What I Listen To

A discussion recently came up about the best rock vocalist of all-time. I had a hard time with this one and my lack of a quick and sure answer shocked an old friend. The question then became, “Had I drifted that far from my musical roots that I held on to so tightly in high school?” Yes and no. I have no less passion for the music I listened to in high school. I still have all of those albums, CDs, MP3s and still listen to them. The Grateful Dead is still in rotation; I still listen to Pink Floyd; Crosby Stills and Nash are on my MP3 players. And they all still have tremendous importance to me.

But my current obsession is more with music that involves searching. Music where the musician is searching and the listener is along for the ride. Yes, you can correctly say that the Grateful Dead and Pink Floyd were on a search. But I’m referring to music that challenges the notion of music itself. Most, but not all, of my listening these days involves jazz. I’ve been reading a lot about John Coltrane lately and have been analyzing his albums. Art Pepper is one that I happily stumbled upon recently. I was in Washington D.C. last month to see two nights of Pat Martino. I still believe that Herbie Hancock is our pre-eminent pianist and the best arranger alive today. And I’m checking out things that certainly challenge what we call music. Groups like Vorwolf, Stephen Vitiello, Paola Prestini and Francisco Lopez.

There was a point a couple of years ago that I would’ve laughed at what these people are calling “music”. But I’ve reached a point where I’m willing to define music as any intended audible piece that evokes an emotional response. That doesn’t mean that I enjoy everything these people put on a CD, but I will give it a listen and see what merit I might attribute to it. These are musicians (and I can’t say that I have a definition yet for what a “musician” is, I struggle with that term), who are never going to be well known, or on the radio, or even have the ability to support themselves with the music they make. However, they are driven to create. And I respect that drive.

A lot of times the rock world gets caught up in the success of the music. And that success can destroy the drive to create, to push forward and to challenge oneself. That’s why I can’t stay contained in the world of rock. It’s not that I don’t enjoy it any longer. It’s just that I see limits to it. Limits that it sets upon itself that curtail creativity and expression oftentimes for the sake of mass appeal. I look at people like Coltrane and Hank Jones who continue to push their music, their writing and their practicing for their entire lives. They are never satisfied with their abilities and keep going. They are searching for things they can’t even define but know that they aren’t there yet.

A few people in the rock world have worked this hard. Frank Zappa comes to mind. He is said to have spent on average 17 hours a day in his studio when he wasn’t on tour. And he released over 70 albums in his career. Stevie Ray Vaughan lived with his guitar around him. These artists were dedicated. But I think they are more the exception than the rule.

I’m not one of those music snobs who will only listen to “high-brow” music. I’ll listen to anything that has quality to it. I’ve been listening to a lot of Prince lately. I’ve been studying how he constructs a song. He’ll have a straight rhythm, then he’ll also have a cross rhythm. He has these two “rhythm scaffolds” from which he can bounce back and forth to create a different feel. When you listen to something like Little Red Corvette or When Doves Cry, you can hear that where he places the beat is where the magic is. He’s a genius at rhythm. I like to listen to people who have devoted their lives to doing what they do very well.

I still listen to metal, 80's pop, new wave, alternative, jambands, classic rock, psychedelic, bluegrass, blues, fingerstyle, etc.

John Coltrane – The Motive

What was the motive behind Coltrane’s body of work? Why did it start where it did and end the way it did? All of this is speculative, but by looking at what the critics were saying at the time and what his contemporary musicians have said, we can infer some things.

His playing has been described by listeners as “angry” and “dense”. Coltrane himself admitted that harmonically he was trying to play, trying to exhaust, all of the possible combinations with the chord changes. Critics have said that if anyone came close to doing so, it was Coltrane. He was asked by Miles once why he played so long and Coltrane said that he didn’t know how to end it, how to wrap it up. Miles quipped, “Try taking the horn out of your mouth.” But the indication is that Coltrane was striving to achieve something that he couldn’t get to.

Coltrane stretched out and began studying music from India and other places around the world. He was trying to achieve the flexibility of the human voice on his instrument. He wanted it to be a vocalization. In the last years of his life he sometimes stopped his solo on stage and began beating his chest. Again, almost in what appears to have been frustration in not being able to get what he wanted out of the horn.

Coltrane is noted as being one of the most studious musicians ever. He was always learning, asking questions of everyone, trying to find something he hadn’t found yet. The critics agree that he was a mediocre sax player up until the time he played with Thelonius Monk. Monk somehow turned his mind around and put him on a path of self-motivation and searching that saw him through to the end of his career.

The book I’ve read suggests that Coltrane was a highly driven musician searching for the ultimate truth in sound, which might have meant trying to vocalize the sax to mimic the human voice after having blown through the harmony with “sheets of sound” early in his career, and later with the melodic modal jazz phase. Critics were hard on albums like Ascension. Debate exists on why, and what did it cost Coltrane in credibility with the jazz community.

Did Coltrane ever achieve satisfaction in his playing? Personally, I don’t think so. I think he was striving towards something he knew he could never achieve, but the struggle in trying to reach it was as close as he could get to it. Was his playing angry? Maybe frustrated is a more appropriate term. But I think Coltrane liked the struggle…it was the journey he enjoyed, not the achievement. But I think he was still reaching up until the end. And to me, that suggests hope. That was an act of hope. Maybe hope is what we are hearing from ‘trane and why he is still so worshipped today. His horn has a sound that says, “Maybe what I’m trying to achieve is right around the corner.”

Coltrane Stories

I’ve been reading the book Coltrane: The Story of a Sound by Ben Ratliff. Every few pages I’ve come across something that is said that just sets off light bulbs. This paragraph is one of them.

Coltrane started bringing new members into the band in 1965. The reception to this experiment had been chilly enough when he tried it with Eric Dolphy; this time his audience was even less forgiving, and as a result he undermined his own credibility. Most of his fans could go with his new music as long as band members of repute were playing it. With new members of less objectively measurable talent, some felt they were being conned.

Think about that. Musicians playing the same notes can be accepted differently depending on how much faith the audience has on the credibility of the musician playing them. Why is it we must have trust and faith, in where the musician might take us before we even hear the first note played? What does that say about the musician-listener relationship? I’m sure it’s why fans will go buy an album by their favorite artist the minute it is released without ever reading the first review. How does that trust get earned? Does a critic have to give us the OK before some of us are willing to take an artist seriously?

…at the Village Vanguard with Coltrane in 1966 [Ali]being asked by Coltrane in the club’s backroom before the gig what he thought about Frank Wright, the young free jazz tenor player. He knew that Ali and Wright were friends, and Wright, who had come to the club that night, had independently approached Coltrane about the possibility of sitting in with Coltrane’s band at the club. Ali reacted skeptically.

I said, “Aw, man, he ain’t playing shit.”
He looked at me. I said, “He ain’t playing shit.”
We go out on the bandstand, and the first thing he does is say [to Wright],
“Hey, man, come on up.”
In the dressing room after it was over, he said something I never forgot.
He said, “I don’t care what a cat plays. If you’re into music, there’ll
be something you hear [in that musician] that you might like.
One note, one sound, that you might like.”