John Coltrane Sun Ship: The Complete Session
Recorded on August 26, 1965 (and not released until after his death),
The release of alternate takes has special significance in jazz, for obvious reasons. Even though no performance of composed music is precisely repeatable—and loving classical music implies being keenly sensitive to the shuddering sublimity of the moment’s unique inspiration—the variety in improvised performances from take to take or set to set is likely to be even greater, and, with the most original musicians, what emerges from the vaults is often revelatory. So it is with “Sun Ship: The Complete Session,” a newly released two-CD set of recordings by John Coltrane and his “classic quartet” of McCoy Tyner (piano), Jimmy Garrison (bass), and Elvin Jones (drums).
It was made at New York’s RCA Victor Studios on August 26, 1965—that epochal group’s penultimate recording—and features multiple takes, plus inserts meant for splicing (as well as some studio banter), of the five numbers that the original “Sun Ship” album, released in 1971 (four years after Coltrane’s death at the age of forty), comprises. Tyner and Jones were gone from the band by the end of 1965 after a five-year run, and this album—especially in its complete unfurling—makes clear the divergent musical directions that they and Coltrane were taking. But, even more important, it highlights Coltrane’s tense and increasingly conflict-torn contention with his own musical heritage, style, and material.
That tension is evident as well in the original album release, but as important as the sheer quantitative addition to Coltrane’s discography (the original session feature complete alternate takes for four of the five tracks plus four potent solos recorded as inserts) is the shift in emphasis resulting from the chronological document of the session. The album opens with the furious title track with its wailing rapid-fire four-note theme repeated and broken down to three notes, when—after a long, swirling and percussive solo by Tyner, Coltrane enters with a vortex of obsessively involute streaks of chordal fragments that yield to furious, sound-shredded shrieks and bellows that suggest the will to break through the stuff of harmonic investigation to sheer expressive sound, the swinging patterns of pounding rhythm to shifting bio centric undulations. It’s radical enough, ecstatically musical, and imbued with the spirit of the new thing—of so-called free jazz and, in particular, of the ideas and ways of the ne plus ultra sonic innovator on the tenor saxophone, Albert Ayler, whose playing owed nothing to the bebop and post-bop ways of Charlie Parker and Miles Davis and tore through the very framework of modern jazz to link it to primordial New Orleans and African traditions by way of Ayler’s self-made ecstatic spirituality.
The complete session feature the same performance, of course, as well as a prior alternate take of it that drives even further toward fragmentation and sudden jagged leaps into pure sonic fury—but it’s not what opens the session. Rather, the very first note recorded—the long note that’s the first of the keening five-note theme of “Dearly Beloved”—throws down a sort of gauntlet from Coltrane to Coltrane. It’s a warble, vibrato-laden, high-throated, strident note, and it sounds, and is, something entirely new for Coltrane. His distinctive and utterly original tone was largely vibrato-free; his long held notes cut through the air like a musical variety of pure light. I’ve always thought of Coltrane as an essentially religious artist whose seraphic spirituality seemed clear and bright (though often earthy and rugged). His adoption of a wide and slow, Ayler-ish vibrato (as well as a more strident tone) made him sound as if he were playing in tongues, as if his light had gone from bright to blinding, as if his purity ran the risk of reckless, self-escaping loss of control—as if he went from conveying the divine spirit to being possessed by it.
Significantly, Coltrane doesn’t play the soprano saxophone at all here; it’s an instrument that he started playing late (in 1960, thanks to Miles Davis, who bought him the instrument during Coltrane’s last European concert tour as a member of Davis’s group) and with which he had what can surprisingly be called his hit single, “My Favorite Things.” On the “Sun Ship” date, Coltrane stuck to tenor saxophone, his prime instrument—and the one that Ayler mainly played. This session, in its dedication to that instrument and its possibilities, seems all the more a reckoning with Ayler’s formidable musical inventions and persona. (Coltrane did, however, continue to play soprano—and, for that matter, continued to play “My Favorite Things,” in extravagant celestial transfigurations.)
Tyner and Jones do their serious and devoted best; Jones, endowed with a mighty and muscular and polyrhythmic sense of swing, keeps the rhythm going on sheer power even as Coltrane shreds and lurches and speeds over it with a benignly frenzied indifference. Tyner’s pianistic cascades of bright chromaticism come as a sort of cooling relief from Coltrane’s blazing-hot performance but not a spark to it; they no longer add much in the way of underpinning to Coltrane’s solos. Their replacements in Coltrane’s group—the drummer Rashid Ali and the pianist Alice Coltrane (the leader’s wife)—were entirely in synch with Coltrane’s new, later manner (and continued to perform with him for the rest of his life).
Those later recordings, such as “Live at the Village Vanguard Again,” reveal Coltrane as he had, so to speak, passed through to the other side. In the “Sun Ship” session, he is still breaking through; it’s a key moment of transition, of personal as well as musical transformation. The album “Sun Ship” captures that vast musical and moral change; the complete session documents it in action, like a sonic documentary film. It’s a treasure, a joy, and a revelation. #HighArt
