ALICE COLTRANE / “Leo”

MP3 06 Leo.mp3 (24.29 MB)

Not too many years from now, when I am sixty-nine, I want to be able to create art as hip as this.
alice coltrane 06.jpg  
Alice Coltrane is so deep that when she stood in New York and wiggled her toes, they felt seismic shocks on the other side of the world in China.

I saw her present her music once. It was like a hushed moment in church when everyone is silently praying, sincerely praying, and something comes over you, you close your eyes and water your cheeks with tears of thanks to the creator for being alive.
 
Instantly, even if you don’t particularly care for her music, nevertheless, instantly you know this is some other kind of stuff, you know Alice Coltrane is operating on a different plane from most folks.

There are two albums I cherish by Alice Coltrane. One is Journey In Satchidananda and the other is Transfiguration, a documentation of a April 16, 1978 concert in UCLA’s Schoenberg Hall. That concert featured a 36-minute version of John Coltrane’s late-period composition, “Leo.” Alice Coltrane played organ, Reggie Workman was on bass, and Roy Haynes was the drummer.

Other than her solo on “Ogunde” from Coltrane’s The Olatunji Concert: The Last Live Recording, which is so far out there you need to be a musical astronomer with a state-of-the-art telescope just to catch sight of that music, but other than that solo (which is light years ahead of any other piano solo she recorded) the Transfiguration version of “Leo” is the most intensely fiery of all of her recorded music.

It's mindblowing that the version of “Leo” from the 2006 UCLA concert ain’t too far behind the 1978 version, even though it occurred approximately twenty-eight years later. That’s a lot of water under the bridge to still be blazing so brightly.

An audience member recorded this and shared it on the internet, so the sound is far from great, but who cares. The line-up is Alice Coltrane on organ, her son, Ravi Coltrane on saxophone, Reggie Workman on bass, and Trevor Lawrence on drums. There are moments when folk start literally screaming and hollering.

This is not ecstasy of the flesh, but rather the much more profound pleasure of spirits elevating.

Many will find this music difficult to deal with. I ask you to listen to the whole track at least once. You can even let it play in the background while you check your email, but, please, hear it. At least once.

I don’t know if Alice Coltrane was consciously trying to recapture what she did almost thirty years earlier, but I do know that Reggie Workman blazes as a bass player and that Trevor Lawrence, who was a last minute substitute, turns in a monster solo.
alice coltrane 09.jpg 
I do know that this is the most “Trane-like” solo that Ravi has recorded, even though Ravi never loses his own identity. (You won’t mistake him for his father or for Pharoah or for any of the other horn men of that period.) I do know that Alice pulls out all the stops on her organ and becomes a human flame thrower shooting off incendiary keyboard runs.
reggie workman 02.jpg  
Both bassist Reggie Workman, who was a major cohort of John Coltrane, and Alice Coltrane were in their late sixties when this was recorded. Late sixties. Undoubtedly they prove that it’s never too late.

Ready or not, like it or not, this is some music every human needs to experience at least once in life.

—Kalamu ya Salaam



         A little 'out-ness'       

Above, Kalamu mentions that many people will find this music “difficult to deal with.” Go ahead and include me in that number. Late-period Trane—whether it's directly from the original Impulse albums or, as in this case, some of the original players recreating it—is notoriously hard to listen to for all but the must dedicated Trane fanatics. It's not just the wildness of the playing and the almost completely improvised nature of the song structure, it's also the length. I dig a little 'out-ness' here and there, but twenty minutes of it without a break? That's a little rough. 

I do like Alice's style though. She has a very odd way of playing. Clusters of notes followed by brief silences and then more clusters. She plays like some people, usually highly-educated people, talk: in rapid bursts of phrases. But what is that instrument? Kalamu says it's an organ, and I assume he's correct, but it almost sounds like a stringed instrument. It sounds like there's a vibrating quality to the notes that you don't usually hear in a keyboard. And, right near the end of her solo, Alice starts doing something to bend the notes. How the hell can you do that with an organ?

—Mtume ya Salaam

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 21st, 2007 at 4:47 am and is filed under Contemporary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.


2 Responses to “ALICE COLTRANE / “Leo””

Kayvon Says:
January 21st, 2007 at 7:35 pm

Just listening to Leo, it’s pretty different, you don’t often hear people play keyboards like that, or when you do they’re nowhere near the technical level that Alice was at.

It sounds like she’s using a monophonic synthesizer voice, something a bit like a muted ethnic woodwind sound. Those pitch bends she’s doing seem to be fairly linear instead of accenting blue pitches or other specific microtonal intervals.

You can actually pitch bend some organs, with Hammond B3s you can press the start/run switches to produce upwards/downwards pitch bends and I have a Yamaha Electone (I’ve seen a picture of Alice Coltrane sat at the same one) that has a footswitch capable of adding downwards bends.

Thanks again for the site,

Pete.


Tracey Lewis Says:
February 1st, 2007 at 7:57 pm

God has truly blessed us with the creative life of Alice Coltrane. I believe that she will sorely be missed in her passing into the next stratosphere, wherever that place is, along with her late husband, John. I had the fortune of seeing the DVD of Branford Marsalis’ live concert in honor of the Love Supreme release which included Mr. Marsalis interviewing Ms. Coltrane. There, if I didn’t know better, I could see a glowing energy radiating from her. She certainly came across as being in total peace with her surroundings. I came away from the interview mesmerized by her beauty, sanctity, self assuredness (as if she knew something about life that we all needed to know but hadn’t quite internalized yet), and in her late husband’s words, love supreme. I pray that she will never be forgotten by the masses, and that she will forever have her name uttered on the lips of those in successive generations, which is the height of immortality. She deserves nothing less for her frankness toward life and openness to God’s universal plan for us all. Thank you, Alice, for sharing the God spirit in you with us without limitation.


Leave a Reply



| top |