere at once, absorbed into space and attention. The arc settles without closing, as stillness carries the last trace of movement forward. It is the beginning of the end and the end of the beginning”.

The concluding volume is not an end to this fascinating journey but a sort of beginning. The Pendulum trio already inhabited its own elastic conception of time, as the devoted listeners to this journey, and has established its idiosyncratic language. But Pendulum’s music tells us something deeper about life and the inevitable changes we experience throughout life. This trio asks us to adapt our time sensibility to its subtle transformations, fully embrace and be deeply attuned to our own ubiquitous cyclical and oscillating arcs, as we move forward, attempting to maintain an elusive balance.

Opening Arcs: Arc No. 1 by Pendulum (Benoit Delbecq, Jonas Westergaard, Peter Bruun)

Opening Arcs: Arc no. 2 by Pendulum (Benoit Delbecq, Jonas Westergaard, Peter Bruun)

Pendulum – Opening Arcs: Arc no. 3 by Pendulum (Benoît Delbecq, Jonas Westergaard, Peter Bruun)

Pendulum – Opening Arcs: Arc no. 4 by Pendulum (Benoît Delbecq, Jonas Westergaard, Peter Bruun)

Opening Arcs: Arc no. 5 by ILK

LOUNGE LIZARDS - Live 79-81 (Analogue Pulse, 2026)

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Acquaro) — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 04:00:00 +0000

By Ferruccio Martinotti

"All Art Has Been Contemporary”

This sentence is a neon installation by conceptual artist Maurizio Nannucci located on the roof of the Galleria d'Arte Moderna in Torino, that takes up a similar concept expressed a few decades earlier by Pablo Picasso. Such a fundamental axiom, around which rivers of ink have been spilled, seems to lose its actualization in the late '70s, early '80s, with regard to jazz: this art form is out of sync with the “here and now” and doesn't dialogue with contemporary, ontologically expressed by young generations. Totally deprived of any chance to become aware of free/improv artists, the teens of the time (your humble writer among them) relate to jazz in the same way they approach Dante, Seneca or Milton in highschool or uni: respect, awe, in some cases sincere passion, more often distance. Wright or wrong, a matter of fact. Moreover, those years were destined to write one of the brightest chapters in the Great Book of Music, through amazing groups like Clock DVA, PIL, Joy Division, Talking Heads, Pere Ubu, X, Television, Bad Brains, Wire, just to throw out some names in bulk. Would it have made sense to spend the very little bucks in our pocket on Chet Baker instead of Meat Puppets and Husker Du? C’mon, a no-brainer. This inexhaustible cornucopia of punk/post-punk gems experiences a small, apparently insignificant, intermittence, which leads us, aboard the only ISO-certified Time Machine (the music), to where almost everything happens: New York. Here, while the ruins of CBGB's and Max's Kansas City are still smoking, a patrol of sappers (Contortions, Mars, DNA, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks), pushing far beyond punk, lights up the charges of the “No Wave”, generating a shockwave that transcends the scope of music and involves the most extremist artistic fringes of the East Village and the Lower East Side: poets (Lydia Lunch), writers (Kathy Acker), painters (Basquiat) and filmmakers (Eric Mitchell, Amos Poe) are up for It. Among them, relocated from Minnesota, John Lurie, iconic muse actor from Jim Jarmusch’s early movies, who in his unmissable autobiography, The History of Bones, offers us a snapshot of that sparkling, bohemian milieu: “We were so sure of ourselves, we never doubted anything. We were powerful, intelligent, energetic, confident, self-centered, and incredibly naive. Nothing outside our fourteen-block radius mattered. From Houston to 14th St., from the Bowery to Ave. A, that was the only universe.” John alternates between filmmaking and musical practicing, not on a third-hand Telecaster or on a battered Precision bass, but on alto saxophone: "At 4 p.m. on Main Street in Worcester, Massachusetts, the universe gave me my first saxophone. Nothing special happened, except that a man, driving around with a wheelbarrow, gave me a saxophone. I became like a monk. I slept on the floor, I didn't have a TV, I didn't smoke, I didn't drink, I didn't fuck. I played the saxophone until my fingers bled and I devoured music: Varese, Stravinsky, Mingus, Dolphy, Monk, Bird, Ornette, Hendrix." From there, it was a short step to form a band, and with his brother Evan on keyboards, the rhythm section of Steve Piccolo and Anton Fier (of Feelies “fame”), and the abrasive guitar of DNA’s Arto Lindsay (a very distinctive element of the ensemble), the Lounge Lizards were born, self-described, out of respect for the Masters of the Past, as "fake jazz." The Purists, losers by definition, take the bait and move on, while those with heart and soul stop, listen to and understand the new hybridization of tradition with the metro, iconoclastic, infectious, no-sounds: a sabotage of the “status quo ante” of jazz but, definitively, a Sabotage of Love. None of them graduated from Juilliard (does it matter?), but the Lizards' sound reflects like few others the zeitgeist of Downtown and the mood of those courageous and visionary prime movers who animate it. Their debut album was released in 1981, packaged with Peter Saville's splendid artwork, featuring a black-and-white photo of the musicians on the cover that always reminds us of Jimmy Giuffre's stunning "Free Fall". At the helm, the mighty Teo Macero who infuses the album with the nocturnal atmospheres that made it legendary, sitting the listener at the bar counter of Edward Hopper's "Nighthawks At Diner" or amidst a Raymond Chandler novel. The quick band’s development during the couple of years preceding it is captured on "Live 79-81," a reissue of the 1985 Roir cassette, containing live recordings at Hurrah and CBGB's in New York (June, August 1979), Her Majesty's Theater in London (June 1980), Cleveland Radio (June 1981), and Berlin Jazz Festival (December 1981). It's all there: contractions and swing, dissonances and post-post-bop, Earl Hagan (Harlem Nocturne) and Monk (Epistrophy), boredom and coolness, dark streets and streetlights. Jazz in its pure form. Did Lounge Lizards change the course of events? No. Did they spearhead a new musical stream? No. Did they contribute to ensuring that kids who grew up on punk could relate to jazz in an updated and conscious way? ABSOLUTELY YES. Same as it happened to John Lurie just some years before, then let him have the final words to come full circle: “When I was 17, someone made me listen to John Coltrane and it was as if he was speaking to me in Chinese. But how? Is there music I can't understand? And so I started listening to it all the time.”

