Articles & Excerpts             

San Francisco Concert Review:

A moving night of music from Coltranes
MOTHER, SON OFFER HOMAGE, LET THEIR OWN TALENT SHINE
By Richard Scheinin, Mercury News, posted on Mon, Nov. 06, 2006
From http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/entertainment/

There's a large, expanding subculture out there in which the music of John Coltrane operates as a sort of spiritual DNA, a key for opening life-affirming vistas. This is what great music does, right? Beethoven offers hope and a sense of transformation. Nearly 40 years after his death, Coltrane, for many, has a similar effect.

That's part of the reason that pianist and organist Alice Coltrane's three-stop U.S. tour — which ended Saturday night in front of 3,000 listeners at the Masonic Center in San Francisco — has generated such interest. Her first major series of concert dates in a quarter-century offered a chance for audiences to connect through the pianist to her late husband, the legendary saxophonist.

Add the fact that their son, Ravi Coltrane, an accomplished saxophonist himself, was in the band, and you had some deep, Coltrane Cult reasons to be there.

But Saturday's concert was much more than some cultish event. It was a wonderfully moving and exploratory night of music led by a pianist who has never really gotten her due; she is an original. So is Ravi Coltrane — who, at 41, increasingly looks like his father — and so are the other two members of the pianist's quartet, bassist Charlie Haden and drummer Roy Haynes, master players and old friends of the Coltrane clan.

Before his death in 1967 at age 40, John Coltrane, with Alice as his pianist, was exploring a brand of jazz steeped in their pan-religious interests — free jazz gone devotional. Saturday's concert gave a decent idea of some of the directions their music might have taken had the saxophonist not succumbed to cancer.

The 69-year-old keyboardist, who has led an ashram in Southern California for years, wore a saffron blouse and matching floor-length skirt for the big event. The moment she stepped on stage, much of the audience leapt to its feet. Coltrane looked tickled. She sat down at her Wurlitzer organ and introduced the first number, "Sita Ram,'' as one of Mahatma Gandhi's favorite songs.

The music was loose-limbed, untethered and moving about organically, much like John Coltrane's late-period music, but with more of an open beatific bent and less of the fury. (Though, to watch Ravi Coltrane crouch down to grab an elusive high note, looking a lot like his dad, was to be reminded of the fury.)

The organ has become Alice Coltrane's most distinctive voice; she plays a kind of raga-jazz on it, a continuous stream of exuberantly swooped and bent notes that are reminiscent of the sitar, but also carry a deep, ornate bluesiness along with the gospel inflections of her Baptist upbringing in Detroit. When she really digs into a solo, her lines start to blur and move out, seemingly in light waves, crest after crest.

For "Blue Nile,'' a hypnotic modal blues, one of her classics from the early '70s, she switched to a grand piano. Haynes was the star here; his solo was a model of melody, organization and slamming, concentrated energy.

The amazing thing is this: He is 81 but looks, acts and plays much as he did in the early '60s, when he was John Coltrane's backup drummer. It seems impossible, but there it is. If Haynes has lost anything except his hair, I don't know what it is.

"Impressions'' was the best number in the concert's first half, with the leader again on organ. There were all sorts of pulsing drones from Haden and implied beats from Haynes, and when Ravi Coltrane entered on tenor, elaborately scooping up and gulping down big sequences of notes, free and bluesy, his mother watched him with a delighted "Oh my'' smile. When the saxophonist finished, the drummer stopped playing, stood up and shook his hand.

Ravi Coltrane has had a slow boil of a career, gathering together his skills over time to become one of jazz's top saxophonists and most interesting leaders. The music he plays with his own band is rigorously organized around shifting meters and unusual harmonic cycles, and his sound tends to be reserved. It doesn't grab you; it grows on you.

But Saturday, he seemed to throw out much of the reserve and, in a very poignant way, embrace his father's legacy— not by playing the same notes, but by paying homage to a more essential sound and spirit.

On "Translinear Light,'' one of the tunes in the concert's second half  (as well as the title tune of Alice Coltrane's 2004 album), his sound was plush and keening. On his father's "Leo,'' his solo flooded through extreme ranges and smeared speech-like utterances.

"Leo'' is a late-John Coltrane blastoff song: a single note, piped up and down across the width of an octave. Saturday, Alice played it on the Wurlitzer. Her raga-rich solo wove itself into swooping, gospel glossolalia. Then came Ravi and then, finally, mother and son, interweaving their speech-like utterances in call-and-response, while Haden and Haynes churned below.

For an encore, the group played John Coltrane's "Acknowledgement'' from "A Love Supreme.''

This is the Coltrane subculture's heart-song. Alice rumbled righteously at the piano. Ravi flutter-floated on the horn. Haden's solo kept turning into itself with perfect logic, like the spiraling pattern inside a nautilus shell. And Haynes, briefly, turned the famous four notes of the "Love Supreme'' melody — boo DWEE do WAH — into a singalong.

Next year, Alice Coltrane turns 70. Here's hoping she comes back to celebrate.

Contact Richard Scheinin at rscheinin@mercurynews.com