Nels Cline and Gregg Bendian
Interstellar Space Revisited: The Music of John Coltrane
[Atavistic]
Rating: 7.9
A friend of mine once remarked about the later music of John Coltrane and
Miles Davis that the two musicians departed from the jazz tradition through
completely opposite exits. Miles (for the moment we'll forget his
unrelentingly mediocre '80s output) tended toward submergence of his voice.
His '70s albums-- from the fiercely swaggering Jack Johnson to the
seismic twin live sets recorded just prior to his six year hiatus,
Agharta and Pangea-- were mired in electronic noise and
chugging rhythm. He put a wah- wah on his trumpet and claimed that he
wanted the instruments to be indistinguishable from one another. The move
was toward collectivity in sound, an idea Miles associated with African
music (certainly refracted through the lens of Hendrix's guitar).
Coltrane, canonized as a saint by at least one church I know of in San
Francisco, moved in the absolute opposite direction: toward singularity--
the transcendence of his own searching voice above all else. Even the
symbology with which the two musicians presented their music moved in
opposite directions. Davis presented himself in a kind of a primeval
paganism, as the Dark Magus-- the Sorcerer-- and cloaked his
songs in a tellurian rhetoric: earth and evil. Coltrane, however, adopted
an almost Christian lexicon after the psalmic perfection of A Love
Supreme; he fancied his archangelic music a kind of personal liturgy.
And after a restless life of continuous ascension, Coltrane's final album
reached the cosmic heights of Interstellar Space. Now, we can debate
volumes on the merits and flaws of Interstellar Space, an album
stripped of the legendary quartet, featuring only Coltrane and Rasheed Ali
on drums. We can suffice to say that it was 'Trane's nod to the music of
the spheres, and that it is accordingly difficult and complex. The idea of
covering this album, also suffice to say, is lunacy. However, free- jazz
drummer Gregg Bendian of Interzone and guitarist Nels Cline have attemptd to
do just that.
Now, I'm ever wary of the phrase "plays the music of," and it can be excused
when we're talking about Gershwin or Bacharach, but the idea of someone else
playing John Coltrane's music is basically paradox. Surprisingly enough,
Cline and Bendian make the right decisions: they play in the spirit of John
Coltrane: ascendant, noisy, searching and free. Cline's guitar- playing
offers such non- stop feedback- soaked freakout that it almost approaches
the sound of a continuously connecting modem. Bendian's drumming is
similarly abstract but manages to always sound like creative, ballsy rock
drumming rather than the nimble coloring of Ali.
In reality, this album owes more to John McLaughlin's Mahavishnu Orchestra
and the great '70s fusion that Miles himself inspired than any sound John
Coltrane ever produced. (I can't help but think of the guitar/ drum duo of
John McLaughlin & Billy Cobham rather than 'Trane and Ali.) But there is no
doubt that the album is inspired or, at least, possessed.
Interstellar Space Revisited is a forward- thinking, millennial
interpretation of Coltrane's later music. But the frontiers of jazz were so
wildly transgressed a mere five years after Coltrane's death, and the album
seems to constantly reference that first flowering of electrified jazz that
occurred under the shadow of Miles rather than Coltrane. Nevertheless, the
album is angularly beautiful in its own right and, for all the noise and
tweaks, there is indeed a sense of humility in the playing. After all, how
can you ape the spiritual questing of another? At best, you can ascend to
modest heights and then humbly thank St. John Coltrane for achieving those
grand astronomical reaches for the rest of us. And Cline and Bendian have
achieved this, noisily, but with grace.
-Brent S. Sirota