The Book Cooks Living Space: John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Free Jazz, From Analog to Digital
“Escape Velocity” (the John Coltrane Quartet, 1965) [T]he world of the open can be inhabited precisely because, wherever life is going on, the interfacial separation of earth and sky gives way to mutual permeability and binding ... earth and sky, far from being confined to their mutual domains by the hard surface of the ground, continually infiltrate one another. Thus the ground is not, in truth, a coherent surface at all but a zone in which the air and moisture of the sky combine with substances whose source lies in the earth in an ongoing constitution and dissolution of living things.[i] (James Ingold) Although “Living Space” is notable (along with earlier pieces like “Countdown,” “Fifth House” and “Satellite”) as one of the first explicitly cosmological references in Coltrane’s work, Isaac Asimov’s idea of “dimensional portals” has more than mere thematic resonance with the music the quartet recorded on June 16th. To conclude the session, they dove confidently into the choppy waters of an untitled free meter piece (numbered 90320 on the Impulse session log) that, while rarely mentioned in studies of Coltrane’s music, is equal in intensity to the previous week’s impassioned performances of “Transition” and “Suite” while simultaneously representing a definitive turning point.[ii] “Untitled 90320” is significant as the quartet’s first documented attempt at a “fast free rhythm” performance and one that also demonstrates, by its passionate performance, that the quartet is now in the proverbial “zone.” Similarly to “Prayer and Meditation” from the previous week’s session and “One Down, One Up,” the melodic point of departure here might be heard as a major 7 augmented motive (Gb-Ab-D-F), which Coltrane elaborates into a complex, chromatic improvisation as he accelerates and decelerates his lines and shapes, pulling the entire ensemble through regions of varying density while swinging back and forth across tonic and altered V7 sonorities, the floating sensation of the chromatic and symmetric harmonies finally spiraling outward to transform the entire ensemble’s rhythmic structure. Considering that the rubato sections had generally been used in Coltrane’s music to introduce and conclude tunes, we might say that “Untitled 90320” turns the tune “inside out,” so to speak – the rubato “exterior” has been remade as the “interior,” then elaborated with an intensity that ultimately makes the very distinction meaningless. At the beginning of Coltrane’s opening solo, we can hear the players tentatively feeling each other out, while a clear centrifugal force can be felt binding them together by the solo’s climax (~ 3:48 – 4:09). A reflection of his expansive harmonic imagination and staggering technique, it is Coltrane’s bebop-derived ability to spray alternately continuous and fragmented streams of lines, shapes, patterns that unites the different levels of activity and provides the “binding element” within the free meter environment. Meanwhile, modes of expanded, free meter counterpoint can be heard within the interwoven punctuations of Tyner and Garrison. Like pylons evenly-spaced across the open sea, Tyner’s percussive punctuations – many passages of which are rhythmically regular and almost metered – simultaneously create tension against the free meter environment while giving form and shape to it. Garrison, meanwhile, “strolls” through his own line which like Tyner contains a substantial amount of rhythmic regularity at times, but is also variable in rate and almost completely displaced from the other instrumentalists’ rhythmic trajectories. The theme of “dimensional portals” becomes particularly relevant in relation to Elvin Jones, who has finally moved into a free meter space, of a kind. Here, he orchestrates a collagist succession of tempo fragments, abruptly alternating between fragments of fast, medium, and slow swing, each of which can be considered a portal to a different experience of musical velocity. These fragments can also be likened to slopes of varying inclinations or gradients that create varying degrees of resistance for the other musicians to improvise against. Jones’ reluctance to completely embrace free meter playing at this juncture – a stubborn compromise between the old and the new – makes it easier to hear his playing as a collage of deformed swing rhythms. For his part, Coltrane is working against the shifting slopes of Jones’ “tempo fragments” like a surfer against the waves or a boxer working the edge of a continually tilting ring, using dense, speech-like cadences to simultaneously push back against and embroider the edges of the fragmented rhythmic planes Jones throws at him. Fred Scharmen, discussing the experimental architecture of Claude Parent and Paul Virilio, speculated on the effect of tilted surfaces for our experience of space in his essay “Folding Space:” [A]rchitectural work between 1963 and 1969 ... demonstrated that offering tilted surfaces for human use and existence opened up new possibilities for the relationships between bodies and space. This move linked spaces that were otherwise disconnected, but it also hinted that people could occupy, however uneasily, the changing surface of difference itself.