Josh Berman Trio – Everybody Else’s Life, Too (Corbett vs. Dempsey, 2026)

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Acquaro) — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 04:00:00 +0000

By Nick Ostrum

Everybody Else’s Life, Too is the latest from Josh Berman, a stalwart of the Chicago scene still somewhat underappreciated outside of his hometown. He has played the gamut of Chicago improvisors (including Mars Williams’ A Very Ayler Xmas project, the all-too-short-lived Michael Zerrang and the Blue Lights, and Ken Vandermark’s Audio One), sneaked across the Atlantic to record with Paul Lytton, Edward Perraud, and Jon Rune Strøm, and led several of his own bands. On this one, he is joined by bassist Jason Roebke – a reliably punchy oft-times sideman of Chicago circles - and the indefatigable drummer Chris Corsano for a live date at Chicago’s Constellation from 2025.

I cannot say there is much surprising here if you are familiar with Berman’s previous headline albums. That said, this is more of what this listener wants rather than simply more of the same. Berman clearly has a thing for bop, in its various forms, and maybe the title is even a nod to his appreciation of those who came before and inspired him. The songs on here start with a catchy head, or a few more plodding, smokey ones, and from there break down into spurs, knotty angles, and spindly striations. One could play this album for someone who thought Miles went too far when he went electric, or Coltrane with Ascension, and they would happily bob their head along with Roebke’s walking bass or Corsano’s steady patter behind Berman’s jumpy melodies. But restricting this to such a palatable bridge would miss the other point, which lies in the free form sections that, yes, are tied to the head but in a sensual way that deviates from its rhythm, tune, and key in favor of capturing, extending, and straining the intricacies of a spontaneous moment. Those sections are when Berman stretches into flutters, crackles, and bites, when Roebke leans into timbre, and Corsano eschews rhythm for sound.

Those sections are limited; in this case I think for the better. That is not because trio cannot stretch out into the unknown. (Take the eighth cut, Scale, as an example of their exploratory chops.) Instead, it is because they do so within Berman’s bookending melodic confines that set the direction and mark the terminal point. And were those themes not inspired, this would fall flat. But they are and do not. For doubters, just listen to the wonderfully lonesome and wistful closer, Second Look, where Corsano’s brushes lay a soft-rain backdrop to Berman’s and Roebke’s melancholic dialog.

