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.

Read the rest here.

Introducing Ms. Lucy Gillespie

On October 30th

at

10.53 pm

LUCY CATHARINE GILLESPIE

Entered the World

She is beautiful, wise, and perfect.

The St. Louis I Never Saw--Bowling Capital of the Western World!

I got to see a lot in the month while I was in Missouri. I got to go to two Cardinals games, visit the wine country, eat in "Oprah's Favorite Restaurant" *as identified by Patt-uh-son, go up the arch, wander around in Soulard, take full advantage of the "tasting bar" at the Budweiser factory, and listen to a heck of a lot of jazz. But the only thing I didn't get to do was play a frame or two of bowling at the sacred site for pin monkeys, the International Bowling Museum and Hall of Fame.

Thankfully, the Steffens Collective was able to squeeze in a game or two while their plane was delayed. The following pictures, taken by Noreen Steffens, are as close as I'll ever come to seeing a giant bowling pin car.

How did they score? Everyone is a winner at the IBMAHOF!

For more, see the official site: http://www.bowlingmuseum.com/

There you can find the answers to these pressing questions:

When was the American Bowling Congress founded?
When was bowling a part of the Olympics?
In France today there are how manydifferent types of bowling being played?

Did you know: A British anthropologist, Sir Flinders Petrie, discovered in the 1930's a collection of objects in a child's grave in Egypt that appeared to him to be used for a crude form of bowling. If he was correct, then bowling traces its ancestry to 3200 BC.

Or that German historian, William Pehle, asserted that bowling began in his country about 300 AD. There is substantial evidence that a form of bowling was in vogue in England in 1366, when King Edward III allegedly outlawed it to keep his troops focused on archery practice. And it is almost certain that bowling was popular during the reign of Henry VIII.

St. Louis Steffens Special--The Recliner

October 20--Happy Birthday, Dan Steffens!

This post is long overdue, but I can't think of a better time to get to it. During the last weekend of the NEH Jazz Seminar I was visited by Birthday Boy Dan Steffens and a coterie of Brooklynites. His love for beer, baseball, and nights out on the town are only exceeded by his love for travel to new places where the beer, baseball and towns are all new to him. So, when he first heard that I was coming to the Lou to listen to jazz records, he checked the Cardinals schedule and the flight departure times, called a few friends, and faster than you can say Bevo the Budweiser Fox, he was up in the arch.

The view from our hotel room...the arch, the Mississippi, Busch Stadium.

Kelly, meeting people wherever she goes.

Noreen famously said that if you looking to go on vacation but have no money, head to St. Louis. In the course of a few hours, we went from going to a bar/restaraunt that offered a ridiculous happy hour (prompting us to order every appetizer they could drop into a deep fryer) to walking into a place on Laclede's Landing where everything was free. Seriously. Food, drinks. Everything. Free! I am not exaggerating. Free, as in no cover charge, no nothing. I don't even think they had a cash register in the place.

I have posted before about the unusual and interesing fare that make St. Louis a destination for the regular-guy gormand: Friend Ravioli, Gooey Buttercake, BBQ Pork Butt, Fitz's soda, strange pizza. But this might take the cake.

Ladies and gentlemen, may I present the Tavern Egg. Hard boiled egg, wrapped in pork sausage, corn meal, and batter, then deep fried. Even the waitress tried to talk me out of ordering it. But what can I say? Not too bad, especially with a few A-B products. Tastes like Easter dipped in Scrapple.




Note: All pictures by Noreen Steffens.

Dear John, Dear Coltrane

Dear John, Dear Coltrane
by Michael S. Harper

a love supreme, a love supreme

a love supreme, a love supreme

Sex fingers toes
in the marketplace
near your father's church
in Hamlet, North Carolina—
witness to this love
in this calm fallow
of these minds,
there is no substitute for pain:
genitals gone or going,
seed burned out,
you tuck the roots in the earth,
turn back, and move
by river through the swamps,
singing: a love supreme, a love supreme;
what does it all mean?
Loss, so great each black
woman expects your failure
in mute change, the seed gone.
You plod up into the electric city—
your song now crystal and
the blues. You pick up the horn
with some will and blow
into the freezing night:
a love supreme, a love supreme—

Dawn comes and you cook
up the thick sin 'tween
impotence and death, fuel
the tenor sax cannibal
heart, genitals, and sweat
that makes you clean—
a love supreme, a love supreme—
Why you so black?
cause I am
why you so funky?
cause I am
why you so black?
cause I am
why you so sweet?
cause I am
why you so black?
cause I am
a love supreme, a love supreme:

So sick
you couldn't play Naima,
so flat we ached
for song you'd concealed
with your own blood,
your diseased liver gave
out its purity,
the inflated heart
pumps out, the tenor kiss,
tenor love:
a love supreme, a love supreme—
a love supreme, a love supreme—

Michael S. Harper, "Dear John, Dear Coltrane" from Songlines in Michaeltree: New and Collected Poems.

See more:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=171552