[iii] Scharmen’s piece was included in a volume of architectural writings on outer-space habitats and as such, “the changing surface of difference ...” is a poetic evocation of the utility of tilted surfaces in expanding the scale of our spatial awareness. Artists such as Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, Sun Ra, Steve Lacy and Paul Bley were working their various ways out of meter but “Untitled (90320)” suggests that in the case of the Coltrane quartet, it was the dynamic tension generated by the leader’s desire for complete rhythmic freedom and Jones’ desire to remain within the framework of metered playing that was leveraging their move into free meter playing. The ethnomusicologists Richard Widdess and Ritwik Sanyal have pondered the applicability of the concept of “pulse” to the non-metered alap sections of Hindustani classical and “light” classical genres such as khyal, dhrupad, and thumri.[iv] “Pulse” in this context is something that typically manifests in two ways: it is on one hand a continuous point of rhythmic reference, albeit one that can be accelerated or decelerated at will by the improvising vocalist or instrumentalist. “Pulse” can also refer to momentarily stable points of rhythmic reference that underlay cadential passages of singing or improvisation and that demarcate the overall song form. In both cases, the concept is flexible, malleable and momentary, and can be elegantly applied to both Coltrane’s streams of evenly-spaced eighth and sixteenth notes, Tyner and Garrison’s layers of disjunct punctuation, and Jones’ “tempo fragments.” With meter deformed/deconstructed in this way, the experience of time in “90320” gives the impression of “accelerating” and “decelerating” in relation to passages of greater and lesser ensemble density/complexity. This new rhythmic geometry – which had previously been a mere fluid superstructure within the quartet’s environment of metered swing – has now erupted to constitute a rhythmic order of its own. “Untitled (90320),” then, is an example of these musicians not only filling space, but continually reshaping space. Ultimately, of course, the structure of “Untitled (90320)” is nothing more than a free-meter elaboration of the conversational dynamic that has shaped jazz improvisation from its earliest days. On a more profound level, however, it is a radical distortion/fragmentation/expansion of the Africanist grid, and a profound turning point in the evolution of Coltrane’s music. We might also telescope out to get a different perspective on the quartet’s inner working. The architect Greg Lynn uses the term “orbital stability” to describe the way a group of elements can hold each other in dynamic balance despite the absence of an “... unchanging constant force of a ground point,” “ground point” translating into jazz rhythm as any cyclical meter with clearly-stated strong and weak beats: Since the time of Sir Isaac Newton, gravity has been accepted as the mutual relative attraction of masses in space. Given a constant mass, stability is achieved through orbits rather than stasis. This distinction between stasis and orbital or dynamic stability is important. In the case of a single, simple gravity, stasis is the ordering system through the unchanging constant force of a ground point. In the case of a more complex concept of gravity, mutual attraction generates motion; stability is the ordering of motion into rhythmic phases. In the simple static model of gravity, motion is eliminated at the beginning. In the complex, stable model of gravity, motion is an ordering principle.[v] Lynn’s distinction between “stasis” and “stability” helps illuminate the way musicians hang together in metrically-free space in a state of ensemble equilibrium, with Fred Scharoun’s “changing surface of difference” imbuing that space with a feeling of gravitational tension and release (i.e. “swing”). With their leader probing continuously-morphing configurations of space with lyrical and mathematical gestures, it was on “Untitled (90320)” that the Coltrane quartet arguably achieved “escape velocity.”