Everybody Else’s Life, Toois much in the vein of a different Josh Berman Trio’s A Dance and a Hop (2015) and should be considered an expansion of that project. Again, you might well know what to expect if you have been following Berman already, but that does not make what you hear any less satisfying.

Everybody Else’s Life, Too is available download from Bandcamp and a CD from a few choice independent music outlets. See the CvD website for more.

Everybody Else's Life, Too by Josh Berman

Kuhn Fu!

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Acquaro) — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 04:00:00 +0000

Happy Sunday, here’s a quick shot of some irreverent fun for the end/beginning of your week (depending on how you set up your calendar): Kuhn Fu, the eight‑member ensemble led by guitarist‑composer Christian Kühn mixes a bit of rock energy with jazz freedom. "Free improvisation-only" folks may wrinkle their noses at such a description, but take a listen - would Frank Gratkowski, John Dikeman or Ziv Taubenfeld lead you astray? Video is from Zentrifuge, Berlin in October 2025.

Christian Kühn - guitar, composition
Frank Gratkowski - alto sax, flute, clarinet
John Dikeman - tenor sax
Mateusz Rybicki - tenor sax, clarinet
Ziv Taubenfeld - bass clarinet
Sofia Salvo - baritone sax
Esat Ekincioglu - bass
George Hadow - drums

More: https://kuhnfumusic.com/

2026 FILMED BY EAR is a series by @berta.berlin.

Magda Mayas - Chant (Unsounds, 2026) Sculpting Silence 4

noreply@blogger.com (Stef Gijssels) — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 04:00:00 +0000

By Stef Gijssels

On "Chant", another sculptor of silence shows her art. The magician is Magda Mayas, whose explorations of the outside and inside of her piano keeps astonishing us, including her inventiveness to create unheard sounds. Mayas is not only a musician, but also an academic researcher with several publications to her name, getting her PhD on the subject of "Orchestrating Timbre – Unfolding Processes of Timbre and Memory in Improvisational Piano Performance" (2019/20), which examines improvisation through timbre, space, movement, objects, and listening.

I'm adding a few videos here to show her art.

The first is an exercise that Magda Mayas developed for the Hochschule Luzern called "Thinking Silent Matter". The excercise focuses on improvisation in a large ensemble context, bringing attention to silence and reduced sound material with slowly changing parameters, starting with the relevant quote : "... silence not only as absence of sound, but also silence as part of the sound". In the video she guides her students through the concept of the exercise.

Indeed, silence matters. It is even essential to anything we hear, whether we are aware of it or not, so why not actively use it in music?

On the tree pieces of the album, she shows this in very different formats. The first and last piece were recorded in Australia, with two years apart, the middle track was recorded in Berlin in Tony Buck's Brief Sand Studio.

The opening track, “Embodied,” recorded live at the SoundOut Festival in Canberra in February 2025, establishes its language through restraint. The piano notes arrive slowly, and the silences between them are as significant as the sounds themselves. Rather than functioning as a conventional prelude, however, this spaciousness becomes the central compositional device. Against the sparse piano framework, elusive sounds emerge from objects and tools used to activate the strings, producing a shifting field of resonance whose sources remain deliberately indistinct. The music is notably sparse, but never static; its intensity lies in the sustained concentration with which each sound occupies the space.

“Halcyon” extends this approach while pushing the sonic material into considerably harsher territory. Carefully paced piano chords are subjected to feedback from a guitar amplifier, alongside a guitar pickup and various other objects. The amplification and feedback transform the piano’s familiar timbre, extending each chord into a dense, sustained resonance. Despite the expanded textural palette, the harmonic language remains remarkably focused: pitches occupy a restricted register and coalesce around a clear tonal centre. This tension between harmonic simplicity and increasingly abrasive resonance gives the piece its mesmerising quality.

Developed in 2023 during the Harringtons Lane artist residency in New South Wales, “Chant” approaches the piano from yet another angle. The piece’s playback was recorded on sixteen different pianos, foregrounding variations in tuning and the subtle differences between instruments. Its structure is deceptively simple, built around the quiet repetition of two chords whose minute variations in tuning and timbre continually alter their perceptual weight. The effect is both soothing and strangely intense. Through repetition, small shifts become magnified, turning what might initially appear static into something constantly in flux.

Across these three works, there is a consistent interest in reducing musical materials to their essentials while expanding the possibilities of resonance, texture and perception. The music derives much of its power from this paradox: the means are often minimal, yet the listening experience is anything but. What emerges is an aesthetic that feels simultaneously rigorous and intuitive—fresh, inventive and deeply attentive to the physical properties of sound.

