Ben Ratliff, Author of New Coltrane Biography

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Ratliff, the jazz critic for the New York Times, isn't interested in simply retelling the biographical facts of John Coltrane's life.

Instead, he analyzes how the saxophone player came to be regarded as the last major figure in the evolution of jazz, tracing both the evolution of his playing style and the critical reception to it.

The first half of this study concentrates on Coltrane's career, from his early days as a semianonymous sideman to his final, increasingly experimental recordings, while the second half explores the growth of Coltrane's legacy after his death.

Ratliff has a keen sense of Coltrane's constantly changing sound, highlighting the collaborative nature of jazz by discussing the bands he played in as both sideman and leader. (One of the more intriguing asides is a suggestion that Coltrane's alleged LSD use might have inclined him toward a more cooperative mode of performance.)

The consideration of Coltrane's shifting influence on jazz—and other modern musical forms—up to the present day is equally vigorous, refusing to rely on simple adulation. Always going past the legend to focus on the real-life stories and the actual recordings, Ratliff's assessment is a model for music criticism.

(Sept.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Notes on Music:

Ben Ratliff and Alex Ross discuss the state of the art form and the experience of listening:

http://www.slate.com/id/2177726/

Still Chasin’ the Trane

From Newsweek:

Forty years after his death, the jazz world still lives in the shadow of saxophone demigod John Coltrane.

At a press conference in Tokyo in 1966, almost exactly a year before he died of liver cancer at the age of 40, John Coltrane was asked, "What would you like to be in 10 years?" He replied, "I would like to be a saint." It was an arresting answer, but by then Coltrane believed he had found the divine in music and was desperate to share what he had discovered. "I believe that men are here to grow themselves into the best good that they can be," he said. "If I ever become this, it will just come out of the horn." From the Coltrane we meet in Ben Ratliff's new biography, "Coltrane: The Story of a Sound," that Coltrane became the best good seems indisputable. In his all-too-short career he radically reshaped the world of jazz both as a composer and a performer. Before he came along, most jazz musicians took standards and then improvised over the chord changes. Coltrane thought nothing of playing for half an hour over a single chord ("India"). Or he might use an established form like the blues as the takeoff point for improvisation so fast and blistering that he all but incinerates the form as he goes along ("Chasin' the Trane"). He could compose and play with etudelike exactitude ("Countdown"), and he could play music that seems to have no form except as he defines it note by frenetic note, as though he were translating the contents of his soul into musical form right on the spot ("Intersteller Space"). In roughly a decade he went from being a more or less conventional sideman to the creator of music so radical it still sounds as if it was written tomorrow. If it is in fact a question of sainthood, there's certainly no one ahead of him in line.

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Introducing Ms. Lucy Gillespie

On October 30th

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LUCY CATHARINE GILLESPIE

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She is beautiful, wise, and perfect.