Grex Rethinks a Coltrane Classic

from the Bandcamp Web page for the recording being discussed

Readers may recall that, this past July, this site discussed a live-streamed performance from Bird & Beckett Books and Records given by the Grex duo of guitarist Karl Evangelista and keyboardist Rei Scampavia. The program was a tribute concert presenting all five tracks from Alice Coltrane’s album Journey in Satchidananda, with an “encore” offering of “Leo,” from John Coltrane’s Interstellar Space album, recorded in 1967, the year of his death. At the beginning of this year, I discovered that, for an album that had been released in October of 2017, Evangelista had composed an arrangement of one of John Coltrane’s major albums, A Love Supreme, which was performed by the Grex duo joined by Robert Lopez on drums and Dan Clucas on cornet. It took another two months before I could set aside the time to listen to this “alternative” A Love Supreme album.

The original Love Supreme was one of the “classic quartet” albums released by Impulse! Records. Those sessions were led by Coltrane on both tenor and soprano saxophone, McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass, and Elvin Jones on drums. The good news is that Evangelista did not treat this album as a “score” to be performed with different resources. Rather, the four-movement structure (“Acknowledgement,” “Resolution,” “Pursuance,” and “Psalm”) served as a point of departure, which probably involved a synthesis of “charts” and opportunities for improvisation, the latter, for the most part, prevailing over the former.

In my own listening experiences, I realized that I could recognize only a few motivic gestures. The clearest of these was that of the ostinato “Resolution” theme. It also struck me that Lopez was familiar with Jones’ percussion work and may even have used the extended drum solo work on the original album as a point of departure. More important, however, is how Evangelista reconceived so many of Coltrane’s own melismatic passages into guitar riffs that brilliantly captured the spirit with little commitment to reproducing the “original flesh.”

The “Grex++” performance is shorter than the original Love Supreme album, particularly in “Pursuance” and “Psalm.” “Pursuance” provided Jones with an opportunity to develop an extended solo of polyrhythms that sharply contrasted the ostinato “incantations” encountered in both “Acknowledgement” and “Resolution.” Lopez had his own lexicon of imaginative takes but did not develop them at quite as much length. Similarly, Jones’ solo in “Pursuance” was followed by Tyner’s equally extended piano riffs. Scampavia’s approach to keyboard work, on the other hand, has more to do with a wide spectrum of synthesized sounds; and (to her advantage) she never seemed to set herself the task of “channeling” Tyner’s keyboard style.

The problem with a jazz album being labeled as “classic” is that too many performers are more interested in reproducing it than in taking it as a point of departure. Evangelista’s arrangement has more to do with the underlying spirit than with “surface level” familiarity. Personally, I would have enjoyed the opportunity to listen to this quartet arrangement in performance (rather than on recording), as I had the opportunity to do with the Grex take on Journey in Satchidananda.