John Coltrane: Divine Wind

It was a warm August evening almost 40 years ago when I heard John Coltrane live at the peak of his powers, and I didn’t know what to make of him. A thick-set man wearing a tight fitting sharkskin suit, beaming a relentless stream of notes from the horn of his saxophone, surrounded by a motley gaggle of musicians shaking and beating a variety of hand percussion; another saxophonist standing nearby; a rhythm section roiling away for half an hour without a pause. All of this without announcements or introductions, and all taking place just 100 yards away on a stage set up at the far end of a vast outdoor stadium. The group was playing to maybe 7000 listeners in a section of concrete bleachers that could have held at least twice as many. Vendors walked through the stands hawking Coke and ice cream.

The occasion was on 15th August 1965, at the Down Beat Jazz Festival in Chicago’s lakefront Soldier Field, where years later I would review the likes of The Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd and Peter Frampton for a daily newspaper. On those occasions the entire place was full to its capacity, topped out at 50,000 people. For the jazz festival, attendance was spotty. But the music certainly had enduring power.

A full afternoon of jazz had already passed, and there was more to come. Listeners came and went during the day-long programme, which featured Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, Dave Brubeck, Stan Getz, the Woody Herman Band, Gerry Mulligan, singer Joe Williams and Thelonious Monk’s Quartet besides Coltrane, who had been scheduled to appear with his regular quartet partners Jimmy Garrison, Elvin Jones and McCoy Tyner. I recognised Brubeck’s “Take Five” and was excited by
“Blue Rondo Ă La Turk”; I liked Getz, who played bossanovas; and Monk, though I was impatient with Charlie Rouse’s sax blowing. I was a precocious little brat, and turned up my nose at Herman’s and Mulligan’s sets. Wasn’t jazz supposed to be a black thing?

I was 14 years old, attending a concert with a school pal, for the first time without anyone’s mother or father as a chaperone. According to Yasuhiro Fujioka’s John Coltrane: A Discography And Musical Biography the classic quartet performed “Nature Boy” and “Blue Valse” for 36 minutes, with Archie Shepp guesting a second soloist. I was never clear about what happened or how the music gained its oversized impact, but I knew immediately that Coltrane’s set was unlike anything else on the bill. In the 90s, saxophonist Dave Liebman sent me a cassette of his performance, and no wonder it had mystified me: it was way beyond my experience. Shepp was ripping with a fierce growl through an extended uptempo improvisation that veered far from the main themes of either “Nature Boy” or “Blue Valse”. He and Coltrane were supported by a seemingly random clatter of shakers and tambourines; the pianist dropped out of the discernible action soon after the pieces had got off the ground.

Back then I’d been digging some of the quirkier R&B radio hits such as Gene Chandler’s “Duke of Earl”. The Capitols’ “Cool Jerk”, and Ramsey Lewis’s funky piano trio instrumental, “The In Crowd”. The hipster parents of another friend had introduced me to mid-50s Miles Davis quintet recordings including “Round Midnight” (on the album ‘Round About Midnight), on which Coltrane made a dramatic tenor entrance, and I had been obsessively spinning a compilation of big band tracks that my folks had received as a cigarette company promotion. I was old enough to realise something momentous was happening between Chicago’s white and black populations, but didn’t grasp all the implications of the Civil Rights struggle. I was friendly towards the kids at school who didn’t live in the same neighbourhood as my friends and I. Not having any athletic interests, jazz seemed like the good, safe, entertaining thing we might share.