John Coltrane -

Live Trane: The European Tours

Posted: October 9th, 2008

Date: November 1961 – November 1963 (recorded)
Release: Pablo #44332
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This year I started teaching English for the first time, in a New York community college. The student population is almost exclusively goal-oriented. They take their humanities courses because they must in order to get to their careers, not because they like literature, and so I am, in a sense, preaching to the disinterested and the damned, arts-wise.

It’s a challenge, but for an arts evangelist like myself, it’s a dream. This is why people preach to the damned: It’s fun, and you might save a soul, bringing one into the flock of, in my case, the Church of Art.

This past semester I taught August Wilson’s play Fences, the story of a black man, Troy, who, among other things, takes care of his brother Gabriel, a disabled WWII vet who now thinks he’s the archangel of the same name. When Troy dies at the end of the play, all the terrible pain of American racism and family betrayal, the weight of sin, history, sex, religion, and death–the pain in all these themes–must be resolved. Any speech would be trite, so Wilson has Gabriel finally attempt to blow his trumpet, without success (there’s no mouthpiece), then do a little dance, moan a song, and declare simply, “And that’s the way that go!”

I told my students that Gabriel represents for me the artist, especially the musical artist, and most especially the African-American jazz artist. Life has been tough, and in American history, the rise of the blues and of improvisational jazz has a lot to do with uttering unutterable feelings through art. I suggested to them (whether or not they’d catch the reference) that they should listen to the later John Coltrane of Om or Ascension, who for me epitomized the attempt to wordlessly speak the unspeakable. I told them that if they listened to him, they’d hear the (successful) equivalent of Gabriel’s moan and dance.

Soon after my class ended, I got my hands on this astonishing seven-disc box set, and I heard, in Coltrane’s middle-period work, the resolution of those same themes in even clearer focus. The 1961-63 European tours that yielded the music found on these discs took place just prior to the breakthrough of A Love Supreme. It’s amazing, when you think of his recorded output, that Coltrane died before he was 40 years old. The man uttered (the unutterable) so much in that brief stretch of time, and went through such an evolution, that his career resembles a time-lapse film of a larva turning into a butterfly. From the first musings with the Miles Davis Quintet, to the final free-jazz screechings of Ascension, is a quantum leap. The extended-songs that fill Live Trane: The European Tours were performed when Trane only had a few years to live and was moving into the last of his transformations.

Personally, aside from pain and exaltation, I felt déjà vu and nostalgia when I first heard these discs. My first jazz CD ever–ever!–was Coltrane’s Paris Concert, which is nestled into this collection, and, which I now learn, is a mishmash of different concerts in Paris from several different tours. I don’t remember why I chose that CD. I just reached for the first jazz album on a rudimentary list of names I had made, and that happened to be it. I listened to that disc so many times before I bought another jazz title that I came to view the Paris Concert as the quintessence of Coltrane, the quintessence of jazz.

Maybe I did. Jazz was at a kind of crisis point when Trane played these shows in 1961 to 1963, or was about to be. The free-jazz stuff, with Ornette Coleman blowing it all out of the water and Cecil Taylor banging away the past, was at hand. In these live dates, we hear a Trane just broken loose from Miles, headed off into, well, into himself, which I’ll get to. That historic crisis moment, for artist and art, I believe is the point at which the most important and interesting work was done last century, and Trane emblemizes one path out of the thicket. He turned within and perfected improvisation in one uncompromising direction.

There are other pleasures in these discs. For those who have not heard Coltrane’s live stuff, it’s just as you would imagine. While he didn’t hold back in the studio, he did have constraints there, such as the length of an LP side. Live, he could play as long as he wanted, and he loved the energy of a live performance. His wasn’t a rock band playing the same song over and over again in the same way. On these seven discs are six versions of “My Favorite Things,” the longest clocking in at 25:11, with every one vastly different in mood and feeling. The longest cut we get is a 27:15 version of “Impressions,” and within those tracks and all the others, I do find the quintessence of jazz as not just a point of crisis, but a point of synthesis, too: We get the blues, some hard-bop, some free-jazz reachings, and almost rock and roll.

The chronology goes like this: Trane’s first European tour was in 1961, with McCoy Tyner on piano, Reggie Workman on bass, and Elvin Jones on drums. Eric Dolphy plays all over Disc 1 and on a number of tracks on Disc 2, including my favorite track in the box, in which he plays flute on a 19:09 version of “My Favorite Things.” On the second European tour, from 1962 to 1963, Trane played with the same lineup, sometimes dropping the piano and just going with a trio, him and the Elvin Jones propelled rhythm section. I prefer the larger band, but that’s just because I’m a sucker for great piano, and McCoy Tyner was a great piano player. All the personnel choices are flawless.

Apparently, for Trane, these trips to Europe were important. The Continent represented for him, as it did for so many other black musicians and writers, a place where he could be feted without the baggage of racism, finding audiences that cared about what he was doing. He did get booed sometimes along the way, but about that Trane said that

“there were boos at this concert [in 1961 in Paris]; I heard them clearly. That doesn’t make me happy, of course, but at least it shows that one is being discussed.”

Whatever he heard, he knew he was being talked about seriously, as an artist.

The producer of this box, Eric Miller, sifted through hundreds of hours of tapes in the vault, many unlabelled, to find any live assets he could, and he found many. He hints in his essay that there are many more out there, which means more Coltrane box sets to come (he also found unreleased stuff by Bird, Art Tatum, Duke, Basie, and Ella–oy gevalt). The hard work paid off, for these shows are gems, and worth hearing for all the reasons I gave above, and also because every note Coltrane played in performance should be heard.

In the excellent liner notes accompanying the box (which include informative essays by Miller and jazz writer Neil Tesser), Carlos Santana writes that Trane “found The Light and, for a time, became The Light.” He says that Coltrane “found his way to the other side.” And that’s what people hear and what I was trying to get through to my students–that Trane represents what every artist strives toward: transcendence through boldness. He was a master improviser, one who, like Bird (and I can’t think of another), was seemingly able to translate the moment, in a Buddhist sense, into something tangible and recorded. We feel like we hear the secret language of his mind/soul given a grammar and shape, and it was through a complete letting go, plumbing the depths of both his own and the universal being, with bravery and boldness. Letting go: that’s the hardest thing, but Trane mastered it, and for that reason alone, it’s exhilarating to listen to the man.

This box set is essential, and I don’t like to say that about box sets, because they’re prohibitively expensive, excessively completist, and I only get them rarely, as gifts or comped as a reviewer. But this one, if you can get your hands on it, certainly qualifies as essential. If you can’t afford it, definitely seek out any one of the four previously released albums that make up a large part of this collection: The Paris Concert, Afro Blue Impressions, Bye Bye Blackbird, and The European Tour. In any case, you won’t have to work hard to hear Trane succeeding where Gabriel in August Wilson’s play failed, speaking the unspeakable, blowing away the blues but never forgetting.