“Found” (the Miles Davis “Lost Quintet,” 1969) After we finished In A Silent Way, I took the band out on the road; Wayne, Dave, Chick and Jack were now my working band. Man, I wish this band had been recorded live because it was really a bad motherfucker. I think Chick Corea and a few other people recorded some of our performances live, but Columbia missed out on the whole fucking thing.[vi] (Miles Davis) The audience at Duffy’s Backstage Tavern in Rochester must have been mildly shocked at the sound of the new Miles Davis Quintet. Miles and Wayne Shorter had traveled many musical miles together by this point, but this first documented gig made it clear that, from its very beginning, the new quintet had a sound and identity that was very distinct from the one that existed just a few months earlier. The percussive, distorted sound of Corea’s electric piano, very different from Herbie Hancock’s Impressionist sensibility, was a major part of the quintet’s sound, strongly defining its colors, textures and spatial contours. Corea’s playing reflected the influences of pianists such as Horace Silver, Red Garland, Wynton Kelly and Bud Powell, weighted with a percussive touch that would be perfectly suited to the textural sensibility of this band, while his background in Latin music (gained while working with Latin jazz luminaries such as Mongo Santamaria and Willie Bobo) lent a funky, syncopated angle to his phrasing that he very effectively transposed into free meter space. Corea had obviously overcome any resistance to the electric piano by this point, as well as any idea of it being incompatible with free improvisation. Not only was he playing it with the quintet, he was also playing it on some of his own albums, and he would soon begin tweaking the instrument’s sound with sound processing devices such as a ring modulator. The resulting sound seemed to owe as much to Karlheinz Stockhausen’s ring-modulated piano pieces like Mantra and to Cecil Taylor’s improvisations as they did to his earlier influences of Silver, Powell, and Kelly. Like Corea, Dave Holland could move effortlessly between swing playing, free playing, and the new riff-based material that Miles had begun working into the set list. His playing juxtaposed a solid command of the bottom with an adventurous, melodic upper register that recalled Charles Mingus and Scott La Faro. Holland provided the ideal counterpoint between Corea and Jack DeJohnette, whose intense, polyrhythmic style in this band can be compared to Elvin Jones in the sense that it kept the quintet in constant, swirling motion – whether in meter or free meter. DeJohnette’s free jazz credentials were solid. Not only had he developed out of Chicago’s AACM collective, but he had also been one of the local musicians to sit in with John Coltrane several times during the saxophonist’s March, 1966 run at Chicago’s Plugged Nickel, and this experience prepared him for the increasingly free trajectory he would take with Miles: “I worked with Coltrane in Chicago at the Plugged Nickel, with Rashied [Ali], us playing next to each other. He was really physically fit to do that gig, he’d built up stamina to do that. And it wore me out every night, playing with Trane! But I learned a lot about stamina, doing that gig with Rashied. It really helped me a lot in terms of influencing the way I play free drums, a looser way of playing.”[vii] But DeJohnette wasn’t only bringing the experimentalism of the AACM; he was also bringing the populist groove of his previous employer, the saxophonist Charles Lloyd who had recorded a string of best-selling albums that brought jazz into dialogue with the rock and world music influences of the counter-culture. Lloyd’s album Love In, for example, had been recorded live at the Fillmore West in 1967.[viii] Finally, DeJohnette had an ear cocked toward the abandon of jazz-influenced rock drummers such as The Who’s Keith Moon, Cream’s Ginger Baker and especially, Jimi Hendrix’s drummer Mitch Mitchell for whom he had high words of praise: “I thought Mitch was the unsung hero of [Hendrix’s band]. Mitch was great; he could really play. He never really got the credit he was due ...”[ix] As the band embraced the freedoms of the avant-garde and the counter-culture, Wayne Shorter adventurously responded to and shaped those freedoms on his own, idiosyncratic terms, pushing his saxophone playing over the border into New Thing territory with solos that referenced late Coltrane, Sanders and Ayler, while quoting liberally from his recent albums such as Super Nova, Odyssey of Iska and Moto Grosso Feio in his solos. Even more surprisingly, this free-wheeling approach to the music included Miles, whose well-known antipathy toward the avant-garde would seem to have inclined him, as bandleader, to tighten the reins on these younger players. But Miles was gushing enthusiastically about the band and lamenting the fact that, in 1969’s rush of activity, a proposed live album (provisionally titled Live at the Village Vanguard and the Spectrum) was never completed.