Ravi Coltrane: The son also shines
Saxophone player pushes past father’s legacy and into new, risky territory
You listen hard when Ravi Coltrane talks about John Coltrane, his late father. You wonder what the son might reveal about himself.
Envy? It’s not there even if there’s reason it might be. Coltrane Sr., a game-changing force in jazz and international star when he died in 1967 at age 40. Trane, as he was called, had a church named in his honour. His Philadelphia home is now an American National Historic Landmark. Ravi, at 47 years old, might still be called an emerging, if widely respected, artist as he’s set to appear at Koerner Hall on Saturday.
Bitterness or anger? I can’t detect a hint, a startling revelation on its own. Ravi — named after Ravi Shankar, the great Indian sitarist — was left a fatherless toddler in the care of his mother, Alice Coltrane, who had her own life and career as a jazz pianist to consider.
It was only following the death of his brother John Coltrane Jr. in a car accident that Ravi, then a teenager, felt impelled to dig through the many layers of his father’s legacy. He listened to John Coltrane LPS, tracing his dad’s history through his Miles Davis years to his time with Thelonious Monk and Johnny Hodges. To Ravi, his father’s spirit was a sound.
Respect? That you find in abundance. “I believe we are responsible for what we do,” the saxophone player says via telephone. “But I also believe in genetics to a certain degree. I was very fortunate to have been in the family I was in. He was my father and he was John Coltrane. I am very proud of the fact of his courage.”
Coltrane Sr.’s courage manifested itself in many ways. Most notable was his spiritual and physical struggle to extract himself from early heroin and booze dependencies which may have contributed to his life-ending liver cancer, a fast fade that stunned the jazz world. (Miles Davis had no idea his one-time collaborator was even ill.)
But to Ravi Coltrane, the idea of courage also takes on a specific musical meaning — of trusting your intuition to play what you want to play, as his father did, to force yourself not to sound or think as someone did before you.
“If I were only trying to play like someone else, I would have developed into an entirely different play- er,” Ravi explains, sounding entirely professorial on the subject. “But I was never any good at that. I remember at college (the California Institute of the Arts) I would try to learn someone’s licks, a Dexter Gordon lick or whatever. But no matter how well I had that lick worked out in the practice room, as soon it was my turn to solo, I’d flub it. It would sound awkward. “You can create better and better technicians in jazz. You can go around the world and find proficient players. You’ve got 12-yearolds playing at the college level. The tricky part is finding players who want to take risks, the risks taken by the John Coltranes or the Charlie Parkers.
“Doing something new is not often encouraged today. What are they saying to a young player leaving school? Strive for tradition or strive for innovation? Well, guess who gets the record deals and media attention? There is a guarantee (of success) if you stay with tradition. Jazz is not a mystery anymore.”
“Perhaps there are two words summarizing this play-it-safe tendency in jazz,” I suggest. “Yes?” he asks. “Wynton Marsalis,” I say. I’m surprised that this possible interview-ending reference to the widely influential Marsalis doesn’t result in an abrupt dial tone. I’m more surprised that Coltrane — who has his own record company, RKM Music, five albums as leader and is wise to the politics of jazz — would confront the aura surrounding the famed trumpeter and fashion maven.
“This is not a knock on Wynton but this (conservatism) reflects the power of his influence on jazz,” says Coltrane. “He’s extremely talented, extremely knowledgeable and very intent on exploring his idea of what jazz is through its traditions. This was an influence on me for a while — I thought it’d be great to live in the past — up until 1986, when I set out seriously to be an improviser.”
Pianist Mccoy Tyner and drummer Elvin Jones — who earlier toured with Coltrane Sr., with bassist Jimmy Garrison — lead a long list of jazz notables who’ve also worked with Ravi Coltrane. He understands the weight his name carries.
But his need to “get out of my comfort zone,” in his words, led to him severing ties last year with players he’d surrounded himself with since 2003 and to form the new band he’s bringing to Toronto.
“I think I got into some ruts over the past 10 years,” he says. “It made me less flexible. I’m now feeling very positive about where I’m going.” Peter Goddard can be reached at peter_g1@sympatico.ca