I’ll make no bones of it, this isn’t easy music. This isn’t music that will make you many new friends. This isn’t music you can really discuss with too many people. This is music that is going to cause friction in relationships, upset neighbours, and frighten pets. Yet this is important music. It is music that resets both the mind and the heart, unadulterated pure expression free from any constraints – be that financial, artistic, or any need for popular approval – that, given time, will completely alter your whole perception on life. Ok, I can already feel a breeze here from those eyebrows lifting at such hyperbolic hubris, but trust me on this. Allow your ears to lose the battle in order for your heart to win the war. Resistance is futile. Put this on loud and just let it absorb into your every pore. There is nothing to fear but there is a lot to gain. It can’t hurt you, it doesn’t want to. Its goals are divine. Their purpose celestial. This is true gospel music.
A few months after releasing ‘A Love Supreme’ an album that catapulted the North Carolina-born saxophonist from the shadows to the spotlight, Coltrane brought together some of the scene’s young exploratory firebrands including Archie Shepp, Marion Brown, Pharoah Sanders and John Tchicai to make what was essentially a big band record, Ascension. Partially charted and loosely set-up by Coltrane through a small number of communal chord progressions the real heartbeat here is the extended solo passages of free exploration left entirely to the whim of the individual player. Two recordings were made both around forty-odd minutes long, both incorporating this captivating to and fro between dense, chaotic full band interactions and fiery, unrestrained solo exploration. At first it feels like being dipped in lava, every sinew in instant recoil, but after a few plays the ears start to relax and you begin to breathe a little slower, start to experience the sounds as they swirl around the room. A few more plays and you can begin to distinguish the different approaches and styles of the musicians involved – the assured, confident Trane leading it off, Sanders’ freer, somewhat angrier stance, Brown’s thoughtful, gentler probing – and really start to get a sense of how the music is organically evolving, how each round of group/solo interactions is used to drive and expand the idea. Keep listening and like with any album the music becomes strangely familiar. The fear factor is gone, the aural defences are down and it begins to work on your senses and emotions. And there you have it, you are in. This is celebratory music. Spiritual music. This is music that celebrates the very meaning of life itself. When it clicks you are completely under its spell. You are converted, anointed by the Church Of Trane. You will become insatiable for this music. It will become your everyday soundtrack.
Beautifully packaged as a double LP by Impulse including both Edition 1 and 2 of the session lovingly remastered as part of their Verve Vault Series this is a great way to begin a musical immersion into the Coltrane catalogue. Heading backwards you begin to understand how he arrived at this point through his work with Miles Davis, his seminal Atlantic period, and the aforementioned A Love Supreme. Push further on and you will hear how these ideas of freedom and celestial yearning take greater prominence in the latter years of his life as he searched for ultimate spiritual acceptance and peace. Ascension is a turnout, a crossroads for both Coltrane, jazz, and black America, a point where the ‘new’ music became a catalyst to ultimate freedom. Give it a go, in this fucked up world what have you got to lose?
Released through the Impulse imprint of Verve Records.
Review by Del Day
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Del Day is proprietor of independent record shop Union Music Store in Lewes, DJ (Songs From The Ark) and ournalist with published work in Shindig, JazzReview, CMP, Groovy Times, Americana-UK and others.