******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ******************** #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. *****************************************************************
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/coltranes-free-jazz-awesome "The discovery and release of a previously unknown recording by the saxophonist John Coltrane, who died at the age of forty in 1967, is cause for rejoicing—and I’m rejoicing in “Offering: Live at Temple University <http://www.resonancerecords.org/release.php?cat=B0019632-02>,” the release of a tape, made for the school’s radio station, of a concert that Coltrane and his band gave on November 11, 1966, a mere nine months before his death. I knew and already loved this concert, on the basis of a bootleg of three of its five numbers. But the legitimate release offers much better sound and contains the pièce de résistance: a climactic performance of “My Favorite Things,” the Richard Rodgers tune that Coltrane turned into a jazz classic in 1960. Yet this 1966 performance of it is very different from that of 1960 <https://play.spotify.com/track/3ZikLQCnH3SIswlGENBcKe?play=true&utm_source=open.spotify.com&utm_medium=open>, and, indeed, even from Coltrane recordings from a year or two before the Temple concert. In the intervening years, Coltrane’s musical conception had shifted toward what can conveniently be called “free jazz.” The term started as the name of an album <http://open.spotify.com/album/7zE4RadAWa8lYSvAZkGtFw> by one of the form’s key artists, Ornette Coleman, from 1960, even though that recording only hinted at the further extremes of free jazz, some of which were in evidence in Coltrane’s final two years. The idea, roughly, involves playing without a set harmonic structure (the framework of chords that lasts a pre-set number of bars and gives jazz performances a sense of sentences and paragraphs), without a foot-tapping beat, and sometimes even without the notion of solos, allowing musicians to join in or lay out as the spirit moves them. Lacking beat, harmony, and tonality, free jazz cuts the main connection to show tunes, dance-hall performances, or even background music to which jazz owed much of whatever popularity it enjoyed. There’s a temptation to consider free jazz as a freedom *from*: freedom from structures and formats and preëxisting patterns of any sort. But it’s also a freedom *to*: a freedom to musical disinhibition of tone, a vehemence and fervor, as well as a freedom to invent. The very word “freedom” meant something particular to black Americans in the nineteen-sixties. They didn’t have it, and there’s an implicit, and sometimes explicit, political idea in free jazz: a freedom from European styles, a freedom to seek African and other musical heritages, and, also, a freedom to cross-pollinate jazz with other arts. In the process, jazz musicians developed new forms and new moods that reflected a new generation’s experiences and ideals. The politics of free jazz were inseparable from its aesthetic transformation of jazz into overt and self-conscious modernism." https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=UUz5iBLL78xZLaIEc9zJ9pSg&v=pZQAwahDL8A _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
