John Coltrane - Ole - May 25, 1961

Artist: JOHN COLTRANE
Title: OLE COLTRANE
Date: May 25, 1961
Release: Rhino #79965
John Coltrane never stopped wondering what he wanted from music, and never stopped pushing the boundaries. Trane genuinely strove to be saintly in his devotion to the divine, creating a body of deeply spiritual music that has come to be regarded as holy by his many devotees. His musical legacy was officially consecrated in 1971, when the Church of Saint John Will-I-Am Coltrane was founded in San Francisco. A gentle and enigmatic man of many voices, Trane was an often fiery, shockingly original musician. Put on any of his records, and the sounds emanating from his saxophone crackle with life. While his music was criticized by some as being too "aggressive," Trane knew (as some people "knew" in the 1960s) that love was the answer. His albums gained in momentum, one after the other, until his death in1967, when perhaps he finally went even further beyond. When he recorded Olé Coltrane in 1961, Trane was already transitioning over to Impulse! Records, and his playing reflected the greater freedom that the new label afforded him. In the original liner notes, he is quoted as saying (in a classic understatement), "I like to play long." On the18-minute showpiece, "Olé", one can imagine the profound satisfaction he must have felt, when for the first time, he was free to let his playing stretch out across the record grooves. This is trance music of the highest order. Recorded one year after his former boss Miles Davis released Sketches of Spain, Trane's "Olé" resonates with the mystical sounds of the North African Moors who once ruled the Iberian Peninsula. While Sketches of Spain is big on Gil Evans' sweeping orchestrations and flamenco grandeur, "Olé" explores the Eastern-influenced musical modes of Islamic Spain in a more stripped down and earthy manner. Just two days after recording Africa/Brass, his stunning debut album for Impulse!, Trane took old band mates McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones into the studio for a rendezvous with some talented new friends. Joining them there were Trane's equally intense and innovative counterpart, Eric Dolphy, the very young trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, and bassists Reggie Workman and the Art Davis. This dream team provided a great deal of musical empathy, liberating the conception and size of Coltrane's solos, spurring him to unknown heights. Everyone except Elvin Jones solos on "Olé," shaping the song with ever increasing freedom into the masterpiece that it is. Eric Dolphy's flute solo is unforgettable, communicating genius in a voice that no one could fail to identify. The interplay of the two basses lends an eerie mysticism to the song, with Art Davis' strong rhythmic bow-work suggesting the entrancing dance of Istanbul's Whirling Dervishes. "Dahomey Dance" is a more traditional sounding blues, with Trane switching to tenor sax. If not for the double-bass frontline and Dolphy's blissfully unconventional solo, this song could easily be mistaken for a missing gem from Miles' Kind Of Blue sessions. The album closes out with two beautifully lush songs. "Aisha" burns with such sensuality that it's hard to understand why it was one of the few McCoy Tyner compositions Trane ever recorded . The final track, a Billy Frazier composition entitled "Original Untitled Ballad (To Her Ladyship)," was not released until 1970. A lovely and delicate tune, it was excluded from the original release for some strange reason. A transitional record, Olé Coltrane successfully navigates the line between Trane's sonically challenging later years and his earlier accessibility. A magnificent milestone in Trane's artistic growth, this is an essential recording for any collection.
---John Ballon

Liner Notes:

In 1971, ten years after John Coltrane created the music on this recording, a San Francisco saxophonist named Franzo King and his wife, Marina, founded the Church of Saint John William Coltrane. As the story goes, they had attended a performance by the Coltrane Quartet and had undergone "a Holy Ghost experience, like you have in Pentecostal Church, emanating from him and his vibration," another priest (and saxophonist) told a reporter in early 2000. "They felt baptized by the sound, and they were so inspired that they had to go tell everybody."

I happen to love the music John Coltrane recorded in the 1950s; I even find some of it rapturous. But only the most myopic mainstreamer would suggest that Franzo and Marina King might have founded a church, and unofficially canonized the saxophonist, after hearing the music from the first half of his career. The Kings had their religious experience in 1965, by which time the Coltrane Quartet was four years deep into the intense, oceanic, usually spiritual and sometimes even mystical music with which they seared the cultural consciousness. That music came after the transition period documented by Coltrane's work for the Atlantic label from 1959 to 1961 - eight records, of which this was the last recorded (and is now the last reissued as a CD album).

By 1961, when he produced Ole Coltrane, Coltrane had made the most significant transition of his professional life. He had moved from the skyscraper verticality of his 1950s hard-bop recordings - which had reached apotheosis on "Giant Steps" - to the sprawling architecture that would define his role in the burgeoning jazz avant-garde (for which "My Favorite Things" had provided an early blueprint). He had thus laid the foundation for the second half of his career; now, in two recordings undertaken in late May of that year, he began fleshing out the walls and raising the roof.

