CLASSICS THAT I HATE

Rating:


Boy, am I going to get in trouble for this review. Maybe I’m one of those philistines that just doesn’t get late Coltrane, even though I liked Sun Ship, which was recorded after Meditations. But I’ve got to say, I find Meditations (released on the Impulse label) difficult to sit through.

The first several minutes of the opening number, The Father And The Son And The Holy Ghost, seems designed to alienate. Pharoah Sanders sets up a keening alternation between the tonic and the fifth which seems to have no function other than perhaps a rhythmic one, but the problem with that interpretation is the entire tune is taken rubato. Coltrane starts by moving a simple melody through a cycle of 5ths, surrounded by cacophony. What else would you call it? Pharoah Sanders’ keening is recorded way out front, so that you can barely hear McCoy Tyner. Elvin Jones usually plays pulse anyway, but when you add a second drummer, especially one as busy as Rashied Ali, all you get is undifferentiated noise. Was Jimmy Garrison even playing? I couldn’t tell.

Eventually, Coltrane starts his solo, which is in the model of the ecstatic, intense grappling with his horn which is the sound of Coltrane searching for the infinite. He’s fine, but hard to appreciate with the amorphous whirlwind surging around him. Thank heaven Pharaoh Sanders drops out for a while.

But Sanders comes back with his own solo. Now, some saxophonists use honks, playing outside the register, slurring lines, and microtonal stuttering bleats as punctuation, but that’s Sanders’ entire style. It becomes wearying very quickly. This is free jazz at it’s most irritating. It’s basically unlistenable.

If Meditations is so bad, why am I telling about it? Well, for one thing, we’re talking about John Coltrane, a genius saxophonist who is one of the most influential musicians of the 20th Century, with dozens of great recordings to his credit. For another, Meditations is considered a controversial masterpiece.

I’m here to warn you away from it. Coltrane actually plays well on The Father And The Son And The Holy Ghost, but the conception of the tune is so impenetrable that the overall effect is like being forced to listen to the combination of an air raid siren, a jackhammer, and a pneumatic drill at close quarters. Simply put, it’s torture — over eighteen minutes worth.

Is the second selection (there are only two) any better? It certainly starts out being more gentle on the ears. Love begins with an unaccompanied bass solo by Jimmy Garrison. Maybe I’m just grouchy from listening to The Father And The Son And The Holy Ghost, but to me, Jimmy Garrison’s solo sounds like little more than a warmup exercise.

When Coltrane comes in, it seems like he’s going to be utilizing a similar compositional structure. He uses variations of the same phrase over and over, transposed into different keys. The problem, as before, is the conception of the band as a whole. Garrison’s bass and Tyner’s piano seem to be playing a different tune altogether. The drummers seem to actually be listening to Coltrane to some degree, attempting to shape the tune around his utterances of the key musical phrase, but that’s what you call a textbook example of damning with faint praise. Frankly, Love sounds like crap to me.

Which is funny because Dave Liebman obviously saw something in it. Liebman plays a version of Love on Homage to John Coltrane that in my opinion is way superior to this one. More sacrilege, I know.

As far as I’m concerned, Meditations is a wretched failure, probably the single worst release in John Coltrane’s entire catalog. Avoid unless you’re a masochist.

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