There seems to be little left to say about John Coltrane or Miles Davis, although such is our (human) nature plenty of prose about them will no doubt pour out until the end of the world. I was going to 'review' Miles Davis & John Coltrane – The Final Tour: The Bootleg Series, Vol. 6, but thought better of it, then thought differently again and so on...
...my head bounced to and fro as if I was an audience member at one of these gigs, assuming Coltrane had that effect, which he surely did. Today we're oh-so-wise about What Happened Next but it's not hard to imagine, having closed off retrospective wisdom, how shocking Coltrane's playing was in 1960...
...it's even shocking now in the context of a band tour under the name of a legend playing standards and future classics from Kind Of Blue to all intents and purposes supposedly not 'just' but no more than a 'cool' god playing Modern Jazz but...
...what happens, no-one could predict. What happens is a draft of things to come not just from Coltrane but a generation of iconoclasts out to smash what used to be Jazz into pieces, albeit very large pieces in the form of 20-minute voyages of discovering just how far they could go when blowing and in the process alienating many Jazz-lovers, just as Miles Davis would do towards the end of the 60s with Bitches Brew...
...talking of which, on this tour, at times, Coltrane manages to make Miles Davis sound like The Past, no mean feat, although it's easy to exaggerate what happened. The fact is Coltrane was in a bad mood most of the time and wanted out; the sound of a prisoner sawing at his shackles doesn't always make for comfortable listening but neither does most of what he would unwittingly unleash in the form the The New Thing...
...some of the crowd at the Paris gig definitely weren't happy, as we can hear by the whistling when, having briefly dipped back into the theme on All Of You Coltrane goes way off-message and to those without the ability to see into the future may well have sounded as if he'd lost the plot completely like an amateur in a cutting contest...
...what Davis thought during the process is anyone's guess but 'Muthafucker!' is one good guess. He had, after all, suggested Coltrane try taking the horn out of his mouth when he told his boss he didn't know when to stop, but the Free thing would be very much about not stopping, or more to the point, not being concerned about neatly tying up a tune (what tune?) in the tradition of improvising as it was known up until the 60s when through a hunger for taking a magical mystery tour Afrocentric blacks and radical whites engaged in a process of developing what would become known as just Improv, rather than 'improvisation', thus, ironically, shortening a word but considerably lengthening the nature of the beast unleashed by the likes of Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman and the UK's own Joe Harriott who, it must be said, deserved more than he got in terms of recognition and, to be frank, lifetime, but instead is a cult figure in musical history, unlike Coltrane, who despite living for 6 years less than Harriott had the drive, ideas, connections etc to make more incredible music than most tenor players could manage should they live forever and there was tough competition, not that he was in competition except regarding polls; the likes of Sonny Rollins and Wayne Shorter who, having 'scrambled eggs' with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers was called up for duty in Davis' next Great Band, which set a pace of their very own whilst others took to roaming Free range, which Davis had no interest in or respect for therefore making the wild electric storm blown up by him in the late-60s ironic, eh?
Did I blow for too long with that sentence? Oh well, consider it a homage...
