Coltrane Plays Naima in 1965

Before you read all this, make sure you watch the video and listen. Don't read until you've listened.

Now that you've listened: I'm a fan of jazz, a huge fan, in fact. I'm the kind of person - or rather, the kind of listener - who always pays more attention to the music of a song than the lyrics. Always. I even usually listen to Bob Dylan for the music more than the lyrics, and jazz is to me seems to be the most perfectly realized purely instrumental art form there is, so there's no reason I'm so in love with it. (No disrespect, I should add, to "classical" music - in quotation marks because I hate that term.) I listen to anything from Coltrane to Bud Powell to Sam Rivers to Pharoah Sanders. I guess what I'm trying to get across is, I listen to a lot, and pretty broadly. And yet, this single video, which I happened on by chance one day on Youtube is one of my favorite jazz recordings I've heard, ever (perhaps after Thelonious Monk's "Pannonica" or Trane's own Love Supreme). I haven't been able to find an audio recording of it, I don't even know where it was recorded (my guess is somewhere in Europe), or when it was recorded in 1965. When exactly in 1965 it was recorded is crucial, because it's either before or after Coltrane's free jazz magnum opus, Ascension, recorded on June 28 of that year, which gives some light on Coltrane's thoughts while playing this, and how much of a drastic change it is from his other material at the time.

In this performance, Trane takes an old tune for his former wife that he recorded for Giant Steps - which was beautiful when it was recorded then - and reworks it, but only slightly. It's not drastic at all, really. The melody is the same, at the same basic tempo. Only instead of the soft ballad on Giant Steps, everybody's intensity is increased one thousand percent: Elvin Jones at times crashes those cymbals like Keith Moon jumping into a hotel pool of polyrhythm, McCoy Tyner exerts a subtle sense of rashness, flying all over the keys, at some times pounding them, and Jimmy Garrison seems to be plucking the strings like he's afraid that at any moment, if he stops, a ship somewhere will sink. And then of course there's Coltrane, who, beginning at his solo, plays a solo of unmatchable near anguish. He uses his beautiful screeching that he used in reservation on A Love Supreme and later brings out full force on Ascension. (Pharoah Sanders later perfected it.) He shows a little bit of his early "sheets of sound" style, a constant onslaught of sixteenth-note arpeggios. He also goes low on the sax, creating a contrast between the high squealing and his best attempt to be a baritone. The greatest quartet of all time simply is at their peak here. I've already watched it five times today. I suggest you do the same.