The title piece was also performed by Mayas at Roulette, streamed live on 30 Apr 2024. The video gives a great insight in her music but also on the added ingredients in the interior of her piano, things you can assume when you see a concert, but can usually at best only guess at.

Enjoy!

Listen and download from Bandcamp.

Alexandra Grimal - Marée Basse (Self-Released, 2026) Sculpting Silence 3

noreply@blogger.com (Stef Gijssels) — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 04:00:00 +0000

By Stef Gijssels

Our third iteration of the "Sculpting Silence" series, brings us to France, for a trio with Alexandra Grimal on saxophones, voice, harmonium, nōkan, shakuhachi, Naoto Yamagishi on percussions and Alexandre Saada on piano and harmonium.

The title, Marée Basse, is French for “low tide”: the moment when the sea withdraws, leaving behind a wide, empty stretch of beach scattered with shells, tiny creatures, and fragments the waves have carried ashore. The music evokes much the same landscape. It takes this open space for granted, allowing the notes of saxophone, piano, and percussion to appear sparsely, sometimes only for brief moments before disappearing again.

All three musicians are minimalists, deeply attentive to the overall sound yet reluctant to impose themselves upon it, as though the tones themselves should determine whether, and when, they wish to interact. Every sound feels tender and fragile, unobtrusive and gentle—and often completely absent. Silence is not merely the space between the notes; it is an essential part of the music itself.

This is particularly striking in the thirty-minute second track, where, roughly halfway through, there is almost a full minute of near silence, with only faint crackling sounds barely audible in the background. When the music gradually returns, the instrumentation has subtly shifted: the harmonium introduces a handful of sustained tones, joined by Grimal's wordless singing, equally elongated and sensitive. Towards the end of the piece, the sound becomes fuller and more agitated, as though a sudden gust of wind were stirring the waves and awakening the distant cries of seagulls.

Once again, silence plays an essential role in this music, much as it does in Japanese art, which has fascinated Grimaldi in recent years. Here, absence is not a lack but a presence of its own—a space in which the smallest sounds can emerge, linger for a moment, and then quietly disappear.

Enjoy!

Listen and download from Bandcamp.

Earth Tongues - Phases (Neither Nor, 2026) Sculpting Silence 2

noreply@blogger.com (Stef Gijssels) — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 04:00:00 +0000

By Stef Gijssels

This ensemble will always carry a deeply personal connotation for me. In 2015, they released their first album, Rune, at a time when I was hospitalised for two weeks, waking at irregular hours. Despite the dire circumstances, listening to Earth Tongues at four in the morning, alone in the darkness, was a strange and deeply soothing experience.

There was something about the ensemble’s careful, almost cautious little sounds—the tiny sonic points that gradually accumulated into a landscape that absorbed, captivated, and ultimately elevated you—that created a uniquely powerful listening experience. It is difficult to explain how important it became for me to return to this music again and again, and how much it taught me about the value of life, the value of art, and the value of improvised music.

When everything collapses around you—and inside you—you begin to realise that whatever remains, however small or fragmented, can still be enough to create something meaningful. You learn to cherish the smallest isolated event - "at least I still have this", to pay attention to what might otherwise go unnoticed, and to welcome the spontaneous connections with and between people who can, together, create beauty out of those tiny fragments of luck.

And in many ways, that is what this music does. Little sounds, little fragments, little pieces surrounded by silence, which, when brought together, can still constitute something beautiful, something meaningful, something valuable. It gave me hope against all odds, and with it a profound insight: to cherish every moment. Life is not necessarily a long story with a clear plot. Perhaps it is instead a collection of small, random events—fragments that, taken together, become a life, and that are all worth living.

The trio, so many years later are still Joe Moffett on trumpet, Dan Peck on tuba, and Carlo Costa on percussion.

Like their previous albums, their sound is deeply organic, drawing on the textures and rhythms of the natural world: the drip of water, pebbles falling, animals growling, birds twittering. Each of the three long tracks has its own distinct character, while the music gradually evolves from pointillist blips into increasingly stretched-out tones in the final piece. Very slowly, almost imperceptibly, these scattered sonic fragments begin to coalesce. The subtlety of this shift is deliberate, shaped by carefully considered compositional ideas and structures.

