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Coltrane

The Story of a Sound

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

1 who's willie mays?

On July 13, 1946, John William Coltrane, seaman second class, recorded eight songs with four other musicians, drawn from the ranks of the Melody Masters. The Melody Masters was a large navy band, stationed in Oahu, Hawaii; navy bands were segregated in those days, and this one was all white.

Quiet Coltrane came from a very religious Methodist family. Both his grandfathers were ministers. As a preteen he liked to draw, and as a teenager he idolized Johnny Hodges, the Ellingtonband alto and soprano saxophonist. He was born in Hamlet, North Carolina, moved to High Point, North Carolina, in his infancy, and moved again to Philadelphia after finishing at William Penn High School in High Point. He was two months shy of turning twenty when the four Melody Masters invited Coltrane to jam with them.

Coltrane, a lean figure in round shades whose tall Afro flattened out on the sides, was not a full-time navy bandsman (no blacks were), and the Melody Masters were not officially allowed to play with black musicians. With Coltrane as guest, escaping the knowledge of their superior officers, they made a private recording, eventually pressing four copies of a 78 RPM record.

One tune from that amateur session was Tadd Dameron's "Hot House," a song that later became known as one of the great compositions of early bebop. "Hot House" is a 32-bar song that first borrows from the chord changes of the standard "What Is This Thing Called Love?" before cleverly altering them. And the seamen try an effortful replication of Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker's version of the tune, cut a year earlier — except that the navy trumpeter doesn't solo, as Gillespie did.

Instead, Coltrane does. In fact, Coltrane, on alto saxophone, takes the only solo — a hideous, squeaking, lurching thing. But perhaps it didn't matter to the thoroughly preprofessional Melody Masters, because Coltrane had met Bird.

Some jazz musicians are off and running at nineteen — Charlie Christian, Johnny Griffin, Art Pepper, Clifford Brown, Sarah Vaughan. John Coltrane was not. He had started playing at thirteen, on alto horn and clarinet, as a member of the school band in High Point. At fourteen, he switched to alto saxophone. The first instrument he owned was an alto bought for him by his mother when the family moved to Philadelphia; he was sixteen then. He took a year of theory lessons at the Ornstein School of Music. At eighteen, he started playing in Philadelphia clubs, working with big bands at dances or in a trio at nightclubs. According to his friends and some of the bandleaders he worked with, he was a perfectly indistinct musician.

He saw Charlie Parker perform for the first time on June 5, 1945, in Dizzy Gillespie's group.

So did his friends Jimmy Heath and Benny Golson. Golson remembered: "John just sat there, taking it all in. All over the hall, people were standing up and shouting, clapping their hands and stamping their feet. Imagine being a saxophonist and never having heard this kind of music before." Following the afternoon performance, Coltrane and Golson accompanied their hero toward the Blue Note club, where Parker had an evening gig. Golson asked if he could carry Bird's saxophone case. The three walked together: Golson on the right, Coltrane on the left, Bird in the middle. Golson, a talker, asked Bird what kind of horn he used, what mouthpiece, what number reeds. It was a scene of total adulation. Golson wasn't embarrassed by it, but Coltrane evidently was. In 1947, Coltrane met Bird again in Los Angeles, while on tour with King Kolax. He didn't remind him that they had met in Philadelphia.

On the Oahu recording of "Hot House," made a year later, Coltrane starts his solo by echoing the melody line from the bridge section of "A Night in Tunisia," which was the big bebop record of the previous year. It may have been fresh in Coltrane's ears from hearing Dizzy Gillespie's septet version of "Tunisia," recorded February 22, 1946, on Victor. Or perhaps he heard the Charlie Parker Septet version, recorded March 28, on Dial.

Musicians working within this common 32-bar song structure can find a way to begin a solo with a quote of a bridge; it's not impossible. It's just tricky. Where the solo begins is the start of a journey, whereas the bridge — in the 32-bar song form, it's the channel of music after the main theme is played and repeated, and which contrasts against that main theme — represents the middle. Coltrane doesn't play inapposite notes to the chords, but the 8-bar bridge melody naturally leads him to a psychological ending place, and he still has 24 more bars to fill. It is incumbent upon him to scramble for something new to propel himself again. Sure enough, the second 8-bar stretch of the 32-bar solo chorus grows disastrous. On the song's actual bridge, bars 17 to 24, he has an even worse time; on the final 8, he achieves adequate redemption, though certainly not poise, with a Charlie Parker lick, a curling flurry of sixteenth notes.

Moving back to Philadelphia after his discharge in August 1946, Coltrane did what any self-respecting alto saxophonist of the time would do: he tried to follow Charlie Parker's movements, because Parker was the king soloist.

