Product Details
Coltrane: The Story of a Sound

Coltrane: The Story of a Sound
By Ben Ratliff

List Price: $16.00
Price: $10.88 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details

Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com

68 new or used available from $1.55

Average customer review:

Product Description

John Coltrane left an indelible mark on the world, but what was the essence of his achievement that makes him so prized forty years after his death? What were the factors that helped Coltrane become who he was? And what would a John Coltrane look like now--or are we looking for the wrong signs?

In this deftly written, riveting study, New York Times jazz critic Ben Ratliff answers these questions and examines the life of Coltrane, the acclaimed band leader and deeply spiritual man who changed the face of jazz music. Ratliff places jazz among other art forms and within the turbulence of American social history, and he places Coltrane not just among jazz musicians but among the greatest American artists.

Ben Ratliff has been a jazz critic at The New York Times since 1996. The author of The Jazz Ear and The New York Times Essential Library: Jazz, he lives in Manhattan with his wife and two sons.
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award
An Artforum Best Book of the Year
 
What was the essence of John Coltrane’s achievement that makes him so prized forty years after his death? What was it about his improvising, his bands, his compositions, his place within his era of jazz that drew so many musicians and listeners to his music?  Jazz writer and New York Times music critic Ben Ratliff addresses these questions in Coltrane.
 
First Ratliff tells the story of Coltrane’s development, from his first recordings as a navy bandsman to his last recordings as a near-saint, paying special attention to the last ten years of his life, which contained a remarkable series of breakthroughs in a nearly religious search for deeper expression.  In the book’s second half, Ratliff traces another history: that of Coltrane’s influence and legacy. This story begins in the mid-’50s and considers the reactions of musicians, critics, and others who paid attention, asking: Why does Coltrane signify so heavily in the basic identity of jazz?
 
Placing jazz among other art forms and American social history, and placing Coltrane not just among jazz musicians but among the greatest American artists, Ratliff tries to look for the sources of power in Coltrane’s music—not just in matters of technique, composition, and musical concepts, but in the deeper frequencies of Coltrane’s sound.
“Ratliff suggests, intelligently and persuasively, that Coltrane had, among other attributes, a 'mystic's sensitivity for the sublime, which runs like a secret river under American culture.'  Ratliff patiently explicates Coltrane's legend, writing in short, aphoristic bursts, often as elliptically as his subject played tenor saxophone, but never less than lucidly.”—Pankaj Mishra, The New York Times Book Review
“Engaging . . . clear-sighted . . . Ratliff suggests, intelligently and persuasively, that Coltrane had, among other attributes, a 'mystic's sensitivity for the sublime, which runs like a secret river under American culture.'  Ratliff patiently explicates Coltrane's legend, writing in short, aphoristic bursts, often as elliptically as his subject played tenor saxophone, but never less than lucidly.”—Pankaj Mishra, The New York Times Book Review

“Coltrane: The Story of a Sound is not a biography but an extended, deeply informed analysis of the qualities that make Coltrane and his music so meaningful to people today, four decades after his death.”—Matt Schudel, The Washington Post Book World

“Ratliff, a New York Times jazz critic, has written a book that’s neither a biography nor a critical study, although it has elements of both. It is, rather, a kind of cultural history . . . Ratliff writes extremely well, with terse, assured brio, as when he refers to Coltrane’s ‘serene intensity’ or the ‘incantational tumult’ of his vast, cathedral solos.”—Mark Feeney, The Boston Globe

"Ratliff has turned me on to more music over the last few years than any other writer . . . The listening skills of a great critic and the ability to convey what he hears are what he brings here."—R. J. Smith, Los Angeles Times

"Brilliant, economical . . . sharp . . . [Ratliff] skillfully and convincingly places Coltrane as something of a man apart from most other musicians—a cultural comet, as much as a musical one."—Henry C. Jackson, San Francisco Chronicle

“In his astute and unorthodox biography, Coltrane: The Story of a Sound, New York Times critic Ben Ratliff pays as much attention to Coltrane’s haunting absence over the last forty years as he does to his brief decade of renown . . . As attentive a reader as he is a listener, Ratliff charts the rapid expansion of the mythology in various, often contradictory tropes: the humble music student and theorist who never stopped practicing and learning, the Christian into Eastern religious for whom pride was a far graver sin than wrong notes, the wordless spokesman for black civil rights and revolution, the unbound thinker who tripped across inner and outer space.”—Richard B. Woodward, Bookforum