But the first of these did not come under the aegis of Atlantic Records, Coltrane's home base for the previous 28 months: with one album left to complete under his Atlantic contract, he had already decided to move into a more compatible environment, the newly created Impulse Records. On May 23, he recorded the first album for his new label, the stunning Africa/Brass, distinguished by its use of a brass choir arranged by Coltrane's new friend and associate, the intense and innovative reedist Eric Dolphy; the album included their version of the English folk ballad "Greensleeves." Two days later, Coltrane took his working band members McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones - along with Dolphy, the flashy young trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, and two guest bassists - into the studio to record the music found on Ole Coltrane. This time, Coltrane used another folk-music tradition as his inspiration: "Ole," the album's 18-minute showcase, was based on a melody from the Spanish Revolution variously known as "Venga Vallejo" or "El Vito."

In both cases, as with "My Favorite Things" the year before, the saxophonist had arrived at a simple, elegant, and brilliant strategy of presenting his new ideas to his public.

Coltrane was pointing toward a system of improvisation that would no longer bind the soloists to the interlocking mechanics of harmonic progressions, but rather would allow them to create free-flowing chord sequences while playing within a much looser harmonic framework; frequently, this would encompass solo lines based on scales or modes instead of the chord "changes" found throughout jazz. In the early 60s, this constituted a radical shift in jazz and indeed in all of western music, which had made harmonic theory its crowning glory. But Coltrane found existing vehicles, already familiar to his audience, that he could adapt to his needs while educating his listeners. "My Favorite Things," Richard Rodgers's Broadway hit, uses relatively few chords and has a scale-based melody line; the same description would apply to "Greensleeves," which had become a Christmastime staple that most Americans could hardly escape come December.

"We had a very broad-based sort of concept," McCoy Tyner says now. "When John first brought in 'My Favorite Things,' I thought, 'The Sound Of Music? Julie Andrews? He wants to do this?' Some fan had brought it in and said, 'John take a look at this'; I think it was at the Jazz Gallery [a New York nightspot where Coltrane played often]. Before I knew it, we were playing it."

Coltrane used these songs as a bridge between his music of the 50s and the 60s. Earlier, like most jazzmen, he had haunted Tin Pan Alley and Cannery Row, concentrating on well-known tunes and song-forms; within six months of Ole Coltrane, his repertoire would include a song that stood completely opposite, in that it employed a one-chord drone to underpin the solos ("India"). "Ole" fits neatly in between: it uses just two chords in a repeated vamp that would have been familiar to anyone who'd heard flamenco music, seen a bullfight, read Hemingway, or even seen the TV show Zorro. This musical cliche provided a reference point, a way in to the music; once inside, listeners could better appreciate the significant deconstruction under way.

(Coltrane had a more immediate reference point of his own for "Ole." His former employer, Miles Davis, had released his famous album Sketches Of Spain in 1960 - a year before Coltrane made this recording - and it too had used flamenco harmonies as a starting point for sustained and frequently scalar improvisations.)

This reduced reliance on a song's underlying chord progression also liberated the shape and size of Coltrane's solos. A musician using a predetermined set of changes will play a solo of one or more choruses, which means the length of the solo will be some multiple of the original song; without those changes, the soloist has a great deal more freedom to determine the length of his improvised statement. And Coltrane explored this burgeoning freedom with performances of increasing length. For instance "Ole," with solos from everyone except drummer Elvin Jones and a four-and-a-half-minute soprano statement from Coltrane, was the longest track Coltrane had ever recorded (though it would soon enough fall to solos more than twice its length).

On the original liner essay for Ole Coltrane, Coltrane himself acknowledged one of the problems that his new approach might pose:

"I like to play long," he told annotator Ralph J. Gleason. "[T]he only thing is, I feel that there might be a need now to have more . . . statements going on in the band. I might need another horn, you know. I ran across a funny thing. We went into the Apollo and the guys said, 'You're playin' too long' . . . . [S]ometimes we get up and play a song and I play a solo maybe 30, or at least 20, minutes. Well, at the Apollo we ended up playing three songs in 20 minutes! I played all the highlights of the solos that I had been playing in hours, in that length of time. . . . It's made me think, if I'm going to take an hour to say something I can say in 10 minutes, maybe I'd better say it in 10 minutes! And then have another horn there and get something else."

In forming a brief informal partnership with Eric Dolphy, he did inded get "something else": a saxophonist as impassioned and disciplined as Coltrane himself, who also had a sound and style - a voice - that no one could fail to identify. Born on the west coast, where he first attracted attention in Chico Hamilton's innovative quintet of the late 1950s, Dolphy came to prominence in Charles Mingus's Jazz Workshop, where his alto sax, flute, and bass clarinet work all bore a remarkable quality of vox humana; more than any jazz musicians since the early swing era, Dolphy seemed to not just communicate but literally speak through his horn, chattering and squawking in addition to declaiming and singing. He thus mirrored some of the instrumental idioscyncracies of Ornette Coleman, but he worked the other side of the fence; Ornette transformed jazz from outside the mainstream, while Dolphy sought to expand it from within. Dead of complications from diabetes at the age of 36, he lived an even shorter life than Coltrane, but also left an indelible mark on those hearing him then and since.

