Weinstein, in A Night in Tunisia: Imaginings of Africa in Jazz (61), notes the parallel between the southern African-American church and Coltrane’s music. The significant presence of religion in Coltrane’s childhood foreshadowed the turn his career would take in the 1960s, when, for both Coltrane himself and for listeners who accepted his new direction, the music became more than just music it was a religious experience - a means of attaining mystical transcendence. From the very earliest moments of his life, Coltrane was exposed to music both in his home and in the participatory religious experience of the southern African-American church. Both of his grandfathers were ordained ministers in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. Both of his parents were musicians: his mother was a church pianist and his father played violin (Hardy and Laing 161). John William Coltrane was born on 23 September 1926 in Hamlet, North Carolina. john coltrane before “my favorite things” Finally, a discussion of the motivations behind Coltrane’s musical “quest” (as characterized by Eric Nisenson) will further illuminate his stylistic development. They will also reflect the influence of African, Indian, and Western art music upon Coltrane and the modal and free styles of jazz in the 1960s. These examinations will reveal the evolution of both Coltrane’s own playing and the dynamics of his group’s interplay. Following an introductory exploration of both Coltrane’s musical career prior to 1960 and the “standard” form of “My Favorite Things,” the paper will compare and contrast four of Coltrane’s recordings of the piece: his 1960 studio recording, a more extended performance at the 1963 Newport Jazz Festival, the last recording of the piece by his “classic quartet” at the 1965 Newport Jazz Festival, and a radically evolved 57-minute performance from 1966 in Tokyo by his new quintet. This project will use “My Favorite Things” as just such a tool. The preponderance of recordings of this single piece, spanning the full development of Coltrane’s work in the avant garde, makes it uniquely suited to careful comparison and analysis, a useful tool for the examination of his stylistic development. At least eighteen of these performances have been released on recording (Cole 228-248). In the ensuing seven years, until his death in 1967, Coltrane made “My Favorite Things” a regular part of his concert repertoire. Interestingly, one of Coltrane’s favorite vehicles for his combos’ sonic explorations was the Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II tune “My Favorite Things” from the musical The Sound of Music. Coltrane first recorded this piece in 1960 in an innovative interpretation that already sounded radically different from the original, catching Coltrane in the formative stages of his new, modally-based, “avant garde” sound. In this search they are rediscovering avant garde jazz for the numinous properties with which it was often consciously imbued by its greatest purveyors, notably Sun Ra (who claimed to hail from the planet Saturn and sought to produce music that corroborated his claim) and John Coltrane (whose fascination with “outer space” themes manifested itself more in mystical and spiritual explorations than in science-fiction fantasies). Today, many people of a younger generation, musicians and non-musicians alike, are looking for what Michael Bruce McDonald calls “an experience of the sacred” (275). The resulting music was given many names: free jazz, avant garde, the “new thing.” As the decade ended, however, this style of jazz was largely abandoned in favor of more “psychedelic” electronic sounds and jazz-rock fusion. They also brought improvisation to new levels of intensity and complexity, taking greater liberties with respect to the duration, content, and structure of solos, and delving into an unprecedented amount of group improvisation. They broke down traditional techniques and incorporated previously unheard scales, harmonic progressions, and compositional structures. In the 1960s, many jazz musicians, such as Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra, Charles Mingus, and Eric Dolphy, expanded the parameters of their music with respect to form, melody, harmony, rhythm, and texture. John Coltrane, 1960, Down Beat magazine “I’ve found you’ve got to look back at the old things and see them in a new light.” It was presented at the Tenth National Conference on Undergraduate Research, April 1996, University of North Carolina-Asheville and at the Pi Kappa Lambda Spring Banquet, May 1996, Gustavus Adolphus College. This thesis by Scott Anderson was completed as an independent research project for the Honors in Music History and Literature program at Gustavus Adolphus College, St.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |