Chasin' The Trane

BOOKS: "CHASIN' THE 'TRANE"

Chasin' The Trane, The Music and Mystique of John Coltrane, by J.C. Thomas, Doubleday & Company, $7.95.

by Bill Adler

There's been scandalously little written about John Coltrane, a man of inestimable musical and cultural impact. Those scraps accessible to the seeker of biographical information available from liner notes, the odd interview, or hearsay, and the story the music itself told, added up to a mystique--Coltrane was/is a saint, at least. So it was with great excitement and the expectation that I'd finally be able to get to a little reality concerning this man's life that I acquired this book.

Well, Chasin' The Trane, for all it's worth, is hardly the definitive biography. Ross Russell's life of Charlie "Yardbird" Parker, Bird Lives, published last year, set a high-water mark for jazz genre musical biographies. It is a multi-dimensional, socio-historical work that fixes Bird firmly in his era. It was, in its intent and effect, demythologizing. Which isn't to say it denied Bird's genius. It just restored his humanity. Thomas, in his book, prefers to emphasize the "mystique" in his title.

Now I'm more than a little disposed to believe in front that John Coltrane was an exceptionally talented, intuitively spiritual person from a very young age on but Thomas insists on making these points in the most blatant, distasteful manner throughout the book and refuses to let the story unfold of its own weight. He is an evangelist and his text is thick with miracles and testimonials. We are told that "even at that age, around 10 or 12, John's eyes had already achieved a quality of luminosity, of absorption, that made one wonder if he could see in the dark like an owl." In addition, Thomas alludes to the "beginning...of the sadness that was well beyond the blues." This same heavy-handedness is evident when he attempts to create (or recreate) the magic of the time John, age 13, first blew a note on clarinet, his initial horn. "He didn't hold the horn at the popular 45 degree angle, instead, as if shyly experimenting, he pointed it toward the floor, looking down, and brought a great gust of air up from his diaphragm through his lungs and throat, culminating in a surging release from mouth to mouthpiece, filling the clarinet's two-and-one-half-foot length with air to spare. And music changed the air."

When Thomas isn't melodramatizing he manages to convey a rich lode of information concerning both John's musical and spiritual development, much of it previously unreported. Apparently Trane knew that music would be his life by the age of 16 when he graduated from high school. He picked up the alto sax by himself, to begin with, and when he moved from his childhood home, High Point, North Carolina, to Philadelphia, excelled on it at the Ornstein School of Music. He was drafted into the Navy in 1945 and played clarinet in the Navy Band. But the alto moved him more and shortly upon his release he was astonishing tenorist Benny Golson with a "fat, exquisite sound that I'd never heard before." Coltrane spent a period of time working in r&b bands in the city because that's what was happening and was hired, as a tenor player, by bluesman Eddie Vinson in 1947. His rise was swift and he worked thereafter with trumpeter Howard McGhee, in Dizzy Gillespie's famous big band, and in r&b bands again when the Gillespie unit broke up in 1950. He absorbed every musical morsel these varied situations had to offer with an insatiable voracity. 'Chasin' has an essentially anecdotal format and Thomas has gathered up any number of entertaining and illuminating stories concerning Trane's musical apprenticeship through his extended sojourns with Miles Davis' and Thelonius Monk's groups.

As for Trane's spiritual education, it happened in Gillespie's band that saxophonist Yusef Lateef, an orthodox Muslem, aroused John's latent interest in religion and philosophy. He suggested that Trane read Kahlil Gibran, the Koran, and Krishnamurti. As time went by the hungry young player was turned on to yoga, Egyptology, Scientology, Plato, and Aristotle. Later he got into astronomy, astrology, the Kabbala, Sufism, and, in Seattle in the fall of 1965, LSD. (When he came down he said, "I perceived the interrelationship of all life forms."  It seems that when he wasn't practicing or performing, Coltrane was reading and it's easily understood why he said, towards the end of his life, "I haven't had much leisure time for the past fifteen years."

It was probably also due to Yusef's influence that John began his long love affair with Eastern music and culture. He would in fact, eventually correspond with, and then meet, Ravi Shankar whose music he admired so much that he would name his 2nd son Ravi.

In 1959 Trane told the Nigerian percussionist Olatunji, "I must go back to the roots," began to study African culture, languages, and music, and first heard in his head the type of drum sound he'd want in the quartet he'd soon be forming. Leon Thomas tells this story--"When I knew them, Trane and Eric were listening to tribal recordings of South African pygmies. He told me that each drummer has a certain rhythm to play and doesn't try to play all the rhythms at once. What he heard was several drummers playing polyrhythms. But what he wanted in his band was Elvin playing polyrhythms all by himself." And bassist Steve Davis recalls, "That first night Elvin was in the band, he was playing so strong and so loud you could hear him outside the club and down the block. But Trane wanted a drummer who could really kick, and Elvin was one of the strongest, wildest drummers in the world. After the gig, Trane put his arm around Elvin, took him to a barbecue place around the corner, and bought him some ribs. Trane and Elvin were tight from then on."

Anyway, Trane and Olatunji got together in1965 to talk about some "extramusical" matters. Thomas' report is the first I'd read about these self-determination efforts. Trane and Olatunji were both pretty fed up with their exploitation at the hands of the men who ran the concert and recording scenes. They decided to work together to make an African cultural center a reality. Yusef Lateef was also interested in participating and the three of them agreed to combine their financial resources, book their own groups, rehearse their music at the center, and eventually form their own recording company. Although Coltrane died before the plan came to fruition, this action represents the continued development of a maturing political consciousness in a man usually described as "completely apolitical" despite his well-known pacifism. In his own way he had expressed himself explicitly and eloquently on a couple of violent American tragedies. "Alabama", included on "Live At Birdland" is his eulogy for the four black girls killed when the 16th St. Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama was dynamited. And "Reverend King" on "Cosmic Music" is, of course, Trane's tribute to that great Black leader.

We have Thomas to thank for illuminating, to a greater or lesser degree, these other shadowy or unknown aspects of John Coltrane's life - his meetings with Charlie Parker, his respect and love for saxophonists Sonny Rollins and Eric Dolphy (his "only true friends,") details of his marital affairs, his (unfortunately) private experiments with a then-experimental Varitone electric saxophone attachment, and his investigations into the Western Classical repertoire.

Thomas also goes into some detail explaining just what were the physical ailments that beset John Coltrane throughout his life, matters about which curiously little was known.

Chasin' the Trane, then, is useful in many respects and exhilarating if you're at all familiar with the man's music. However, its unabashed thrust is the argument for the canonization of its subject which (along with the lack of an index) undermines its credibility. We should read this airy biography as an introduction or aid to his music and hope for an earthy, scholarly companion piece by someone else that, together with this volume, will add up to the monument that this giant deserves.