Revisiting Coltrane
Friday, 8 September 2006
No real theme to today’s musings….
Photos are of a grave in a rural Georgia cemetery, quite a distance from the sea that yielded the shells that decorate its top. Exposure to the weather exposes their lack of durability…. Still, it’s a pretty sentiment….
Outside reading: click here to read a lovely story by Ben Ratliff about how satisfying John Coltrane’s music still is. He notes:
In his time Coltrane had no peer as a player of romantic ballads; he learned from Johnny Hodges, the master of that form. For his first wife, he wrote “Naima�?…. Perhaps it’s the insistent pedal tone, grounding everything, or the wide intervals, or the rich harmony; but “Naima�? almost reinvented this type of tune in jazz, building on Hodges saxophone showcases like Duke Ellington’s “Warm Valley�? yet intimating something deeper, a kind of contemplative, I’ll-see-you-in-the-next-world feeling.
Me, I’m headed for iTunes Music Store to improve our Coltrane playlist….