New Alice Coltrane & Yusef Lateef From the Vault
New Alice Coltrane & Yusef Lateef From the Vault
Reviewing two essential new releases
Welcome music lovers to a new edition of ‘Listening Sessions’!
This time around, I’m taking a look at two new releases of essential music from the early seventies. Alice Coltrane’s The Carnegie Hall Concert was issued a few weeks ago and is simply breathtaking—surely to be one of the major archival releases of this year. Yusef Lateef’s Atlantis Lullaby - The Concert from Avignon will be released on vinyl for Record Store Day (April 20) and on CD six days later, and is a fascinating snapshot of Lateef with his working group of 1972: pianist Kenny Barron, bassist Bob Cunningham and drummer Albert “Tootie” Heath.
I hope you enjoy the essay and will share your thoughts as well.
The next time I will be in touch (April 30) will be the end of ‘Listening Sessions’’ modified schedule of a new essay every two weeks. From May until the summer, it will be business as usual with me being in touch every 10 days.
Until next time, may good listening be with you all!
If you’re not yet a subscriber of ‘Listening Sessions,’ I hope you'll click the button below to subscribe and get each edition delivered straight to your inbox. I publish a long-form essay on music three times a month, every 10 days or so.
If you are a subscriber, please share ‘Listening Sessions’ with any music fans in your orbit.
There is a strand of jazz that burrows inward. It permits the noise of everyday life to become just that: noise, something to be noticed but not acted upon, relegated to background scenery while in the foreground the breath, the undulating cycle of inhaling and exhaling, becomes front and centre. The breath is the foundation of meditation, mindfulness, Buddhism and self-care. It can bring forth stillness, nirvana, colours if your eyes are closed and your mood is just right, and inner peace. At least that’s how I feel when listening to the first disc of the just-released The Carnegie Hall Concert by Alice Coltrane from the evening of February 21, 1971.
Totaling just under 30 minutes of music, it includes extended performances of the opening tracks of Coltrane’s just-then-released Journey to Satchidananda: the title track and ‘Shiva-Loka.’ Satchidananda was Swami Satchidananda, an important spiritual force in Coltrane’s life in the years after the passing of her husband, John Coltrane. The concert at Carnegie Hall was a benefit for Satchidananda’s Integral Yoga Institute in Greenwich Village and was organized by impresario Sid Bernstein.
The bill was emblematic of the spirit of cross-pollination that was still going strong in the early seventies. Appearing alongside Coltrane were Laura Nyro, who opened the show, and the Rascals, by then only Felix Cavaliere and Dino Danelli remained from the original lineup, closing. Despite the outward eclecticism of sandwiching Coltrane in between two acts that, their proclivity for jazz notwithstanding, may be seen as utterly incongruous, there were substantial connections between the three. Coltrane recorded with both Nyro and the Rascals. Coltrane, Nyro and Cavaliere all sought spiritual guidance from Swami Satchidananda. They all pilgrimaged with him to Sri Lanka (then Ceylon).
Nyro’s set was a short one—approximately 20 minutes—just her on the piano. Her shows in the early seventies were hushed affairs with the quiet only broken by rapturous cries of devotion from the crowd. It was the kind of ambience that served as sufficient preparation as Coltrane and the group she assembled for the concert took the stage.
The core group comprised seven stalwarts of the jazz avant-garde: tenor saxophonist Pharoah Sanders and bassist Jimmy Garrison were long-time associates of Coltrane as was bassist Cecil McBee. Tenor saxophonist Archie Shepp, and drummers Ed Blackwell and Clifford Jarvis rounded out the all-star lineup along with two devotees of Swami Satchidananda: Tulsi Reynolds who played tambura and Kumar Kramer who played harmonium.
As EchoLocator’s Tom Moon astutely noted about the music Coltrane and group played, it was rooted in the vamp, the opening two numbers especially. ‘Journey to Satchidananda’ is an invocation, a gradually invitation to let the listener in. The first 95 seconds are weightless with Reynolds and Kramer establishing a drone, and Garrison and McBee then following with the bassline that will cycle for the next thirteen-and-a-half minutes; its sway and cadence approximating the act of breathing. Blackwell and Jarvis fall in a half-minute later and it’s another half-minute before Coltrane layers on top her shimmering, sacred harp.
Like Hindustani music, this is music that is centered around what happens while it is being heard—it takes the time that is required, and so for the next two-and-a-half minutes, the vamp cycles on. Shepp then floats in on soprano, entirely of the mood around him on the Hall stage. Eventually, Sanders joins in on flute and the two play, in parallel, hazy phrases of affirmation which, as the performance as a whole will do as well, gradually drift away.
