Impressions Whilst Listening To Coltrane

Buggering about wasting my time...so I pick out Coltrane’s complete Village Vanguard recordings, select a disc randomly, hit the random button on the remote and get ‘Spiritual’...that’s it, that’s so perfect...hit the ‘loudness’ button to increase the power of Reggie Workman’s wonderful bass riff and feel the power of this music...Dolphy’s bass clarinet not least of all, even though I’m ambiguous about Eric; sometimes I love his sound, then again, I don’t, but you can’t argue with these sets...you could try, but you’d appear foolish...you could say you don’t like jazz, and that’s not a crime, although it might be if I was prime minister...then again, thank god for differing tastes...hold on, they’re playing ‘Impressions’ now...Coltrane sounds as if he’s in complete control of the experience, adventure, trip, whatever you want to call it...before he went Out There, here he is still inside, just, prowling the perimeters of ...what? What we think of as ‘permissible’...‘listenable’? Maybe...and even I couldn’t stick with him when he journeyed as far out as it felt possible to go without the man spontaneously exploding in a screaming cloud of noise...and Dolphy? He’s tearing this up...because he can, he can fire as fast as any gunslinger and right now, hearing what he’s doing, I can’t help but think he was some kind of magician...or alchemist...damn, he’s quick...and I can only imagine what the audience were thinking... ‘What is this crazy shit!?’ McCoy now...he kind of grounds the whole process, but not as if to hold anyone back, but simply reaffirm the meaning of....melody? Harmony? Beauty? Continuity? I don’t know...I have spent time only listening to Tyner solos on Coltrane recording...without wanting to own all the records he made as a leader because for me the magic exists in the context of Coltrane...although to see him at The Jazz Cafe a few years ago was something I’ll never forget...perhaps to an extent he suffered in the long shadow of Coltrane...we all do because...he makes something so powerful you can only hold tight, wither, listen, marvel, cower, cry, scream, sigh, say to yourself ‘What the fuck...I’m gone, I’m nothing, a mere mortal’... just like him, a man capable of playing as if he was a god, a spirit, a voodoo priest blowing such phenomenal sounds into your ear that you can feel mind unravelling along with the solo and yes, at times you might cry for mercy, escape, release, peace, but if you hang on and continue you will come to a place, another place, some place you thought you’d never reach...I don’t know what you’d call it, but imagine being in his head when this is all being created, to be a free-flowing mechanism, a dynamic organic machine made of fingers, lips, lungs...and now I suddenly think of Hendrix’s ‘Machine Gun’, how Coltrane’s tenor is a machine gun ripping the Klan to shreds, scattering bones, blood, bits of flesh all over the South...but the man was a pacifist...and this is black power of another kind...as he plays on the longer version of ‘Impressions’ I begin to think I’m losing my mind to him...and as he reaches towards a scream it feels as if that sound could bring down the walls of the county jail holding all those innocent men and somehow, imagine this, blow life back into the strange fruit swinging from the trees...and around the 13min mark he makes sounds that suggest he is disappearing, a flurry of sounds, not notes, pure sounds, as if to say that even he has reached his limit...but it comes back, he comes back to the melody...a relief, a resolution...and I am exhausted...needing silence to recover...