In an unsentimental mood … John Coltrane performs at Newport Jazz Festival in 1966. Photograph: Gai Terrell/Redferns
The sax star turned his back on fame to embrace free jazz. Caught on a tape machine hidden in an overcoat, newly revealed recordings show how he did it
In August 1965, at the height of his fame, saxophonist John Coltrane headlined the DownBeat jazz festival in Chicago. Taking to the stage with a new member of his band, young experimentalist Archie Shepp on tenor, Coltrane’s quartet blew through a series of jagged and free improvisations, straying from structured compositions and, instead, hurling down sheets of sound so loud and aggressive that they reportedly caused widespread walk-outs. DownBeat’s own reviewer later wrote: “They gave as tasteless a display of musicianship as I’ve ever heard … Shepp and Coltrane seemed to be more interested in trying to out-honk, out-squeal and out-bleat each other than in playing music.”
That 1965 performance should have been a triumphant moment, after five years of Coltrane’s star ascending. Since leaving Miles Davis’s “first great quintet”, with whom he had recorded what would become the bestselling jazz album of all time – 1959’s Kind of Blue – Coltrane founded an entirely new harmonic language in jazz with the 1960 release of his solo LP Giant Steps, had a radio hit with his 1961 version of The Sound of Music’s My Favourite Things and, in January 1965, formulated his own spiritual imagining of jazz music with the Grammy-nominated album A Love Supreme. He was already a giant of the genre, contributing dozens of compositions to the standard repertoire, but two years later, in 1967, aged just 40, he would be dead of liver cancer.
“He torched his commercial appeal by going avant garde,” says the writer and Coltrane biographer Ben Ratliff. “He wasn’t interested in pissing people off but he wanted to absorb new influences, younger players and explore the unknown. He always wanted to keep moving forward and to keep listening to himself. He was questing and working towards a kind of endless music.”
‘This was social music’ … John Coltrane. Photograph: CBS Photo Archive/CBS/Getty Images
To mark the centenary of Coltrane’s birth this month, that quest is being documented on a series of previously unreleased, holy grail recordings of his nightclub experiments. Regularly taking up four- to six-week residencies in spaces such as the Jazz Gallery in Manhattan, the Showboat in Washington DC or Pep’s Lounge in Philadelphia, Coltrane would play extended sets of new material that existed purely in the moment of their making: unplanned and unruly.
The Tiberi Tapes … holy grail recordings from the height of Coltrane’s live career.
Dubbed The Tiberi Tapes after Frank Tiberi, the saxophonist who made the recordings, the reel-to-reel tapes initially existed as Tiberi’s private means of study. Taking a bulky Magnavox TR-100 to clubs, with its microphone hidden in the sleeve of his overcoat, Tiberi began recording concerts, managing to change the tapes in the dark every 30 minutes to capture as much of Coltrane’s virtuosity as possible. Following Coltrane’s quartet from 1960 to 1964, just before the recording of A Love Supreme, Tiberi amassed 80 reels of recordings and more than 60 hours of music that he began sharing with select peers and students: a map of Coltrane’s circuitous route to endless music.
Sax legend Joe Lovano played with Tiberi as part of the Woody Herman Big Band in 1976 and remembers being astounded by the material. “Frank would come and put the headphones on me and press play on certain sections to illustrate the way Coltrane would work harmonic changes or melodies,” Lovano says. “It was inspiring because you could already hear how he was playing single tunes for 35 minutes or more; really stretching out to follow the music and let it take him where it wanted to go. That freedom of his later work was always present in the way he took his own melodic path and left space for others.” Lovano later played with McCoy Tyner, Coltrane’s pianist from 1960 to 1965, “and he told me they all knew Frank was recording but he had their blessing. The band knew it was for education and the music first.”