“Ratliff condenses the biography proper into the first part of the book in order to devote himself in part two to a lengthy consideration of the saxophonist’s influence since his death. Even more important, the book is less about music than it is about sound—as jazz musicians understand it . . . Ratliff’s book is intelligent and compelling. The text and its sources reveal how seriously he took his task. In addition to working with biographies and interviews, some of which must have been difficult to locate, Ratliff also draws on obscure radio programs, various unpublished materials, thirty-nine interviews he conducted with musicians and countless conversations with people knowledgeable about jazz, American culture and New York City. Throughout he tackles topics that might seem the province of academics—such as the merits of Theodor Adorno’s and Edward Said’s ideas about ‘late style’—with considerable skill and clarity . . . While Ratliff avers in his introduction that he is a writer rather than a musician, his discussions of the sound of Coltrane and Coltrane’s compatriots in performance are informative and compelling, especially when his own writing captures the spirit and feel of a recording in ways that a transcription never could . . . Most important, Ratliff focuses his observational eye again and again on the power and perils of repetition, both for Coltrane and the jazz musicians who have emerged since his death . . . Indeed, Ratliff’s reconsideration of a musician who has already been the subject of countless books, poems, and documentaries is perhaps a subtle reminder of how much joy there is in repetition. Like the best writing on music, his book not only provides food for thought but also creates an insatiable desire to go back to the recordings, in hopes that we too might discover some elusive truth.”—Travis A. Jackson, The Nation

"Were it not for the power and breadth of saxophonist John Coltrane’s legacy and the lithe prose of New York Times critic Ben Ratliff, Coltrane would be a scholarly

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #35086 in Books
  • Published on: 2008-10-28
  • Released on: 2008-10-28
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Binding: Paperback
  • 272 pages

Features

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Ratliff, the jazz critic for the New York Times, isn't interested in simply retelling the biographical facts of John Coltrane's life. Instead, he analyzes how the saxophone player came to be regarded as the last major figure in the evolution of jazz, tracing both the evolution of his playing style and the critical reception to it. The first half of this study concentrates on Coltrane's career, from his early days as a semianonymous sideman to his final, increasingly experimental recordings, while the second half explores the growth of Coltrane's legacy after his death. Ratliff has a keen sense of Coltrane's constantly changing sound, highlighting the collaborative nature of jazz by discussing the bands he played in as both sideman and leader. (One of the more intriguing asides is a suggestion that Coltrane's alleged LSD use might have inclined him toward a more cooperative mode of performance.) The consideration of Coltrane's shifting influence on jazz—and other modern musical forms—up to the present day is equally vigorous, refusing to rely on simple adulation. Always going past the legend to focus on the real-life stories and the actual recordings, Ratliff's assessment is a model for music criticism. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Sonny Rollins made an album called Saxophone Colossus, but his contemporary John Coltrane became the embodiment of that title, the last soloist to date to dominate jazz as Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker had. New York Times jazz critic Ratliff gives us not another biography but rather a history of Coltrane's "sound," his personal manner of playing. Half the book traces Coltrane from beginning on the alto sax to adopting the tenor during early jobs to initial fame in Miles Davis' and Thelonious Monk's working bands and as a leader on recordings in the 1950s. The rest analyzes his last seven years leading the most successful quartet of the 1960s, for which he took up soprano sax, and more experimental ventures after disbanding it. Ratliff demonstrates that the first period was one of increasing complexity in Coltrane's solos; the second, of increasing tonal variety and extramusical (spiritual) motivation but decreasing structural underpinnings as Coltrane exploited modal scales over sparse or no Western chord changes. This is popular, nontechnical music analysis at its best. Olson, Ray

Review

"Ratliff has turned me on to more music over the last few years than any other writer. . . . The listening skills of a great critic and the ability to convey what he hears are what he brings here."--R. J. Smith, Los Angeles Times

"American jazz writing needs more books like this, which engage jazz with an expansive literary imagination in a broad cultural context. . . . This is an important and rewarding book."--Down Beat

"Overheated prose seems to follow Coltrane like an insistent stream of bum notes, but Ratliff, the dauntingly omnivorous New York Times critic, manages cool restraint in this clear-eyed, nuanced consideration of the jazz giant's influence.”--The Atlantic Monthly

"Brilliant, economical . . . sharp . . . [Ratliff] skillfully and convincingly places Coltrane as something of a man apart from most other musicians--a cultural comet, as much as a musical one."--Henry C. Jackson, San Francisco Chronicle

Customer Reviews

Trane Dissected5
Here the music of John Coltrane, arguably one of America's most important 20th Century Artists, has been laid bare on the musical autopsy table by a seasoned and confident art and Jazz critique, Ben Ratliff.

To those of us from the 1960s, whose intellect and artistic sensibilities were being constantly challenged -- even assaulted -- by a need to understand Coltrane's music, this is a welcomed contribution to the history of Jazz and to a better understanding of the music theory behind post-modern Jazz music and its familiar compositions. Using a dialect that fuses the vernacular of bebop with his own rich self-invented language of the art critic, Ratliff wields a deft scalpel in this his own self-styled musical autopsy room.

In part one of this two-part dissection laboratory, Raliff examines Coltrane's music using dense, sometimes even layered and often deeply intellectual language and analysis borrowed from music theory, excerpted from the tapes of live Jazz presentations, and from the "head sessions' of many famous Jazz musician's practice sessions. He does so with great erudition but without over-hyping or being pretentious, boring or pedantic.

