The
accursed Coltrane
Ravi
Coltrane, son of a famous father.
Ravi
Coltrane began his best tune of
a lovely January night, "Lover
Man," as a tenor saxophone
soliloquy, with his partner, Joanne
Brackeen, gently stroking in the familiar
harmonies at the piano keyboard.
The son of John
Coltrane, who'll be 40 before long, has
found his own voice now, and his clear,
sweet solo took you past the map drawn by
Charlie Parker that has defined this
number on the jazz stage since before
Ravi was born.
Instead of the
bullet-like trajectory that Bird dictated
for so long, the young Coltrane's
approach tonight supplied a dimension of
light and shadow, and a refreshing
palette of colors that brought to mind
the explorations of the instrument by the
jazzmen of the 1920s and 1930s: Frankie
Trambauer, Eddie Miller, Lester Young,
people like that. Back to the roots, in
other words.
Coltrane
has devised an adventurous way
of improvising rapidly that
proved highly original. There was not a
hackneyed measure anywhere, really, and
yet, being his father's son, it was all
monumentally sentimental.
Brackeen, a California
native who is not much older than her
partner for the night, is no stranger to
brilliant saxophonists, having played
with Dexter Gordon, Harold Land, Joe
Henderson and such monsters. Her solo
came in towering waves that struck and
then left quiet inviting pools.
When these two started
out from nowhere on a free jazz excursion
, their two equally powerful intuitions
did a dance without a leader that held
you in an iron grip as they tracked each
other's feelings with uncanny accuracy --
leading the listener into the emotional
landscape and out again.
It
was pretty durn entrancing,
but there was more. Brackeen played the
jaunty title track from her new album,
"Pink Elephant Magic," and a
couple of other originals that were
equally cheering, "Black Swan"
and "Cuban Exchange." The
latter could have used a conguero to heat
up the soup, but Brackeen had supplied
such a rich feast of dense invention in
her treatment of "Body and
Soul," it was probably just as well
they did it the way they did it, these
two beautiful musicians on this memorably
musical night at the Jazz Bakery in Los
Angeles..
Young
Trane: Never a hackneyed measure
Flogging
his new CD,
"Moving Pictures," the accursed
Ravi Coltrane brought a very intense and
industrious band to Catalina's in the
darkening heart of Hollywood one night in
2001.
The curse, of course,
is that he is the son of a brilliant
father, in this case John Coltrane. (His
mother, Alice Coltrane, is no slouch
either, as Los Angeles well knows.)
Ravi, 35, plays the
same instrument as his iconicized pop,
the saxophone, and as he made his way
through four or five original numbers,
some of them drawn from the new album, he
did not sound very much like his elder.
Maybe he was not that good, but he was
good, and in his own sweet way.
His
sound proved lighter and
more affable
as he gave his extensive tenor saxophone
elaborations on a ballad that brought to
mind "Yesterdays." Playing
soprano on some hard-driving hot tunes,
he filled the instrument, centering his
sound and achieving an oboe-like
penetration even at high velocity.
And although his output
is not so tightly packed as his father's,
young Coltrane goes much further out,
exploring polytonal and other scalar
vistas rather than trapping himself in
the modal stuff that used to wow them at
the Village Vanguard in the years before
Ravi was born..
In these latter-day
adventures, Ravi was assisted by a most
attractive and inventive pianist, Andy
Milne; a bassist who supplanted the elder
Coltrane's dual instruments with a single
ax, Darryl Hall; and a powerful drummer
who found textures alternative to those
of Elvin Jones, Steve Hass.
All
four of these very fine musicians
showed a flair for the
compositional that yielded formal
dividends far more varied than what we
remember from Coltrane, whose stuff could
get confining and even suffocating. And
if the young men's journeys were arduous
or came back empty from time to time, you
never felt they shouldn't have gone.
Sometimes
empty but never unnecessary