Tiberi, who is now 97 and was unavailable for interview, offered up the tapes recently to Coltrane’s final record label, Impulse!, as a means of preserving their history. Whittling down those 26 hours of music to 11 newly mastered compositions, the Tiberi Tapes compilation doesn’t shy away from the often poor audio quality of the haphazard recordings or the raucous environment of their making. Audience members can be heard chatting in the background or yelping in response to spirited passages, while Coltrane’s saxophone lines weave through the tape hiss to produce startlingly beautiful takes on a slower, more melodic version of Giant Steps, as well as a 33-minute extension of A Love Supreme’s Resolution. “The energy of these recordings is important because it captures the creative spark Coltrane was feeding off,” says jazz historian Ashley Kahn. “This was social music, so people are chatting or making noise, but if you can work your way through, it gives as much back as you put in.”
For Lovano, the Tapes serve as a testament to the relationships Coltrane had with each of the musicians in his band. “It was legendary how much he practised and played, all day, every day. And then performing until 4am before driving home to his babies. He’s just a young man striving in his 30s and he shares that inspirational energy,” he says. “You can hear how he digs new cats like Archie Shepp or [drummer] Rashied Ali or [saxophonist] Pharoah Sanders – they loved each other and he let everyone stand on their own two feet. You can always hear the seeds of where he will go next.”
What came next was the most uncompromising album of Coltrane’s career. Recorded in June 1965 (a few weeks before the DownBeat festival show) and released the following year, Ascension was the first recorded taste of this unruly, alienating music. He expanded his quartet to include seven extra players from the experimental fringes of free jazz, including Sanders and John Tchicai who would go on to be pioneers in their own right. The 40-minute suite was recorded unrehearsed in two takes and plays like a big band spiralling through screeching solos that struggle to maintain their balance over the shifting tectonic plates of melody. At points, the cacophony is so overwhelming that it feels like listening to seven conversations at once.
“Post-1965, it’s the line in the sand, and still the most challenging part of Coltrane’s career for many,” Kahn says. “It was so new and revolutionary they didn’t have names for it. Was it Energy Music? The New Thing? It was so radical that people had real issues understanding what was going on.”
Coltrane performing circa 1960. Photograph: Gai Terrell/Redferns
By 1966, after Tiberi stopped recording and had embarked on his own career, Coltrane had absorbed several new, subversive players into his fold, including free music saxophonist Albert Ayler, who was famous for playing 40-minute elongated live versions of single, hard-blowing tunes. During a show with Ayler, two drummers and Coltrane’s wife, Alice, a pianist, at the Lincoln Center in New York in February of that year, even more of Coltrane’s audience reportedly left in droves after hearing the untethered, explosive direction in which his music was going. The writer Amiri Baraka described the atonal experience as a sound “of an actual frightening nature... it swallowed you!”, while saxophonist Dave Liebman estimated almost half of the 2,600-seat audience walked out over the hour-long performance.
“In Coltrane’s later period, we have an artist who is at such a masterful level that his playing has moved beyond our immediate understanding,” saxophonist and Coltrane acolyte James Brandon Lewis says. “There was always intent and direction with his line but our ears might be too untrained to know what he was trying to solve. He was connecting improvisation to the tribal and spiritual history of music, seeing it all as one thing – the folklore and the future.”
Continuing to perform and record until just months before his sudden death in July 1967, the question of where Coltrane would go next has haunted fans and listeners ever since. “He was always searching for his sound and he never stopped,” says saxophonist Melissa Aldana. “In the later years, it was like he was trying to find a divine vibration, free from any kind of preconceived limitations. He was deep into the sound and he was totally free. That’s what always brings me back to him and it means there will always be something new to find in his playing as we continue to listen.”
While his audiences might have waned in his later years, it is that same, ceaseless searching that now seems to pull younger listeners in 100 years on from his birth. Ironically, Ascension – the album that heralded his “difficult” late phase – was reissued in June this year owing to demand. “Don’t analyse him, just hear,” Lewis says. “Open up your heart and receive the message. Whatever you think it might be.”
