Jazz Titans:
Anniversary Collections
For Miles, Trane and Billie

By Gene Seymour
SeeingBlack.com Jazz Critic

I wasn't there. I'm hazy on the details. But I love this story.

The Miles Davis Quintet, somewhere in the mid-1950s, is edging towards a break during a recording session. But its tenor saxophonist John Coltrane keeps on playing and playing torrents of phrases to the point that he almost has to be physically restrained. The leader wonders aloud why Coltrane has to blow so goddam hard and play so goddam many notes. Coltrane says something to the effect that he doesn't know how to stop himself. With characteristic truculence, Davis snarls hoarsely, "Take the horn out of your mouth!"

That last phrase is the only one I'm sure was word for word. But does it matter? This story, almost as much as their music, perfectly defines both the personalities of these titans as well as the qualities that set them apart.

One deep blue note deployed at the proper angle or sheets of sound raining down on rich and poor alike, Miles Davis and John Coltrane respectively embodied dual artistic choices for the modern jazz musician in the 1950s and 1960s. What Davis left out is as eloquent and dramatic as what he put in, while Coltrane pulled chords apart and rushed headlong into the resulting clutter in what seemed a desperate pursuit of truth and beauty. The quest alone was enough for poets and mystics who made Trane the figurehead of a secular religion whose adherents still mourn his passing in 1967.

Miles, meanwhile, followed his own star, leaving behind those who couldn't hang for the next transition, whether it was modal fusion, electro-boogie or proto-funk. It didn't matter. Wherever he went, he drew a crowd. Even after he died in 1990, the power of his name alone was enough to make New Yorkers line around the block earlier this year for a marathon tribute to his work.

That Miles and Trane shared the same 1926 birth year is harmonic convergence of an especially eerie kind. Together and separately, Davis, the prickly minimalist and Coltrane, the beatific maximalist established a sphere of influence so vast that it encompasses at least three generations of musicians and listeners. Both men are the last undisputed titans of jazz's first century and it's altogether fitting that the first true year of jazz's second century should be spent celebrating their 75th birthdays.

Retrospectives, reissues and commemorative pieces coursed throughout 2001. "The Complete 'In a Silent Way' Sessions," (Columbia Legacy) is a epic adventure, told in four compact discs, chronicling Davis' journey into Electric Ladyland, from which he never really returned. This package also proves that the sonic landscape farmed by Davis and his fellow travelers still has ground fertile enough to grow all manner of exotic fauna. That is, if anyone's up to it these days.

Coltrane's 75th, meanwhile, was marked by the release of "The Olatunji Concert: The Last Live Recording" (Impulse!). As its title indicates, this recording of an April 23, 1967 concert at Harlem's Olatunji Center of African Culture is by all accounts the last known recorded evidence of what Trane was thinking and where he might have been headed by the time he died just three months later. Those seeking definitive answers from this concert will, I'm afraid, be disappointed. What comes through, generally, is a furious pounding against whatever barriers were keeping Coltrane from finding apotheosis through his fragmented chords and incantations. In other words, it's not the place to begin discovering the wellspring of Coltrane's galvanizing passion.

Another commemorative release, "Spiritual" (Impulse!), will help. It's a single-disc compilation of Coltrane's ruminative and deeply meditative classics, selected with the help of his widow Alice. The first movement of "A Love Supreme" is included as are such pieces as "Dear Lord," "Song of Praise" and the still unsettling and deeply profound title track. Hearing both men working together, however, remains the best portal to enter both their respective worlds. The eight-disc set, "The Complete Columbia Recordings: Miles Davis With John Coltrane, 1955-1961" (Columbia Legacy), does gather it all under roof, along with the alternate takes that are almost required for such packages. But that's way too extreme for novices. The music should be experienced in the manner in which they were first savored: In their originally released forms. And that means, most notably, "Round About Midnight," "Milestones," "'58 Miles" and, of course, the sine qua non of modern jazz LPs, "Kind of Blue."

I

am also partial to what preceded and followed the Columbia recordings. The five Prestige albums recorded in the mid-1950s, now on Original Jazz Classics, are, in some households, cherished heirlooms. Purists may pick nits between "Miles," "Relaxin'," "Workin'", "Steamin'" and "Cookin'." But, really, they're all rich, deep and sweet; small combo jazz at its most discursive and spontaneously swinging.

Then there's what I call the "last waltz" recording for Miles and Trane: "Miles Davis in Stockholm Complete" (Dragon), a four-disc recording of live 1960 concerts where you can vividly hear Davis plaintively, but rigorously holding fast to his jeweler's lyricism and Coltrane breaking off into the kind of eastern-inflected chants that were the hallmark of his "My Favorite Things" (Atlantic).

Miles Davis once told an interviewer that he'd preferred listening to Billie Holiday late in her life than in the youthful bloom of the 1930s and early 1940s. It's true that there's greater emotional drama and tension in those 1950s performances where she was straining harder with her physically diminished gifts to wring everything she could out of a song with whatever she had left.

Still, those who favor the earlier Billie have a point and never has their point been made so persuasively on record than in "Lady Day: The Complete Billie Holiday on Columbia, 1933-1944" (Columbia/Legacy). This set, retailing for $169.98, may seem somewhat lavish. But its pristine sound quality makes it worth every penny. For the first time in memory, these tracks are cleaned of hum and fizz and one hears more clearly than ever the robust and natural intelligence of the young prodigy who could transfigure pop dross into classic gold. The impulse to make the very best she could out of a bad situation was apparently ingrained in Holiday's DNA. It's regrettable that her situations would only get worse from here on.

-- December 21, 2001

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