"That Must be the Answer"

My Coltrane listening seems to be progressing backwards in time, moving from the Complete Impulse! Studio Recordings of the "Classic Quartet" of John Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, and Elvin Jones back to the Heavyweight Champion anthology of all of the recordings he made for Atlantic. Many things happened over this relatively short period of sessions, the first of which was on January 15, 1959 and the last on October 24, 1960, a span of less than two years. I have already written about the "Coltrane-Flanagan connection," which was established during this period and flourished in May of 1959, particularly in the recording the tracks for Giant Steps. However, another connection began to emerge later that year when, on November 28, 1959, Town Hall (in Manhattan) offered what may have been the most intriguing program in the history of jazz performance. Here, according to Lewis Porter's John Coltrane: His Life and Music, are the groups that assembled for this event:

1. A quartet led by Coltrane
2. A group led by Ornette Coleman
3. A group led by Cecil Taylor
4. A group led by Thelonious Monk
5. A quartet led by Count Basie with Elvin Jones on drums
6. The Art Farmer/Benny Golson Jazztet with McCoy Tyner on piano

If ever there were an event to prepare the rest of the world (or at least New York) for the changes that were emerging in jazz, this was it!

Porter does not give the specifics regarding who played what. We might get some clues by checking discographies; but I am more interested in the impact that Coleman had on Coltrane, since this is almost two years before Atlantic released Coleman's Free Jazz recording, which probably planted at least some of the seeds that would later blossom in Coltrane's "Ascension" recording session. In this respect it is interesting to read Porter's citation of an interview Coltrane gave to Benoit Quersin, in which he said of Coleman:

I'm following his lead. He's done a lot to open my eyes to what can be done.

Porter's citation continues:

I feel indebted to him, myself. Because, actually, when he came along, I was so far in this thing [“Giant Steps” chords], I didn’t know where I was going to go next. And I don’t know if I would have thought about just abandoning the chord system or not. I probably wouldn’t have thought of that at all. And he came along doing it, and I heard it, I said, "Well, that must be the answer."

If we view the history of music in terms of which paths are taken and how those paths cultivate our ability to listen, then the individual histories of composers, whether in the settings of "serious music" or jazz, seem to be oriented around the question as Coltrane formulated it: Where do I go next? Some decide to cultivate further the "turf" they have already occupied; and I would not wish to imply that their work is of lesser value for their "lack of motion." However, those that choose to "go" often make choices that astonish and/or discourage us. Think of Igor Stravinsky. His move from Russian nationalism to neoclassicism won him much acclaim, while his decision to experiment with serial music elicited little more than groping perplexity (and some bitterness from the strongest acolytes of Arnold Schoenberg).

Coltrane never seemed to worry if others were perplexed by his choices of where to go next. There is certainly no questioning the sincerity of his interest in what Coleman was doing and the extent to which Coltrane saw an "answer" in Coleman's work. Within six months of the Town Hall evening, he had arranged two recording sessions at Atlantic in which he worked with Coleman associates Don Cherry, Charlie Haden, and Ed Blackwell to record three of Coleman's compositions, along with one of Cherry's and a performance of Monk's "Bemsha Swing" for good measure. Atlantic released the resulting album as The Avant-Garde: John Coltrane & Don Cherry, but not until April of 1966, which is to say after their release of Coleman's Free Jazz and impulse!'s release of Ascension! Indeed, it almost seems as if it was only after the idea of a jazz avant-garde had been established by Free Jazz and Ascension that Atlantic worked up the courage to release material they had recorded almost six years earlier; but, for all of their good intentions, Atlantic was never in the business of making music but only in the business of making money from distributing it! Nevertheless, those business decisions are now part of an ancient history that most have forgotten. What endures is the music, and it is as alive as it was when things were first coming to a boil at Town Hall in 1959.