There’s a moment in many John Coltrane songs, just after the climactic sax solo, when the music hangs suspended, with nothing really happening—perhaps a fluttering of piano, some light drum or bass work in the background. It’s a moment of beautiful stillness before the final saxophone flourish brings the piece to a final, transcendent resolution. Those passages rarely last more than half a minute or so, but they have a magical quality that eases the listener down from the heights of the song’s peak, while at the same time maintaining a certain tension that keeps the listener’s attention until the song’s end.
Jazz harpist and pianist Alice Coltrane’s ideal seems to be to prolong these moments of suspension across entire songs—her pieces establish a mood and maintain it. The songs seem to float and drift, dreamlike and ethereal. Alice Coltrane songs aren’t about getting somewhere, they’re about simply being, a purely Zen approach to jazz.
Among some jazz nuts, Alice Coltrane is the Yoko Ono of jazz, the woman who broke up the greatest band of the ‘60s, in this case not the Beatles but John Coltrane’s classic quartet with McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, and Elvin Jones. But jazz lineups were always more fluid than rock groups. It was rare for the same group of musicians to play together as a unit for more than a few years; tastes changed, sidemen left to lead their own groups. It happened all the time. Rock lineups changed, too, but the band names stayed the same throughout the changes, so the lineups seemed more fixed, I suppose. Regardless, Alice Coltrane’s music is a fascinating listen.
So check it out.
Cover Art Citation:
- A Monastic Trio: Source, Discogs.com.
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