Jalylah Burrell

Hello, Babar

Seattle-bred, Brooklyn-based cultural critic Jalylah Burrell riffs on anything and everything.

"If Trane Wuz Here": Birthday Reflections on the Jazz Deity

Posted 09/23/2008 at 9:16 AM | Comment?

I am not one of the those people who worships John Coltrane. I own just one of his albums. I don't play it often; I prefer drizzles and sprinkles to cascading sheets. At the gorgeous and acoustically exemplar* Jazz at Lincoln Center season opener last week, headlined by the effortlessly cool Ahmad Jamal, I was more impressed by understated solos by saxophonist Sherman Irby and trumpeter Sean Jones than fiery ones by saxophonist Devin Phillips and the august Wynton Marsalis, although they were all very good.

What endears 'Trane to me and I surmise most everyone else was his intensity of performance and purpose as Francis Davis elucidated in 2001 on the occasion of what would have been Coltrane's 75th birthday.

...Coltrane's significance has begun to seem as much symbolic as musical. Musicians far removed from him stylistically and likely to define their own music in the most secular terms have embraced him as a role model, or at least have recognized the high seriousness they can claim for themselves by dropping his name. He has come to stand for a disciplined mind-set, a desire for spiritual ecstasy, a vision of music as ritual and of performance as a holy rite. Depending on what a listener wants from it, Coltrane's music is a cry for black liberation, the soundtrack of a spiritual quest, a backdrop for tripping, or merely (merely!) the next evolutionary step for jazz after bebop.Whether it's results suit one's aesthetic sensibilities, they were evidence of fine craftmanship and audibly taxing work.

There is also the love below flowing through those sheets. That is what everyone is looking for, even when they claim otherwise. So there ends my birthday tribute an artist for whom I have little insight but something to say. I'm grown. I can speak.

Here are a few Coltrane covers to watch/listen to in tribute to by the man from Hamlet, North Carolina born this day 82 years ago.