Everyone then drifts back for ‘Shiva-Loka.’ Here, the opening elevates the spirituality which, once its vamp starts, quickly leads to solos by Sanders and Shepp, both on soprano. The phrases occasionally erupt in intensity but both players quickly return to holding their fire. Cavaliere is quoted in Lauren Du Graf’s liner notes as saying, “[The audience was] was in bliss. I mean, seriously. The spirit of that event took hold from the beginning. There was no doubt. They were all devotees or interested people in the higher forms of consciousness.”
That feeling transcends the fifty-three years between the night the music was created on the Carnegie Hall stage and whatever night one has a chance to listen to it. The static nature of both performances induces what Cavaliere sensed even more strongly—arguably more so than anything I’ve heard in a long time. The firmly established expectation of what will transpire—the indomitable vamp—doesn’t equate with monotony but with calmness. To reduce it to a safety or comfort zone is to damn with faint praise. It is, more accurately and more promisingly, a portal to get just a little closer to the ultimate answers.
It’s a kind of a shorthand to describe the music of Alice Coltrane but it obscures the opposite end of its transcendence, principally through her work in her late husband’s final band with Sanders, Garrison and drummer Rashied Ali. I encountered that group early in my jazz education. After being knocked out by Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue (still the greatest initiation into jazz we have), my next immersion into the music was all four hours of John Coltrane’s final working group live in Japan from the summer of 1966. Each of the recording’s six performances (to give you a sense of their herculean length, ’My Favourite Things’ here goes for 57 minutes) was played, one per week, on legendary Toronto disc jockey Ted O’Reilly’s Saturday evening program on CJRT (now JAZZ.FM91) in the winter of 1994. The music sounded nothing like the cool, placid Kind of Blue. Instead, it was energy music with an amorphous pulse devoid of just about anything to which the jazz novice could cling.
Ali’s drums seemed to respond moment to moment to the other players. John Coltrane played like he was speaking in tongues at a Pentecostal revival. Sanders, on the other hand, sounded like he was possessed. Alice Coltrane was serene amid the seeming madness and Garrison could scarcely be heard. To these virgin jazz ears, it all sounded utterly Satanic, especially a 38-minute version of ‘Afro-Blue.’ Only the aforementioned workout on ‘My Favourite Things’ had something, if only for a fleeting moment here and there, that seemed intelligible. It’s music that I have yet to revisit (to rob myself of the shattering impact of that first listen seems almost sacrilegious to me) even as I know now it was heaven, not hell, to which the music was reaching. The other half of Alice Coltrane’s Carnegie Hall concert tries to reach it too.
First up is ‘Africa,’ a John Coltrane composition from 1961. The excitement here comes from the band balancing on the edge, trying to maintain the contours of the vamp—the chiming bassline and the polyrhythms that Elvin Jones laid down for the original studio recording. The effect is mostly explosive as everyone gets a chance to solo (Reynolds and Kumar sit out as they do on the following number). Particularly noteworthy is a chance to hear Garrison’s flamenco style on the bass and the fusion of Afro-Cuban and Africa rhythms when Blackwell and Jarvis improvise as well as the short gospel interlude before Sanders and Shepp returns.
‘Leo,’ a John Coltrane theme initially recorded as ‘The Father, The Son and the Holy Ghost’ for his mighty Meditations, throws off all the restraints. It’s 21-minutes long but feels compact. Shepp and Sanders’ joint solo is short but packs a whole lot of heat with Shepp gruff and phrenetic, and Sanders in full overdrive. Alice Coltrane’s improvisation on piano brings a sense of calm with her left hand often comping like McCoy Tyner and her right hand spinning out lines that dart up and down the keyboard. Blackwell and Jarvis’ joint solo is astonishing in the relentlessness of its syncopated beat. When the performance ends, the audience erupts. One can only wonder how the Rascals managed to follow such an incendiary performance. One those there can answer how. What is clear is that The Carnegie Hall Concert is a major archival release and utterly essential.
These days, the jazz listener is blessed with a steady stream of such releases. One person we can thank for this—perhaps the individual we should thank the most—is producer Zev Feldman. On Record Store Day this year (April 20), there are an astonishing 10 recordings coming our way thanks to his dogged persistence and dedication to bringing newly unearthed or previously unauthorized relics of jazz’s past to light. One is a 1972 concert by reedman Yusef Lateef.
Like Alice Coltrane, Lateef was a musician of the interior, a meditative, probing and spiritual player. He could also be as earthy as he was ethereal. He could play a blues on tenor in the barroom style of Illinois Jacquet or Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis and then turn on a dime to offer a modal snake-charmer on the flute or oboe.
