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During the 1960s, jazz was diversifying with some groups continuing bebop, others joining the cool school, and some experimenting with avant-garde styles like free jazz pioneered by Ornette Coleman. John Coltrane incorporated elements from various world musics like Indian and African styles into his playing, branching out further than most musicians. His album Olé Coltrane, recorded between his hard bop and spiritual free jazz periods, features original songs and arrangements with Spanish influences that were overlooked despite predating Miles Davis' acclaimed Sketches of Spain. Analyzing Coltrane's transitional works provides insight into his broad career and allows comparison to contemporaries also exploring world music elements like Davis.
During the 1960s, jazz was diversifying with some groups continuing bebop, others joining the cool school, and some experimenting with avant-garde styles like free jazz pioneered by Ornette Coleman. John Coltrane incorporated elements from various world musics like Indian and African styles into his playing, branching out further than most musicians. His album Olé Coltrane, recorded between his hard bop and spiritual free jazz periods, features original songs and arrangements with Spanish influences that were overlooked despite predating Miles Davis' acclaimed Sketches of Spain. Analyzing Coltrane's transitional works provides insight into his broad career and allows comparison to contemporaries also exploring world music elements like Davis.
During the 1960s, jazz was diversifying with some groups continuing bebop, others joining the cool school, and some experimenting with avant-garde styles like free jazz pioneered by Ornette Coleman. John Coltrane incorporated elements from various world musics like Indian and African styles into his playing, branching out further than most musicians. His album Olé Coltrane, recorded between his hard bop and spiritual free jazz periods, features original songs and arrangements with Spanish influences that were overlooked despite predating Miles Davis' acclaimed Sketches of Spain. Analyzing Coltrane's transitional works provides insight into his broad career and allows comparison to contemporaries also exploring world music elements like Davis.
During the 1960s jazz was heading in many directions simultaneously.
Some groups forged on in the
bebop tradition in the form of the generally more rhythmically driven hard bop, while others joined the cool school, a laid back style popularized by the spacious playing of Miles Davis. Still others ventured into the avant-garde, trying to do something, anything new or in different ways. Of this last category, the most famous, or infamous depending on perspective, is undoubtedly Ornette Coleman who played so called free jazz, which was simply a jazz quartet (or two simultaneously) improvising simultaneously without the aid of chord changes to guide the improvisations. There is yet another individual who is not so easily categorized despite an enormous impact on the jazz scene then and now: John Coltrane. Coltrane, who is known for his intense sheets of sound technique among other things, wasnt very interested in labels or conventions when it came to music. Not that other musicians made effort to put themselves into labels, but quite the contrary. However Coltrane stands out as the first jazz musician to branch out to a global scale in making his music. While players like Dizzy Gillespie incorporated Afro-Cuban rhythms into his music, Coltrane picked and choose elements from a broad range of world music, from Middle Eastern, to African, to Indian, and probably much more. He would adapt for example, eastern embellishments and timbre in his famous My Favorite Things, or have the rhythm section play a static droning accompaniment while exploring every musical avenue in the album Impressions. Of course, Coltranes playing did not start out so worldly; he played in the style of Charlie Parker at first and developed into a top notch hard bop player with his big debut group, the Miles Davis Quintet. While his career was taking off though, he had many demons to overcome; he battled a range of drug and alcohol and even over-eating addictions before finding faith and directing all his energy to music, like some determined mystic. Coltranes relentless spiritual drive resulted in some of the most iconic jazz recordings to this day like My Favorite Things, Impressions, and the seminal A Love Supreme. However, in reviewing his work, there is one in-between album, quite literally, that is overlooked. Ol Coltrane was recorded only a few days before Africa/Brass and is situated right in the middle of his transitionary period bridging his hard bop and avant-garde, or spiritual, free style of his later years. Not only that, but Mile Davis recorded his take on Spanish flavored music with Sketches of Spain with the momentum of previous Gil Evans collaborations around a year prior, further contributing to an undeserved shadow over Coltranes work. It would be one thing if Ol Coltrane was a regular collection of standards, but in fact its actually a three or four track album, depending on the issue of release, of originals plus one ballad by Billy Frazier, every track greatly varying in style. In overviewing John Coltranes broad output as a whole, it is always good to take a magnifying glass to one particular piece in order to gain insight into the work that preceded and followed it. Not only that, but by looking at one moment in a long career, one can compare the music of Coltranes contemporaries, so it makes all too much sense to juxtapose two different iconic musicians take on a similar subject, that is the Spanish flavored music in both Daviss Sketches and Coltranes Ol. As mentioned previously, using world elements of different world musics is a common theme in Coltranes career, but the same couldnt really be said about Davis, who, with Gil Evans, looked to Spanish sonorities for their exoticism, where Coltrane was trying to solve a perpetually troubling musical/spiritual problem (It should be mentioned that Coltrane failed to differentiate between spirituality and his own music; they were one in the same).