John Coltrane and Miles Davis are honored by three of the jazz greats who followed them.
by Mike Gibson
It seems only fitting that the most influential saxophonist in modern jazz would conceive and perform in a series of concerts that pay homage to the most significant and hallowed horn players of yesteryear.
Indeed, one local jazzman notes that latter-day tenor giant Michael Brecker is in many ways the spiritual progeny of John Coltrane, the legendary saxophonist who transformed popular conceptions of the instrument and took the medium of jazz to new heights of expression. Brecker, along with keyboardist Herbie Hancock and trumpeter Roy Hargrove, brings the Directions in Music tour, a celebration of the music of both Coltrane and fellow jazz icon Miles Davis, to Knoxville on Sept. 26.
"Twenty-five years ago, you'd hear someone playing a certain kind of saxophone, and you'd say 'Ah, he's copping Coltrane,'" says saxophonist and University of Tennessee jazz professor Paul Haar, who once played with Brecker at a concert in Texas. "Now, you're liable to hear someone playing and say, 'He's a Brecker clone. He's imitating Michael Brecker.'"
"Whatever," Brecker says dismissively, having been told of Haar's assessment. In the midst of a frenetic series of promotional interviews and last-minute rehearsals, Brecker speaks to a Knoxville reporter via phone only a few days prior to the tour's opening in Santa Cruz, Cal. "I'm not sure what [the compliment] means. It's very flattering. But it's certainly not the way I see myself."
Like so many jazz artists of his generation (Brecker is 50), he reserves a singular reverence for Coltrane, whom he cites as his chief inspiration. "The first time I heard Miles Davis, I was 10 years old," says the Philadelphia native, the son of an attorney who was also an accomplished jazz pianist. "Then later, after I'd started playing and studying, I heard Coltrane, and that changed everything. There's really no way to compare what I do or what anyone else has done to what Coltrane did, to what Coltrane meant."
Captivated by his newfound idol's endlessly questing, sometimes otherworldly approach to improvisation, as well as his unrivaled technical brilliance, the youthful Brecker changed from alto saxophone and clarinet to tenor sax (Coltrane's original horn of choice) and gave himself unequivocally to the pursuit of a career in jazz.
After a brief stint at Indiana University in the mid-1960s, he moved to New York City, Mecca of the Jazz Nation, where he helped found the seminal jazz-rock outfit Dreams. His career blossomed; after high-profile work as a sideman, he founded the Brecker Brothers in 1973 with his brother Randy, an accomplished trumpeter whose own career ascendance coincided with that of his younger brother's.
The brothers' funk-laced collaborations produced work still revered by musicians in the realms of jazz and rock today. Since then, the now-iconic horn player has performed with nearly every significant jazzer who's drawn a breath in the last three decades, as well as playing sessions with innumerable popular artists, a roster of greats that includes Frank Zappa, Bruce Springsteen, Elton John, and the Rolling Stones.
His latest album, Nearness of You: the Ballad Book,—his seventh as a solo artist—returns Brecker to his roots, however, drawing inspiration from Coltrane's essential 1962 jazz touchstone Ballads.
"[That is] one of my all-time favorite records," Brecker said in a prior interview. "Coltrane was a tremendously lyrical player in many settings...[Ballads] can be appreciated in so many different ways. You can simply relax and enjoy its beauty, or you can become immersed in the tremendous amount of information found in the music."
But Brecker's new platter draws from a wholly different repertoire than the Coltrane classic, featuring two of his own compositions as well as songs penned by the likes of Hancock, James Taylor, and the album's producer-guitarist Pat Metheny.
"I wanted it to be a modern ballad album," Brecker said. "I steered clear of the ballads in the traditional tenor vocabulary...[But] I was still looking for beautiful, evocative melodies with great chord changes and solid song forms I could sink my teeth into."
Brecker says a few of those songs might find their way into the Directions in Music set list, along with other compositions from Hancock and Hargrove. Mostly, however, the group will burn up the chord charts on tunes first set ablaze by Davis and Coltrane—the men whose music sparked young Michael Brecker's career. "It's a celebration," Brecker says. "Of their music, and of their musical sensibilities."
When trumpeter and bandleader Miles Davis' monumental 1950s combo debuted at Philadelphia's Blue Note jazz club in 1955, few of the observers guessed they were witness to music history-in-the-making.
Davis himself had recently emerged from the haze of a career-threatening heroin addiction, while his collaborators, Red Garland, Philly Joe Jones, Sonny Rollins and Paul Chambers were all considered suspect sidemen in some regard. And when Davis brought young, little-known saxophone player John Coltrane into the line-up a few months later, jazz enthusiasts scarcely batted a lash.
"Coltrane was unproven; [pianist] Garland was considered a 'cocktail player,'" explains University of Tennessee instructor of music and director of jazz bands Keith Brown. "And everyone thought [drummer] Jones played way too loud. But Miles Davis knew the whole would be greater than the sum of the parts. He had the ability to pick, encourage, and allow musicians to experiment and explore."
The players—Coltrane in particular—all grew in stature, and the group as a whole flourished. Over the course of its seven-year history—during which time Coltrane drifted in and out of the band—the unit prospered on the forefront of so-called "hard-bop", a stylistic permutation that added hard-swinging rhythms and loud, aggressive drum beats to the chordally-complex bebop jazz pioneered by players like Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker.
Davis assembled a second, equally revered long-running quintet in the early '60s, a group that further extended the outer limits of bop and forged the platform from which the trumpeter would launch the electric fusion era in the latter half of the decade.
Coltrane, who during his years with Davis had honed his saxophone technique to an astounding level of achievement, became a bandleader and pioneer in his own right. In addition to his technical brilliance—his solos were marked by such a torrential outpouring of notes and ideas that one critic characterized the effect as "sheets of sound"—he restlessly sought ever-newer and less constrained modes of expression, incorporating Eastern and Indian musical influences as he staked out previously uncharted territory in post-bop and free jazz.
"He was searching for a voice," Brown says. "He once said he was trying to obtain an audience with God."
Adds jazz Prof. Haar, "He was an explorer. When he played a solo, it was as if he couldn't get his ideas out fast enough. It was almost violent; people talked about walking out of a room he had played with their nerve endings tingling."
Both Davis and Coltrane were superb and highly distinctive instrumentalists, their playing styles recognizable even to the jazz layman. Today, students of jazz still study their recordings much like monks poring over sacred scrolls, the transcription and mastering of the solos contained therein an integral part of their musical education.
But Brown, a drummer, believes the influence of those two 20th-century music Titans reaches far beyond the relatively limited, physical parameters of their respective instruments. "They changed the functionality of groups, the approach to improvisation, the way jazz is played. In both cases, their influence was more universal than the horns they carried."
September 20, 2001 * Vol. 11, No. 38
© 2001 Metro Pulse
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