Lateef’s artistry spanned wide. A good example of Lateef’s expansiveness can be found through the two years he spent in the early sixties in Cannonball Adderley’s band. He could tongue a gutbucket solo on Nat Adderley’s ‘Work Song,’ uncoil a blissed-out statement on Cannonball’s ‘Primitivo’ and cost along with maximum hipness on Nat’s ‘Jive Samba.’ His own contributions to the group’s book were often audacious. There was the in-the-moment ‘Syn-Anthesia,’ the unrelenting rush of ‘P. Bouk’ and the exalted modalism of ‘Brother John.’ It’s no surprise that after Lateef left the band, not only did Cannonball replace him with Charles Lloyd, another player plugged into the mind, but after Lloyd left, Cannonball's music would be forever altered. There is some sort of through line between something like ‘Brother John’ and pianist Joe Zawinul’s early jazz-rock triumph ‘74 Miles Away.’
Atlantis Lullaby - The Concert from Avignon finds Lateef with his working group at the time: pianist Kenny Barron, bassist Bob Cunningham and drummer Albert “Tootie” Heath (RIP). Portions of the show, from Cloître des Célestines in Avignon, France on July 19, 1972., have been available as a bootleg. Using the source tape of the show from Paris’ INA: Institut national de l'audiovisuel, the complete show is now being presented in the kind of comprehensive package that marks a Feldman production.
As mentioned, a Lateef recording is an exercise in eclecticism. Atlantis Lullaby may provide a narrower range of Lateef’s artistry than on such classic recordings as Eastern Sounds and Psychicemotus (in particular, that his oboe playing isn’t featured nags just a bit), but it still never sits in one particular feeling for long. Barron’s ‘A Flower,’ a duet between the pianist and Lateef on flute, is ample consolation with its melding of Erik Satie and Chick Corea as is Heath’s ‘Lowland Lullaby,’ a duet between the other members of the band with the drummer on Indian flute.
The concert opener, ‘Inside Atlantis,’ is knotty post-bop and classic tension-and-release. ‘Eboness’ mines the same terrain with the added bonus of an extended solo by Cunningham. Lateef could dig deep into a ballad, probing and teasing out its harmonic framework. The melody of ‘I’m Getting Sentimental Over You’ is never explicitly stated here but the languid improvisation offered is an interesting and mellow treatment of a standard that has not suffered from overexposure.
These five performances form the backbone of the recording, evidence of the work-a-day repertoire of an ongoing unit. Surrounding them are two showpieces. ‘Yusef’s Mood,’ which dates back to Lateef’s debut on Savoy in 1957, is a flag-waving twelve bar. Barron solos first and unleashes chorus after chorus of barrel-house blues. He keeps at it for over 10 minutes, never relenting, clearly inspired and content to keep hammering away in full gospel shout for as long as is needed. Keep your ears peeled afterwards for a hair-raising moment 15 minutes in during Lateef’s improvisation.
Barron’s ‘The Untitled’ is another matter entirely. Here is where the mysticism of Lateef’s music—he disavowed the label jazz and called what he did autophysiopsychic music which comprised of three voices: the audible, the dramatic and the soloist’s, is most gloriously present.
A suite like his ‘Number 7’ from 1964’s Live at Pep’s, ‘The Untitled’ begins at a furious pace before segueing into an ambient middle section. Cunningham bows a drone, Heath moves from the drums to flute and Lateef almost chants on his tenor. When Barron takes over, he comments with the kind of semi-gospel runs that marked early ECM Keith Jarrett. Lateef interjects briefly on the arghul, an Egyptian instrument that sounds almost like the bagpipes. When Heath returns to the drums, the rhythm section, led by Barron, engage in a long dialogue that flirts with rock. Cunningham and Heath lay out for an extended solo section by Barron. ‘The Untitled’ is 25 minutes well spent as is the whole of Atlantis Lullaby - The Concert from Avignon.
If you’re not yet a subscriber of ‘Listening Sessions,’ I hope you'll click the button below to subscribe and get each edition delivered straight to your inbox. I publish a long-form essay on music three times a month, every 10 days or so.
I started digging into Alice Coltrane’s catalogue after coming across Lakecia Benjamin’s Coltrane tribute from a few years ago (itself a revelation). It almost feels embarrassing that it took me this long. What a force. A few days ago I was streaming Ptah the El Daoud and Turiya and Ramakrishna brought tears to my eyes. This was a lovely homage—yet another. Thanks, Robert.
Great stuff as always, Robert. Just a minor point: I disagree that Kind of Blue is the best introduction to jazz. For that, I'd pick one of the Prestige Quintet records, probably Relaxin'.