[x] The set lists from two performances at Duffy’s (documented sometime between February 25th and March 2nd, 1969 by an unidentified recorder) seem fairly conservative at first glance, comprised mostly of familiar tunes stretching back through the 1960s into the late 1950s – including “Gingerbread Boy,” “Green Dolphin Street” and “So What” – alongside tunes recorded by the Second Quintet that had never been performed live by that band, such as “Nefertiti” and “Paraphernalia.” Like the Plugged Nickel recordings of 1965, however, these recordings depict Miles once again at the helm of a band that was about to radically rewrite the rules and procedures of his music, regardless of the repertoire. This quintet’s rhythmic sense, in particular, was as flexible as a rubber band – they swung as hard as any band had ever swung, but frequently pushed that swing into all kinds of unusual rhythmic shapes and spaces. They swung so hard and with such turbulent, polyrhythmic invention, in fact, that it was sometimes difficult to tell whether or not they were actually playing time. Miles alluded to this in a Japanese interview that summer. “We play four tempos at once, and you can hear a tempo but you also can hear another one within that. And you can either play on that one or that one.”[xi] For the most part, the quintet did actually remain within the bounds of metered swing at this early stage, but their dizzyingly fast tempos often resulted in the kind of surreal experience of the beat that Larry Kart described: Outside of Charlie Parker’s best units, I don’t think there’s ever been a group so at ease at up tempos as Miles Davis’ current quintet. Their relaxation at top speed enables them to move at will from the “hotness” up-tempo playing usually implies to a serene lyricism in the midst of turmoil ... This “inside-out” quality arises from the nature of human hearing, since, at a certain point, musical speed becomes slow motion or stillness (in the same way the eye reacts to a stroboscope) ... They generally stay right on the edge, and, when the rhythm does seem ready to spin endlessly like a Tibetan prayer wheel, one prodding note from Davis or Shorter is enough to send them hurtling into “our” time world, where speed means forward motion.[xii] Kart’s comments, echoing Alan Silva’s earlier observations about the innovations of Sunny Murray, are an accurate description of the rhythmic world that the quintet generated. If the Second Quintet had moved like magic between discrete tempii, the new quintet – even at this early stage – took things a step further, sometimes stacking different tempii, and at other times moving in and out of free-meter spaces with a deftness that made them seem like magicians of morphing structure. On the Duffy’s recordings, some of these liquid moments might be heard as “bracketing devices” – subtle-but-dramatic shifts between songs – or tempo changes hinted at or executed. Yet others exist as moments of repose when the band is collectively “exhaling” after a particularly intense passage, in a way that causes them to relax out of meter. Like the rhythmic ebb and flow of the Coltrane quartet’s performance of “Acknowledgement” at Antibes, what is remarkable here is the amount of dynamic tension that these juxtapositions of meter and free meter generate within the overall song form. And as with Coltrane, it was the quintet’s mastery of the more traditional conceptions of time that enabled discerning listeners to follow them through this dynamic of musical tension and release in the same way viewers might follow the trajectory of a given painter’s work across a trajectory from representational painting to full abstraction and back. Overall, the exhilarating experience of time when listening to this quintet results from the absolute confidence of the band’s collective rhythmic compass, which gives them an extraordinary ability to mold the music in plastic terms. Jack DeJohnette himself said it best when he explained “... We were playing the music as shapes, not as time. That kind of ebb and flow playing was a way of allowing the music to breathe.”[xiii] Taking its cue from the last days of the Second Quintet, the Lost Quintet played its music in freely-associative, uninterrupted suites, with Miles cueing the next tune by playing a fragment of its theme. The band would then take off on the next tune without pause, regardless of whether it was in a different key, tempo or time signature. It was a reflection of their awareness of the ground they were breaking, and Miles’ time spent with sonic innovators such as Jimi Hendrix, that Miles had bought a sound system for the band’s club dates, as De Johnette remembered: “Miles bought a sound system which the band took around. Because he wanted to make sure everybody heard the details of what was going on. So we had this portable sound system that we carried around in a Volkswagen bus. And sometimes Dave would drive it to gigs and set it up. It was just two speakers – one on each side – and then there was a head and we would just set it up. So everybody was hearing the detail ...” (one wonders to what extent a personalized sound system would have made a difference in the presentation and reception of John Coltrane’s later music).[xiv] As a result of this heightened sonic clarity, many of the reviews of the new quintet began to narrate not a progression of songs, but a continuous suite of magically changing moods and structures: “Miles and his alter ego, Wayne Shorter, are gravitating ever closer to a free Nirvana, basing their improvisations on arbitrary scales and/or modes, rendering all conventional frames of reference obsolete. Tempos change and moods shift almost subliminally. The rhythm section follows with an uncanny instinct ...”