Another of the Greats Smoked a Pipe

[mso489]

John Coltrane, the remarkable saxophone genius, 1926-1967, who played with Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, and other jazz greats, and then with his own quartets, was also something of a pipe smoker, as captured in the recently aired documentary on his life on PBS. It looked like he had at least one bent cob and two briar pipes, and he was shown smoking them in the studio at rehearsal. He evolved to being as much a composer as a jazz performer, and has had wide and various influences on jazz and other genres ever since. He weaned himself cold turkey from heroine addiction early in his career and became a music guru to many others after that. One of the greats, and a pipe smoker. Born in HIckory, N.C., and grew up in Highpoint, N.C., and lived in Philadelphia and eventually on Long Island.

 

[cortezattic]

As a lifelong jazz enthusiast and erstwhile musician, I understood and enjoyed "early" Coltrane. In his later years, however, I have to admit that he was over my head, and I couldn't understand the music. That goes for Miles too, and to a lesser extent, Dizzy.

 

[nevadablue]

Try this, Coltrane and Duke Ellington.
http://youtu.be/sR13ECD71xU

 

[mso489]

In literature and music, some avant guard work just fades from view, except as historical artifact ... like perhaps most of the prose of Gertrude Stein. Other work requires classroom explication at first, then graduates to common idiom, and finally permeates popular culture. The poems of T.S. Eliot did that, at first confused and irked most people, then became universally taught in schools, and finally seeped into advertising and movies so that his pastiche, collage, and quick cut images and dialogue is everywhere. Few TV and online ads don't reference his style to some degree, nearly all movies, and much else. I think Coltrane's cacophonous many-leveled harmonics are stealing into everything from contemporary classical, to hip-hop, to rock and even bluegrass. To Gertrude Stein's credit, though her work doesn't draw much readership, the cadences she developed obviously influenced Hemingway, so you can hear those rhythms in his best work. He married the music to rich content and made it work.

 

[saltedplug]

When I rarely listen to the avant-garde Coltrane, I can just barely hold onto something listenable, not knowing if the thread I hear is present in the music or if I'm inventing it so I feel my listening justified. I've not heard Miles do anything in this vein, but I have listened multiple times to a YouTube video of him with about an 8-piece band in Vienna that is loud and multilayered, strident and rough. Pete Cosey the guitarist plays "space" music and fits right in:
Turnaroundphrase November 3, 1973, Vienna:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Op0sFwKRxY

 

[sallow]

Blue trane is a great record. You get Lee Morgan also.

 

[judcole]

Trane in his hard bop years - Blue Train, Soultrane, Giant Steps - is a *lot* more accessible then, say, A Love Supreme. The album he did with Johnny Hartman is a classic of jazz ballads. Bags & Trane, the album he did with Milt Jackson, is magnificent.