Ratliff situates Coltrane's development as a musician and as a person in the context of a politically and socially hectic, but artistically rich and fertile, time. For instance:

He points out that Bebop was a new language of blues-based modernism, developed in NY in the early 40s by Charley Parker and Dizzy Gillespie and associated with fast tempos, asymmetrical melodic lines, and chord harmonies inspired by Stravinsky, Debussy, and Bartok. Ratliff explains Parker's eureka moment as being when he used the higher interval of a chord as a melody line and backed them up with appropriately related changes - only then could he play everything he had been hearing. He explains too how the two giants of the post-Charley Parker era, John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins, "separately colonized the post-Parker universe."

With great precision and an innate sensitivity to what is important, he explains Coltrane's idea of sheets of sound as being similar to the sketching of a "thin-pointed pen" versus that of a "paint-roller" -- both tracing out the same melodies. Or, as Coltrane challenged Wayne Shorter to do: "play all the sounds you can hear emanating from the "dronggg" caused by dropping a forearm across the piano keys.

Part I covers Coltrane's graduate degrees in advance music theory from both Miles Davis and his apprenticeship under Theolonius Monk; his brief stint with the master of the Avant-Garde, Ornette Coleman; and the expansive musical developments and interpretations he acquired from associations with Sun Ra, Rav Shankar, and many others. Coltrane's language on the saxophone was the language of sophistication. He played lavishly around, behind, above and outside simple changes; and he did so with great depth, stamina, fervor, and tenderness. In what is not an altogether apocryphal story, Raliff relates a tale that Coltrane, toward the end of his life, simply ran out of things that could be played on the saxophone, and out of new musical forms that could be explored.

In part two, the author gives a rich sample of comments, commentaries and critiques of those who studied, or studied with, or were affected by Coltrane's persona and music. These are well-selected comments and critiques designed to reveal even more about the artist and his music; and they do. A great part of section two draws on the rich history of Jazz and the subtext is devoted to understanding the context in which Coltrane existed both musically and socially. As the author points out, no one can understand John Coltrane without understanding that he was obsessed by, and obsessed with, musical sound, and by the demands he placed on himself in his quest for the perfect sound. Coltrane was about three things: Sound, sound, and more sound. For instance, even at their least inhibited, Coltrane's solos still show stamina that comes from difficult, almost demonic, obsessive and solitary practicing; they are derived from a deep and profound knowledge of the intricacies of music theory, and as always, his music is immensely and intricately "worked out music" in search of "the ultimate sound."

Like all great artists, Coltrane altered the lives of those he touched and of those who emulated him. They ceased to see Jazz as an exercise book, or a record collection but as an art form of open-ended possibilities. This is a fine piece of Jazz historical writing that will endure. Five Stars.

Coltrane5
Ratliff does an extrodinary job on what had to be a difficult subject. He has a way with words like very few authors I've read in a long,long time. Not only is his vocabulary boundless but the way he uses his word knowledge is beyond about anything one finds today. He must be the finest Jazz writer in the USA.

Brilliant, contentious and absorbing4
John Coltrane is an endlessly fascinating musician, whether or not you like his music - he was both traditional and forward-looking, immensely disciplined and constantly striving for more freedom, technically brilliant yet willing to work with musicians considerably less able than himself. He made a series of relatively undistinguished recordings before suddenly emerging as a phenomenon when hired by Miles Davis, and then he went from one level to another, taking jazz to terrifying levels of complexity before breaking it down into something starkly simple.

Ben Ratliff's book is about two things: what Coltrane wanted to do, and what people have wanted from Coltrane. He is clearly a good listener, and someone acutely aware of how Coltrane was coming across at the time. He is also very sensitive to the depths people have sometimes sunk to in both praise and dispraise of the man, citing as evidence both Frank Kofsky's absurd description of 'Live at the Village Vanguard Again!' as the greatest recording in the history of jazz, and Philip Larkin's bilious and vindictive article, written shortly after Coltrane's death, about how much he hated Coltrane's music - Larkin surely wanted to make other people agree with him that it was worthless, which is never a very noble ambition in a critic.

Unusually for a jazz writer, Ratliff is also aware of how Coltrane's enormous influence has spread beyond jazz and into rock and punk (never thought I would see the great jazz-punk bass player Mike Watt mentioned in a book on Coltrane). He argues, if I take his point correctly, that Coltrane's influence has often been to make subsequent players sound like Coltrane, whereas the influence of an equally gifted player such as Sonny Rollins has worked more obliquely, helping players to sound more like themselves (perhaps because Sonny is not as imitable as Trane). It's true that, of the players (at least the sax players) who were most influenced by Coltrane, the majority have not been able to overcome his influence and develop truly distinctive voices - people on the level of Dave Liebman, etc., being the exceptions rather than the rule.

This book does not require a degree in music theory to read, or any musical talent whatever. It helps if you've listened to a lot of music. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and my only quibble is that it wasn't longer. I can read about Coltrane forever.