At this point in jazz, when big bands and dance-hall jobs were beginning to disappear and small groups were taking precedence, solos really mattered. It was first under Lester Young, and then more decisively under Charlie Parker, that the cult of the solo had emerged. Finally, to Parker's cohort, the solos were king, subjugating the stuff around them. Even the worst examples of Parker's solos were fetishized. The earliest scholarly writing on jazz solos appeared in the 1930s, but the hagiographic approach toward jazz soloing may have started with Elliot Grennard, a Billboard writer who witnessed Charlie Parker's infamous recording session of July 1946. This was when Parker was experiencing heroin withdrawal that caused him to suffer involuntary muscle spasms, making him sound sick and adrift, particularly on the tune "Lover Man." Grennard wrote a fictionalized account of the "Lover Man" sessions for Harper's Magazine called "Sparrow's Last Jump"; it was published in 1948 and won the O. Henry Prize for short fiction. Ever since, "Lover Man" has had its morbid admirers. Ross Russell's book Bird Lives! — Russell was the producer whose label, Dial, put out the "Lover Man" sessions — created a fascination for Dean Benedetti, a Parker fan who took a tape recorder to club gigs and recorded only Parker's solos, not what happened before and after them.

In Philly, Coltrane played with the pianist Ray Bryant, among others; he went on a short tour with a band led by Joe Webb, which included the blues singer Big Maybelle. On his G.I. Bill benefits, he studied at the Granoff School, a local music school, specifically with Dennis Sandole. Sandole, who died in 2000 at the age of eighty-seven, was a swing-band guitar player who eventually let his own music take second place to his teaching. He focused on scales, as Coltrane would before long. He used exotic ones, and created his own, yet by all accounts, tailored his lessons to the individual student.

Coltrane worked hard, to the exclusion of any other interest. "I used to practice a lot with Trane," said his friend Jimmy Heath, who was then also an alto saxophonist before making his name on tenor. Everybody called him Jimmy. Coltrane called him Jim. Nobody else did. "He'd be in his shorts, we didn't have any air conditioning in those hot tenement houses; he lived with his mother. He'd be practicing, sweating, man. Practicing all day. Nobody practiced that much at that time that I knew. He was practicing all the things he eventually perfected. Lines, harmonic concepts that we were learning together, things we had transcribed."

Heath also remembers Coltrane practicing so hard that he made his reeds red with blood.

Coltrane lived not far from the Woodbine Club, at Twelfth and Master streets in North Philadelphia, an after-hours place where jam sessions would take place, with musicians including the saxophonists Heath, Jimmy Oliver, and Bill Barron, the trumpeter Johnny Coles, and Coltrane. He would work along Columbia Avenue (now called Cecil B. Moore Avenue) in the same part of town, where there was a club on nearly every block.

Heath had gotten his hands on a transcription of Charlie Parker's solo on "Don't Blame Me"; the transcription had been made by Howard Johnson, the lead alto saxophonist in Dizzy Gillespie's band. They studied from sources like that, and used the Philadelphia Public Library to listen to classical music, for "harmonic possibilities," Heath says. "We knew that Bird carried around the Firebird Suite score." They didn't play the Stravinsky score per se. "We were extracting the cadenzas," he remembered, "and turning them around to fit our own groove."

A few years later, Heath mentioned something about a play Willie Mays had made in a baseball game the day before. Coltrane replied, "Who's Willie Mays, Jim?"

Work came Coltrane's way. He joined up with King Kolax, a Chicago-based trumpet player, singer, and crowd-pleasing bandleader in the jump-blues style.

Jazz has its connector-pieces, more notable for who they hired and what happened around them than for their own musical accomplishments. In his early years, Coltrane played with many of them. King Kolax, by most accounts an outgoing and funny presence on stage, left no extraordinary artifacts; the most significant recordings he played on were with Billy Eckstine's big band in 1946, as part of a four-man trumpet section that included Miles Davis and Hobart Dotson. Kolax takes no solos. Bird, as a teenager, had played with Kolax's group in 1939 — a time when Kolax had one of the hottest bands in Chicago. A few years later, in 1941, Gene Ammons was the alto player in Kolax's band. Johnny Griffin saw that band at his grade-school graduation dance at the Parkway Ballroom in Chicago, emerged stunned, and thereupon resolved to play saxophone. Coltrane was the next soon-to-be-major player in line, touring with Kolax during the first few months of 1947.

Coltrane also gigged with his friend Jimmy Heath, who led his own big band in Philadelphia, a kind of third-string version of what the Gillespie band was playing ninety miles to the north. And then he played with Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson, a bandleader of a kind not dissimilar from Kolax: killingly dressed, singing, playing saxophone, entertaining.

Upon joining Vinson's band — it was for a long string of one-nighters in the winter of 1948 — 49 — Coltrane took up the tenor saxophone in earnest. Vinson wanted someone who could play like Bird over rhythm-and-blues tunes. Coltrane could, but the open spot was for tenor, not alto. He took the opportunity. And now that he was on a different instrument, Coltrane — a born student — began casting about for the great tenor player who could suggest avenues for him on tenor the way Bird did on alto.

At the time, among the major contenders was Lester Young, who had become famous playing lovely, light-gauge melodic lines on tenor saxophone with Count Basie. There was also Ben Webster, who played fat, sweet, rich notes on tenor, and could subtract pitched sound until all you heard was elusive hissing; he was a super-artful manipulator of timbre and ballad phrasing. Coltrane also admired Tab Smith, a master of pitch and tonal control, a swelling-romance tenor player who descended from Johnny Hodges.

