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Jazzmen are made unique among the musicians of our culture by the fact that they must be both composers and performers at the same time. In the earliest days of jazz no one player was capable of carrying the full burden of this dual role so a "collective ensemble" approach was created. Soon, however, men like Louis Armstrong arrived on the scene, men who had both the instrumental proficiency and musical sophistication to be true composer/performer-soloists. A format was created from which jazz has ever had difficuity escaping: tune-solo-tune. In response the so-called New Jazz has transformed the New Orleans collective ensemble concept into a "sea of soloists" from which temporary leaders emerge.

What does all this have to do with "Interstellar Space?" Everything. In this duet album John Coltrane and Rashid Ali put their abilitiy as composer/performers to the ultimate test. There have been other duets in jazz, but they have relied on the use of one harmonic instrument in playing tunes with which the listener is already acquainled. With no ensemble or harmonic support in which to hide, the success of Coltrane and Ali in exploring newly-created compositions depended ultimately on their ability as soloists.

A duo of this nature faces two potential problems-holes in the overall sound and lack of variety. The fírst has been solved on I.S. by the use of percussive and tonal "sheets of sound". Ali has channeled the pulses and accents that are at the heart of most jazz drumming onto a surface level and replaced them with a near continuous series of rippling snare rolls, the total effect being one of uninterrupted percussive flow. Coltrane has done likewise in the melodic sphere, infusing his playing with an indefatigable energy that allows barely enough time for breath amidst the outpour of notes. Variety is provided through the exploitation of different timbres especially by Coltrane who uses lush tones, honks, beeps, harmonics, wild register shifts, and God knows what else to create the effect of several horns playing simultaneously.

The greatest problem faced on this album however, is one spawned by the very nature and direction of Coltrane's musical evolution. Earlier in his career he once remarked, "I found that there was a certain number of chord progressions to play in a given time...l had to put the notes in uneven groups...to get them all in." By 1967, as evidenced by I.S., this fascination with "getting them all in" had grown to cosmic proportions getting an infinite amount of notes into a finite space. At times it almost seems as if Coltrane was fighting to transcend the limits of human coordination, eliminate individual pitch attacks, and produce an endless stream of sound. It is clear that Elvin Jones' polyrhythmic drumming would have been wrong for this album. At this stage in his evolution Coltrane (1967) wanted the kind of freedom that Rashid Ali's percussive "sound sheets" could provide.

Saturn, the last cut on I.S. is the best example of what l've been trying to communicate in this review. Coltrane's tenor exploration climaxes in an unbelievable echo passage that for a moment sounds almost like one continuous sound stream, before returning to the opening 12/8 riff. Listening to l.S. you may grow frustrated in knowing that Coltrane was striving to achieve the impossible, but more likely you will be uplifted in hearing just how close this giant of a jazzman came.

-Brad Smith