Remembering: Forever Trane

John Coltrane, the gentle, reserved, rarified and dignified, soul with the fiery angry tone. The emminance and grace, the power and the glory. Sounds, sheets and all, gutteral, bluesy, flowing, mystified, some played at beyond breakneck speed but yet still coherent and compelling. And how can we think of Trane without Elvin??? The Sound encouters its Fury, completing the whole, so to speak.

Trane could play every which way, fast and loose. And majestically and regally. Note, for example, "Naima" and "Alabama". In stark contrast, "Chasin the Trane", which pleads, wails, screams, sears simmers, gesticulates, full of fire and brimstone. And "Out of This World", a renditon worthy of the very cosmos, themselves!!! "You're clear out of this world, when I'm looking at you..." No smokey Chris Connor iteration, this, me thinks. Neither the Mulligan Concert Band's sinewy, polyphonic stew, either. No, Trane's "Out of this World" is indeed just that.

I was thinking thusly the other day: what if "Blue Trane" was not an anomaly?? What if Trane had indeed signed with Blue Note and not Prestige? At first glance: we would, of course, be robbed of the Prestige sides, and what a terrible loss that! But, in the alternative: Trane plying his trade for the best label in the business, with Messers. Wolf and Lion, two of the few Record Company Big Wigs who actually treated their musicians as actual human beings? Trane working with Horace Silver, Hank Mobley, Lou Donaldson, Billy Higgins, Lee Morgan?? Not just in blowing session after blowing session?

What a wonderment of riches we have from someone who died so young!!! The Prestiges, the Atlantics, the Impulses. And the beauty, fire in the belly, flowing consequently therefrom.

Unfortunately, I find myself having less and less use for the post "Ascension" period. But what a strange, apolyptic momment, though, "Live in Seattle '66" generated ten years ago, the CD blaring in my car during an all-night road trip through the heart of Nebraska in the midst of a driving, thunderous rain storm!

Where would Trane have ventured if his health had not fatally failed him?? Where could one go after stepping one foot into the abyss, mind still on fire, alight with imagination and the sense of experimentation??