And then there was Coleman Hawkins. Coltrane liked the arpeggios Hawkins played, the articulation of a whole scalepattern where for other musicians just a few notes would do. Hawkins seemed to have a more sweeping, kaleidoscopic vision of music than most of the other top soloists in jazz: instead of using a thin-nibbed pen to trace out melodies, he used a paint-roller. Resourcefully, he made all these notes, all these references to passing chords, sound virile and natural.

In the early 1960s, Eddie Vinson was asked about Coltrane. "Yeah, little ol' Coltrane used to be in my band. He never wanted to play. I used to have to play all night long. I'd ask him, 'Man, why don't you play?' He'd say, 'I just want to hear you play ...' That ol' boy was something. He changed his playing every six months almost." A character trait: Coltrane may have been diffident with others, but apparently not with himself.

Then Coltrane's break came. Dizzy Gillespie's piano player, James Forman, knew Coltrane from jobs around Philly; they were both members of the musicians' union. Forman recommended Coltrane to Gillespie, who asked both Heath and Coltrane to join his big band. The job began in late fall 1949.

Bebop, in the forties, was a new language of blues-based modernism. It came to be associated with fast tempos, asymmetrical melodic lines, and chord harmonies inspired by Stravinsky, Debussy, and Bartók. It was developed in New York in the early 1940s by Parker, Gillespie, and the musicians around them, and it naturally stole into popular big bands over time: this was simply what young musicians were playing. But in 1949, the very idea of a Dizzy Gillespie big band — and in the minds of anyone reading about jazz back then, that proposition equaled a bebop big band — was problematic. First, big bands were for dancers, and bebop tempos could be fast, and harder to dance to. Second, America was recovering from a wartime economy, which had already debilitated the great touring big bands through gas and rubber shortages and a rise in travel costs; the preeminence of these bands in the national musical culture was lessening. And the proof was in the music itself. Cropped, curling bop lines, tritone-heavy bop harmony, fast and spiky bop rhythm: they were all better executed by a fouror five-piece group than by an orchestra.

But Gillespie, who along with Charlie Parker had come to be synonymous with bebop as a movement, had an advantage in realizing a difficult proposition. He came from the Cab Calloway band of the early 1940s, which had popularized the image of strong, modern music and witty clowning; he had to do something with his show knowledge. More important, he was thinking about another big-band model: the Latin kind. He had learned about Latin music largely through his association with the Cuban trumpeter Mario Bavza, a section-mate in the Calloway group; in 1942 he had sat in with Machito's Afro-Cubans, and started learning ways to improvise jazz over the Cuban clave rhythm.

Gillespie's orchestra lasted from 1946 to 1950. He had graduated from the small labels of the first bebop experiments; RCA was recording him then. In 1947 the orchestra created "Manteca," one of the most important pieces of jazz ever — the starting place of modern Afro-Latin jazz. But by the time Coltrane joined, sharing with Heath the role of lead alto saxophone (the top voice of the alto saxophone section, playing written lines), the end was in sight. Bookings were shrinking. By the end of the decade the orchestra had been sized down to six or seven members.

Some of the radio broadcasts by the small group in 1951 survive on bootlegs, and these are the next significant recordings of Coltrane, after Oahu. Here and there you hear him on a solo feature, strong and true and improvising: he is not erased by the thundering of a big band, or relegated to the background on a singer-with-orchestra date. His growth has been remarkable, and why shouldn't it be — five years have passed, a long time for a young man. He has access to more notes, yet the logic of his playing is still jumbled, still chaotic. But what do we hear of the later, mature Coltrane in 1951? Bits and dots. And for the next four years, until he joined Miles Davis's band, there was only the refinement of a basic set of skills.

Coltrane seems not to have played any tenor saxophone with Gillespie's big band. But offstage, he was practicing the bigger horn assiduously, building on the work he had done with Vinson, using scale-book exercises by Czerny and Hanon, running various arpeggio and interval patterns, some of them jumping registers, through all the keys of Western music. They were meant for pianists, as finger-strengthening exercises; they weren't typically practiced by any kind of horn player.

By the time of the 1951 recordings, he had developed his own style, if a barely coherent one — one that mixed exotic scale patterns and rhythm-and-blues rhetoric, stubborn long tones, and the beginnings of a serious interest in the low and high registers.

The best solo on the 1951 bootleg recordings with Gillespie — there had not yet been any official studio recordings from this time featuring a Coltrane solo — is in Gillespie's "A Night in Tunisia," recorded on January 6.

We already know of Coltrane's connection to "A Night in Tunisia" from his quoting of its bridge section in the 1946 Oahu "Hot House." One can assume that it was a song he practiced on; he may have grown used to improvising over its seesaw motion between minor chords.

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Excerpted from Coltrane by Ben Ratliff. Copyright © 2007 Ben Ratliff. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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