Pursuance: Coltrane Legacy Deserves Better

courtesy of Lydia Liebman

At the end of last month, ropeadope released the latest album of saxophonist Lakecia Benjamin. Pursuance: The Coltranes is her third full-length release; and, as the title suggests, the content serves as homage to both John Coltrane and his wife Alice, who became his pianist with the departure of McCoy Tyner. The thirteen tracks on the album include seven of John’s originals and four composed by Alice. The remaining two are based on spirituals. “Goin’ Home” (“Going Home” on the track listing) was adapted for spiritual purposes by William Arms Fischer, who appropriated the principal theme from the second movement of Antonín Dvořák’s Opus 95 (“From the New World”) symphony in E minor. “Walk With Me” is probably best associated with The Williams Brothers and is featured on their gospel album Still Here.

The advance material for this album (presumably derived from liner notes by John Murph) claims that Benjamin is performing with “an astonishing cross-generational ensemble of over 40 jazz heavyweights that includes Ron Carter, Gary Bartz, Regina Carter, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Meshell Ndgecello, Steve Wilson, Marc Cary, Keyon Harrold, Marcus Strickland, Brandee Younger and Jazzmeia Horn.” Sadly, there does not seem to be any specific account of who participates in which tracks, which strikes me as unfair to both the Coltrane legacy and those that were recruited to work with Benjamin on this project. I make this claim as one that believes adamantly that none of the tracks recorded by either of the Coltranes should be subjected to casual listening. This music might not demand quite the level of attentive listening that one might bring to Arnold Schoenberg or Anton Webern, but it comes damned near close!

My last encounter with an attempt to pay homage to the Coltrane legacy took place in July of last year. It involved a performance rather than a recording, and the featured work on the program was a complete performance of A Love Supreme. The event was a sorry disappointment as four well-intentioned performers never really “got” what the music was or the foundation of ideas upon which that music was created. It may not have been as depressing as my encounter with an attempt to revive Ascension, but it still left me somewhere between disappointed and dismayed.

While invoking Noam Chomsky in the course of writing about the Coltranes may be as inconsistent as invoking Schoenberg, Chomsky may offer the best explanation for why Pursuance is so disappointing, particularly to those that have long been steeped in the Coltrane repertoire. In Chomsky’s terminology, the tracks on this album account for the “surface structure” of Coltrane recordings as a point of departure. However, there is a “deep structure” that involves far more than notes and riffs that gets at how those that sailed under the Coltrane flag went about making music. That there is little sense of that deep structure should not be surprising, but there is also no sense at all of an alternative deep structure.

As a result listening to this new album has had little impact other than raising a strong urge to spend more time with the many Coltrane albums in my collection.