“He was a passionate player that was always looking forward,” says saxophonist Joe Lovano, featured soloist with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra in world premiere “John Coltrane: Legacy.”
By Nick Krewen
Special to the Star
Get ready to hear the music of John Coltrane in a whole new context.
While the legendary repertoire of the late jazz sax colossus has been performed in many configurations over the last 75 years or so, Meridian Hall’s world premiere of John Coltrane: Legacy will offer some of the woodwind genius’s innovative classics in a rarely heard format: symphonic.
Edwin Outwater will conduct the Toronto Symphony Orchestra for the occasion, with Grammy-winning tenor saxophonist Joe Lovano as the featured soloist.
“It’s kind of a new concept,” said Ravi Coltrane, John’s sax-playing son, in an interview.
“John Coltrane never played with a symphony orchestra. I think uniting the different art forms — symphonic music with improvised music — is something that could always lead to new ideas and new inspirations, not only for audiences but for the musicians and the arrangers and composers as well. I’m hoping that’s what this project does.”
“I think the evening is going to be really beautiful,” said Lovano in a separate interview.
Some of the Coltrane classics being worked up for the May 15 show include “Giant Steps,” “Naima,” “So What” and “My Favorite Things,” as well as “Ascension” from the North Carolina native’s landmark album, A Love Supreme.
There will also be a visual component, with previously unseen photos of Coltrane from renowned jazz photographers Jim Marshall, Chuck Stewart, Francis Wolff and others.
Ravi — who serves as chairman of the John and Alice Coltrane Home, the Long Island landmark where his father composed “A Love Supreme” and his pianist mother recorded a number of her solo albums — was less than two years old when John died of cancer in 1967 at the age of 40.
While he didn’t know his father, Ravi couldn’t escape the global impact of his music.
“I knew what he represented for me, you know, and as a budding young musician my ear went straight to his music, ” Ravi said.
” Just his courage and his wherewithal as a creator — and the courage he had to follow his voice alone — is such a beautiful lesson for all creative types all over this world to really utilize your intuition, trust it and then really stand by it. Then fearlessly, or spiritually at least, you go forward with your own conception of music, your own approach, your own voice.
“With him, I think it was really a built-in ethos, for musicians of that era to have your own voice. Clearly, John Coltrane took that imperative very seriously.”
Although Coltrane’s career lasted little more than 20 years he clearly crammed a lot of vital activity into that time frame.
Obsessed with practising, he spent the majority of his spare time studying his instrument. He collaborated with such lions as late ‘40s bebop trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie (with whom he toured), and joined trumpeter Miles Davis in 1955 as part of Davis’s hard bop and modal jazz “First Great Quintet,” which included Red Garland on piano, Paul Chambers on bass and drummer Philly Joe Jones.
The Coltrane-Davis pairing is regarded as one of the most fruitful in the evolution of jazz.
Coltrane also explored modality with pianist and composer Thelonious Monk before returning to Davis in 1959 and the sextet that recorded jazz’s all-time bestselling album, Kind of Blue. That’s Coltrane executing the tasteful tenor sax solos on “All Blues,” “So What” and the other memorable cuts on that watershed project.
The self-titled Coltrane marked the saxophonist’s first record as a band leader: 24 more albums would follow through 1967 as he continued his musical explorations, stretching into more avant-garde territory and invoking spirituality in his style.
“He was a passionate player that was always looking forward,” said Lovano, who has toured and recorded with Coltrane drummer Elvin Jones, and pianists McCoy Tyner and Steve Kuhn during his lengthy career.
“He was in the moment of ‘now,’ always, and then he was always searching for what it could be. That question keeps you moving and keeps you young.”
Ravi Coltrane added his own thoughts about his father’s compulsion.
“I don’t think I’ve ever met a sax player that wasn’t obsessed to some level or degree with the instrument, with the music, with conception, you know? With what was possible and what they were going for, it takes a certain type of temperament to really go as far as the possibility of achievement and those heights.
“You have to have an obsessive nature just to approach the instrument. You utilize that as part of the fuel of making change and growth as an artist and as an inspirer. John’s obsession didn’t slow him down: it served as his propulsion.”
That impetus to create an original sound is why Ravi, who has headlined Koerner Hall on several occasions, says his friend Lovano is the perfect choice to anchor the Legacy concert.
“Joe Lovano is the perfect guy, period,” Coltrane said, adding that the show might be booked into other cities if this one is successful.
“He’s one of the most recorded and unique tenor saxophonists of the last 30 years, if not longer. I first heard Lovano in the ‘80s and he’s not only a master of his instrument; he kind of personalized sound during an era when a lot of musicians were content just sort of copying stylistically what their own heroes had been doing.
“Joe absorbed all of that music and found his own voice within that (framework) and that’s a very difficult thing. I can’t say enough about Joe: he’s someone who has such a great ability to interpret the music of the greats and those that he loves and, obviously, John Coltrane rates very high in that regard for him.
“He is the perfect guy for this rollout presentation of this Coltrane content.”