Entrancing moments with Ravi Coltrane
Ravi Coltrane and a team of jazz greats worked their way through a dizzyingly ecstatic live set Wednesday, Aug. 2, at Stanford University’s Dinkelspiel Auditorium. The 2017 Stanford Jazz Festival closed this week, and Coltrane gave it a magnificent send-off. His set was hypnotic, mournful, emotional and tense, and nourished the spirit in ways that the brain can only begin to process.
The son of legendary saxophonist John Coltrane and jazz pianist Alice Coltrane, Ravi lived up to the name, at the same time establishing his own ravishing and original voice. For Wednesday night only, he assembled a team who could match his smoky-manic sax every note of the way. George Colligan’s sharp piano chords and Eric Revis’ bass built the foundation. Ralph
Alessi on the trumpet arched his back in a perfect C to squeeze out the most dynamic sounds. But it was Dafnis Prieto who beat the crowd into the wildest frenzy. The 43-year-old Cuban American drummer (a graduate of the 1997 Stanford Jazz Workshop) electrified with his alarmingly fast fills and cymbal-happy splashes.
Amazingly, Ravi Coltrane had never played with any of these guys before. And rarely did they reach for their sweat rags.
The quintet played five numbers — three manic and bop, two becalmed and spiritual — plus an encore (after a long standing ovation), where they spent whatever energy they improbably had left. At their best, the ensemble squeaked, hammered and bashed in tactile sync — as though trying to conjure up a storm in the cool room.
In the first number (a slowly building hurricane of speed), Coltrane started off slow and smoky, then brought in each instrument at a breakneck pace. Coltrane bent his knee to wrestle the sounds out of his sax; Prieto went into tentacle-like pyrotechnics; Alessi crisply trilled and ran all over his horn. These three formed the core of the storm, with Revis and Colligan swirling around them. The crowd cheered and yelled to Coltrane as if he played just for them in a private jazz nook. But Coltrane’s quintet also paradoxically filled up the wide auditorium; one became aware of what it’s like to breathe in brass instead of oxygen.
It was not all just breakneck bop. In the two slow numbers, regardless of religious affiliation, a listener’s hands began to unconsciously fold into prayer. In the next-to-last number, Ravi Coltrane seemed to be working through father John’s “Love Supreme” spirituality, but with a calmness and clarity of mind all his own. Coltrane’s sax spoke with pungent loss, with the sound of a lifetime of mourning. This number marked the return of the first number’s stormy cloud of sound, that hurricane eye of a perfect ensemble. But instead of energy and mania, the storm blew with an unsettling solemnity. Prieto whisked the cymbals with brushes — a pitterpatter, like beach footsteps, squarely at odds with his fiery, slambang, bash-it-out style.
It was a tear-inducing work of hymnal majesty, befitting of John Coltrane’s mid-’60s prayercentered jazz and Alice’s devotional pieces of the ’80s and ’90s (released just this May by David Byrne’s label Luaka Bop).
Throughout the night, audience brains worked overtime, as they tried to decide which musician deserved their attention. The players were equally inventive. Having to settle on one person felt like the jazz equivalent of asking Robert Altman to make his chatter-stuffed, all-over soundscapes more audible (and tamer) by focusing on only one conversation at a time. Alas, the brain can only soak in so much. Even so, by the end, one was as overwhelmed as at the end of an Altman film epic like “Nashville” or “Short Cuts.”
There was something special and mysterious about Coltrane’s set. He has been honing his rich sax tone with a quartet (not Wednesday night’s) for the past five years, but they have yet to release an album. When you experience events like Coltrane’s set, you wonder how one can ever replicate the live buzz of that room on record. It’s done time and again, of course, but Wednesday night’s Coltrane set really drove home how sensational live jazz is when it’s performed winningly. At its best, live jazz is one of the most wondrous highs in the world; Coltrane and company proved it many times over.
Coltrane started slow and smoky, then brought in each instrument at a breakneck pace.