McCoy Tyner thinks that both Coltrane and Dolphy benefitted from the association, but in different ways. "I think what John was looking for was to add another dimension," he reflects. "We felt the rhythm section was sort of self-contained" (although Coltrane tinkered here too, with his use of two bassists). So "John was looking for something else," says Tyner, and Dolphy's front-line empathy served his purpose. "I think he and John got along very well. They were friends, and I think he might have wanted somebody else there to share the podium, to see eye-to-eye with where he was going."

As for Dolphy, Tyner figures the Coltrane imprimature could only have helped. "I think John was trying to help Eric, too, because at that time a lot of people didn't understand what Eric was doing. So he was kind of like a partner: a sideman in the front line. . . . Eric working in the band was like a catalyst to help get his name out there a little bit more." Nonetheless, this tactic would have had only limited impact: Dolphy's recording contract with another label prevented him from appearing on Atlantic under his own name, and it's anyone's guess how many record-buyers realized that "George Lane," his handle on the original release of Ole Coltrane, actually referred to Eric Dolphy.

Tyner admits to being surprised that Coltrane didn't add Booker Little, the trumpet player in Dolphy's own group, to the quartet. "We didn't know then that Booker had leukemia and couldn't play every night," Tyner says. "But the way he played, the way he fit - we thought he'd be the trumpet player in the band."

Instead, at least for this album, the band got Freddie Hubbard. Only 23, Hubbard had come out of Indianapolis to land a job with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers; a few months before Ole Coltrane, he had also taken part in Ornette Coleman's historic Free Jazz recording, on which he and Dolphy had fronted the second half of Ornette's "double quartet." (Coltrane evidently found Hubbard's blend of hard-bop roots and brash rebellion, limned by his solo on "Ole," to his liking. Four years later, when Coltrane next had need of a trumpet, Hubbard again got the call - for the sonic maelstrom known as Ascension.) The band also featured the two splendid bass players Art Davis and Reggie Workman, both of whom had worked with the Quartet; their strumming interaction manages to suggest a guitar - albeit a very large guitar - the actual use of which might have overplayed the music's Spanish connection.

The dual bassists bring an especially strong rhythmic thrust to "Dahomey Dance," another long piece for which Coltrane switches to tenor sax. A blues, the track has a much more traditional format than "Ole"; however, the tune obscures its form by downplaying the chord change that would normally appear in the fifth measure of a blues, and thus encourages the unfettered soloing Coltrane sought. Hubbard, not quite as comfortable with the concept, plays a more conventional solo, something close to what he was playing with Blakey at the same time; but Dolphy, more attuned to Coltrane's concept, follows him and scatters the harmonic signposts to the winds.

Tyner dedicated his lovely composition "Aisha" to his first wife, who had been a childhood friend of Tyner's in Philadelphia, and also an acquaintance of Coltrane's. "Yeah, I knew her because she was the little sister of the singer in Cal Massey's band, and I worked with Cal. We all knew each other; her house was like mine. I wrote it at the time we were married, but I sort of wrote it in John's kind of style at that time."

Coltrane almost never performed compositions by his band members, which makes "Aisha" a rarity; nonetheless, it was not the only Tyner tune, or even the first, that Coltrane recorded. "Well, I met John was I was 17 and playing at the Red Rooster in Philadelphia, and Cal [Massey] introduced him to me. Then the club owner asked if he'd come in the next week, but John said he didn't have a band; he was writing the music for Giant Steps and was on a sort of sabbatical. So the club owner asked him to work with our rhythm section, and I brought along a tune for him that I thought he'd like." Coltrane apparently liked it well enough: he recorded it as the title track of his 1960 Prestige album The Believer. But it and "Aisha" remained the only Tyner tunes recorded by Coltrane (despite the wealth of stirring compositions the pianist has written).

Perhaps we should consider "The Believer" (or at least its title) somewhat premonitory: within a few years, Coltrane had made believers of his peers, hundreds of thousands of devoted listeners, and also Franzo and Marina King. Remember, they felt "baptized in the sound" of Coltrane's music; in the same article mentioned above, their friend and acolyte added that "Then they found out John had said in an interview that he wanted to be a saint."

That article appeared in the spring of 2000, when newspapers and television stations in San Francisco carried news that the Church of Saint John Coltrane had lost its home, victimized by the city's real-estate boom. San Francisco in the year 2000 presented a study in bizarre economics. The influx of dot-com millionaires, who had outgrown the confines of Silicon Valley, had little compunction about paying $400,000 for modest homes in so-so neighborhoods that went for half that price five years earlier; the Church's rent went from $1350 to $2500 in one fell swoop, and Franzo and Marina King couldn't afford to stay.

But they did win the right to forestall immediate eviction, and they did raise one-sixth of the $60,000 needed to purchase a new location; they also moved to another church willing to share its facilities for an extended period of time. The Kings and their followers believe that the Church of Saint John Coltrane will rise again in the new milennium, perhaps bigger and stronger than before. If the sacred music at its foundation is any indication - works such as "Ole," and "Greensleeves," and "Africa" - I see little cause for doubt.

Neil Tesser