Encounters with Elvin

Bertil Holmgren

since 2002

Recent articles (3 total)

Published: April 25, 2007

Let's get back to Elvin. Over time I, like many, have come to realize him to be a grand human being, and as a fellow creature, too. In music, as in sports, the greatest individuals are those who play for the team. Team playing came perfectly natural to Elvin, and he played his role with joy (which to a minor extent is true for McCoy, although my impression is that he was never really able to be equally generous, and it affects his aftermath). Elvin was the engine of the rhythm section around Coltrane, A V-8 sometimes running on four cylinders, sometimes on six. Additionally, the Elvin engine was mounted in a car with oval wheels. This odd transmission produced a beat that seemed like convulsions, like peristalsis. Elvin Jones's music, as well as Coltrane's, resembles Richard Wagner's, to some extent: extensive, pompous, filled with layers and references. Wagner perhaps should be dealt with in a different context, but his way of continuously twisting sequences forming an 'infinite melody' is so strikingly similar to Elvin's and Trane's. I think also of the attempts by Coltrane to convert his horn into two, to play several octaves simultaneously, to find new notes beyond what the instrument in fact was designed to permit.

The music of the group at the time was still not complete. Pretty recently they had left behind the phase when forming the quartet, with broken up harmonies and new sounds, which in turn was a period of transition from basically hard bop music. Coltrane was developing tremendously and the others were forced to follow. Elvin, the team player, signed in without a doubt. If you have heard "Afro-Blue" you see what I mean. Elvin's music, so potent, is still only a motorway for Trane to drag on. Someone has said that beauty only is in the eyes of the beholder, but here it was for real. And "Afro-Blue" ends as it starts, a bit like life itself.

In an interview, Elvin has said that Coltrane had a sense of divinity about him. I suspect he meant to include his feeling that his relationship to Trane was like an apostle, and that Coltrane was his master. Let's not for one moment forget this contradiction that was Elvin's, that as coherently as you lay a road of concrete, you break it up with bulldozers. And you are laying that road for one single man to travel. It's great.

My nights patronizing Birdland were split with days in arcades (pin ball halls), hamburger joints, and record stores around Times Square. One night, I brought with me an album, the newly released Africa/Brass, to the club with the faint cherished hope of a Coltrane autograph. In New York then, as you all know, there were an abundance of jazz clubs with awesome music. Besides the most famous ones, there were smaller joints like one hole in the wall right on Times Square, called the Metropole. It was unique in the respect that it really was a hole in the wall, no wall or door to the street, you could stand on the sidewalk up front listening to people like Jack Teagarden, Jimmy Smith, the Woody Herman Band (how do you manage to squeeze a big band into a 6 meters wide and maybe 15 meters deep hole which was mainly a bar? And who had to pay for the whole show?). Carrying the Africa/Brass under my arm I pulled away from Metropole to my constant nightly sermon at Birdland—at the corner of Broadway and 52nd Street ('a dollar admission- how could you go wrong?'). I was considering being able to nick Coltrane in between sets, but that wasn't possible. Obsessed by his chase for development, after each set he'd disappear into the back regions of the club, and after a minute or so you could hear him practicing scales, up and down, down and up, without an end. You all know what it's normally like at clubs during intermissions. Everyone relaxes, the musicians might take a beer or a coffee, talk to friends in the crowd, just loosienng up. This was the case here too, except for one man. Scales, scales, scales. I was then a rather shy teenager. In the middle of a tune (it might have been I Want to Talk about You), when Coltrane had gone down to sit at one of the tables lighting one of many Cuban cigars, I pulled myself together and went over with the record. My intention was to trap his attention, maybe get a conversation going. "Mr. Coltrane", said I, "I'm from Sweden and I admire your music very much." Perhaps he was as shy as me, or just reserved, or concentrated in McCoy's solo (if not stoned, I don't know if he was still into drugs at the time) but he didn't react. I repeated what I said bent over his left ear handing him the album. He slowly looked up at me with the words "Sweden, huh?" and pulled out a chair. For a few minutes, that felt like eternity, he kept smoking his cigar staring blindly ahead of him. Then he wrote: "Thank you + very best wishes. John Coltrane."

View All 1 2 3 Next »