Silence is an essential part of their music—the white space between colours, an open realm of possibility waiting to be filled. What makes their work so compelling is the extraordinary value they give to each individual sound, with an intense attention to precision, texture, and timbral quality. When you enter their music attentively, it seems to slow down rational thought itself, allowing you to surrender to the sound and, for a while, simply be the music.

Listen and download from Bandcamp.

Susana Santos Silva & Vasco Trilla - Mushin (Defkaz, 2026) Sculpting Silence 1

noreply@blogger.com (Stef Gijssels) — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 04:00:00 +0000

By Stef Gijssels

A short intro on "Sculpting Silence"

The nature of art is to make you stop you in your tracks, to stop doing what you're doing and thinking, and to start using your senses, your eyes and ears, sometimes your touch and smell to be surprised, to be confronted with the unexpected, to admire, to see things differently.

We will have a short series of music that we describe as "sculpting silence", music in which sound is used like the black lines of a pen in zen art, a few strokes that capture the essence on a white canvas. And the first album in the series explicitly refers to the Zen concepts of 'Mu' and 'Shin' : "The term combines the kanji Mu (nothingness) and Shin (mind or spirit), and is often translated as “no-mind.” It refers to a state of consciousness free from fear, anger, or ego—where action arises naturally and without obstruction. In musical terms, this becomes a space where sound is not forced or premeditated, but emerges with clarity and immediacy", we read in the liner notes.

So the few strokes on a white canvas - on 'nothingness' - are like the ripples on a still pond, the barely visible effect of the slightest breeze. Here are some descriptions I found on the value of the colour 'white' in Zen art, comparable to silence in music.

In Zen art, white is not merely a blank background or an empty void. It represents 'ma' (negative space), functioning as living breath, silence, and the infinite potential from which all forms emerge and return.

The unpainted white paper or silk is an active, essential presence equal to the black ink strokes.

Zen painting uses intentional emptiness, asymmetry, and abbreviated forms to point toward direct seeing rather than decoration.

Blank space is not “nothing”; it functions as breath, silence, and the field in which forms appear and dissolve.

Common motifs—enso, bamboo, landscapes, and solitary figures—teach non-attachment and ordinary clarity.

I also found some sayings about listening.

"Listening stops with the ears, the mind stops with recognition, but spirit is empty and waits on all things."

"What is this mind? Who is hearing these sounds? ... What is it that hears?"

"The quieter you become, the more you can hear."

Now about the album.

The cover art is bizarre, to say the least: a cigarette-smoking armour seated on a toilet in a hilly landscape. It's in bad taste in my opinion, and not because of the toilet, but also because it does not truly reflect the nature of the music. It's a surreal digital artwork created by Aki Karano (also known as Akis Karanos) a visual artist and experimental musician, based in Greece.

In retrospect, it looks familiar when you see the likeness with the traditional Japanese drawings of monks contemplating the world, and also seen from the back. There may be a reference, or it might just be a coincidence. Admitted, the monk is not smoking and not wearing an armour, and he's contemplating a circle and not a square, yet it might be a more modern, more surreal rendition of the same experience.

Now really about the album.

Both Susana Santos Silva on trumpet and Vasco Trilla on percussion explore the boundaries and sonic potential of their respective instruments, creating ringing tones, whistles, droplets, swooshes, rumbles, gurgles, swishes and many more sounds without name or description.

The album begins quietly, with uncommon sounds cautiously flirting with silence—touching it slowly and gently, as if aware of its fragility. The result is a kind of soft intensity, with no obvious path or predetermined concept beyond the simple act of producing small fragments of sound and welcoming their clarity, their unexpectedness, and the ways in which they interact.

This is music that has nothing to prove. It does not seek to impress, move, or even necessarily engage a listener or an audience. It exists simply for its own sake: to be savoured, appreciated, and perhaps approached with the same state of mind as the artists themselves—with no attachment and no anticipation. Such an experience can only emerge from going beyond the expected, allowing the music to develop organically and naturally, as if arising from nothingness.

Contrary to the liner notes, I would recommend simply listening, rather than reflecting while you listen. Let yourself become part of the experience. Be there in the moment.

Both Santos Silva and Trilla are masters of their art. They share a remarkable sensitivity and an innovative ability to draw sounds from their instruments that are rarely heard, while employing a wide range of techniques and tools to sustain the listener’s attention. As with much improvised music, the album may surprise you on a first listen, but it reveals more of itself with each return.

Be the music.

Listen and download from Bandcamp.