[xv] Even the reviews were becoming more impressionistic, colorful and effusive. The structural complexity of the Duffy’s recordings is intensified by the anomalies of the crude audience recording, which alternately obscure or clarify the details of the music. This was in all likelihood a monaural recording originally made on someone’s personal cassette recorder, but after many generations of duplication there are now notable differences between the left and right sides of the sound space. And while there is substantial bass presence in the 100-500hz range, a substantial chunk of frequencies are missing between 1000 and 3000hz. Thus, while all of the instruments can be heard, they are audible to differing extents, due to these anomalies. Miles and Shorter are fairly audible for most of the recording, and Corea’s Rhodes is likely more prominent on the recording than it actually sounded in the venue – the most prominent instrument on the recording, in fact. His percussive touch, amplified by the distortion of the recording, occasionally makes the instrument sound at times like a Hammond B-3 organ in a neighborhood organ trio. With the sizzling sound of DeJohnette’s over-saturated ride cymbal oscillating across the soundscape due to excessive compression and phase cancellation issues, the recording as a whole presents a humid, in-your-face sound portrait that intensifies the overall sound of the band. And given the quintet’s tense muscularity, this soundscape is also a very valuable portrait of a time when jazz bands came to burn, sublimating the physicality of the urban black experience into musical sound. Recorded on the cusp of the age of jazz-rock fusion in early 1969, it is also an instructive showcase for the glorious heritage of bebop drumming and specifically, the incredible amount of ensemble gravity that a mere ride cymbal can command on its own, with De Johnette holding the entire ensemble together and driving them with much less amount of low-end information that would be expected today. This mechanically-distorted document of the Lost Quintet, ironically set in the heart of America’s rust belt in 1969, is a funky, textured excursion through post-industrial aesthetics, with the sound of a semi-electric jazz quintet projected through the aesthetics of decayed magnetic tape. In the visual sphere, the sound world of this recording might provide perfect accompaniment to some of the images of the Japanese street photographer Daido Moriyama, images that were also generated during a late 1960s period of social unrest in postwar Japan. Moriyama’s rough, heavily textured, sensual excursions burn with a haphazard energy through Tokyo’s industrial districts such as Shinjuku.[xvi] Across traffic intersections, railroad and subway platforms, alleyways, rooftops, mirror reflections, and building facades, humans are often reduced to shadowed, spectral presences while over- or under-exposed light, textures, objects, and spaces take center stage. Like Francis Wolff’s cover of Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers’ 1959 At the Jazz Corner of the World but pushed a few aggressive steps further into the realm of abstraction, Moriyama’s fevered black & white narratives transform daytime into a blinding haze of light, and nighttime into a blurred play of animate and inanimate phantoms, defined by stark contrasts of black & white, with industrial grey as the chromatic solvent: “[Cities] are alive with a breakneck momentum, with a vitality like an incredible creature or monster, Moriyama told Bree Drucker in 2017. “[M]y photographs are all about the gray, they’re gray tones.”[xvii] Photographic collections such as Shashin Yo Sayonara (Farewell to Photography) are dramatic problemetizations of photography as a medium of realist documentary, with images cropped and distorted until familiar sights are reduced to the most abstract, indeterminate gestures.[xviii] Moriyama discussed his photographic process in ways that are directly resonant with the alter-archives of the Lost Quintet and its distressed textures of industrially-produced sound: “When I see something discarded, be it mine or someone else’s, on the darkroom floor or elsewhere in the world, and discern a certain reality or actuality in it, for me that is photography. Discarded things are beautiful. They’re emotional.”[xix] Halfway through Corea’s solo on “No Blues” in Rochester, the rhythm section begins to float away from hard swinging into a free meter space. Miles had been selectively toying with Don Cherry-isms on the trumpet, but now Corea, Holland and DeJohnette were forging an entirely new environment around him. And while Miles had recently prodded Corea toward the Fender Rhodes, the pianist was now channeling Bud Powell’s percussive touch to make the instrument sound as if he were transmitting Morse code instead of playing bebop lines. So as the rhythm section ventured deeper and deeper into the free zone (with Shorter a willing participant), Miles now had no choice but to go with their flow. Even without LSD and light shows, these young musicians were making Coltrane’s free jazz sound like the new, psychedelic sounds coming out of the Fillmore. Run tell that.
Notes: i. Ingold paraphrasing psychologist James Gibson in the essay “Bringing Things to Life: Material Flux and Creative Entanglements” from Finke & Weltzien, eds. (2017). State of Flux: Aesthetics of Fluid Materials. Berlin: Reimer)
© 2024 Michael E. Veal
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