# An Absolute Truth: On Writing a Life of John Coltrane: Live in Japan – Full Live Album Video, Photos

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2018/09/23/an-absolute-truth-on-writing-a-life-of-john-coltrane-live-in-japan-full-live-album-video-photos/
- Published: 2018-09-23T00:06:56+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**23.09. – Happy Birthday !!! A few years ago I found a used, first-edition hardcover
of Dr. Cuthbert Ormond Simpkins’s 1975 book, _Coltrane: A Biography_, online for
$150. I had long admired its feverish, street-pulpy story about the saxophonist 
John Coltrane, whose powerful music increasingly seemed capable of altering one’s
consciousness before he died in 1967, at age forty. Posthumously, the mythology 
and exaltation of Coltrane, as well as his musical influence, only grew. But by 
that point, Simpkins had already researched and written Coltrane’s story, expressing
an uncompromising, unapologetic black voice rarely found in the annals of jazz before
or since.**

I forked up the money for the hardback. The dust jacket bears an impressionistic
black-and-white painting of Coltrane playing soprano saxophone. The rounded, sans
serif font resembles that of _Soul Train_, the popular TV show that premiered in
1971. On the back cover is a photograph of a young, Simpkins sporting a West African
dashiki shirt, a high Afro, thick sideburns, and a beard.

Simpkins’s idea for the book was conceived during his senior year at Amherst, in
1969; he worked on it during breaks from Harvard Medical School in the early seventies.
Simpkins possessed no credentials in jazz or literature. The publisher of the original
hardcover is Herndon House; quick Google and Library of Congress searches yield 
no other books from that publisher. There are identical typographical errors in 
all three editions—first and second hardback, and paperback. (Sarah Vaughan’s name,
for instance, is spelled once as “Vaughn,” and Nesuhi Ertegun appears as “Nehusi.”)
All indications point to the book having been self-published, the original piece
preserved in two later editions.

[⌊Simpkins Coltrane Cover⌉⌊Simpkins Coltrane Cover⌉[The writer Stanley Crouch remembers
when _Coltrane: A Biography_ first came out. “In the black jazz world, the arrival
of the Simpkins book was a major event,” he told me. There had been a book-launch
party at the New Lafayette Theater in Harlem during which saxophonists Sam Rivers
and George Braith played. In the _New York Times_, Gary Giddins wrote a positive
review, favoring the book to another Coltrane biography, by J.C. Thomas, that came
out the same year. It was a promising, gutsy start for the young writer, but Simpkins’s
goal was not to advance a literary career; he never wrote another jazz history. 
He forged one book on John Coltrane, then moved on to a career in medicine.

_Coltrane: A Biography _has long been out of print, but its significance has become
even more apparent since then. Leonard Brown, a professor of music and African American
Studies at Northeastern University and the author of _John Coltrane and Black America’s
Quest for Freedom_, told me, “The Simpkins book on Coltrane was written from the
perspective of a young, twenty-something black man in the early 1970s, a critical,
chaotic time in American history in general and African-American history in particular.
That perspective is hard to access today. You can’t find it in a university or conservatory
setting.”

_New York Times_ music critic Ben Ratliff, who wrote _Coltrane: The Story of a Sound_,
echoed Brown: “In the early 1970s jazz had become broken, really within a ten-year
period, and Coltrane’s death had something to do with that. I have great respect
for Simpkins’s book because it is passionately researched and great-souled. There’s
a feeling in the book of something urgent being at stake. I think Simpkins, who,
importantly, was neither a journalist nor a musician, threw himself into it. The
ways in which his book might be perceived as dated today—the detours into poetry,
for example—might yet be ways in which it stays fresh.”

*  *  *

The day after Christmas, in 2012, I packed my rented Chevrolet Impala in New Orleans
and drove five hours northwest to Shreveport. My plan was to spend a couple of days
with Dr. Cuthbert Simpkins, Coltrane biographer and trauma surgeon.

Simpkins was born in Shreveport in 1947 and returned there in 2004 to be head of
trauma surgery at LSU Health Shreveport, the former Confederate Memorial Hospital.
His parents—Dr. C.O. Simpkins, a former dentist, and Dorothy Herndon Simpkins—are
still alive and residing (separately—they divorced in the 1970s) in Shreveport. 
They were civil rights pioneers in the fifties and sixties, organizing local efforts
with national leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Ella Baker.

After dropping my bags at a bed-and-breakfast, I drove across town to the ranch-
style house Simpkins shares with his wife, Diane, in a forested suburban neighborhood.
Tuffy, as he’s known to family and friends, was wearing green hospital scrubs. He
had just returned home from a shift in the intensive care unit at Rapides Regional
Medical Center in nearby Alexandria.

In the kitchen, I met Tuffy’s mother, Dorothy, now eighty-six and recovering from
a stroke. She can walk slowly with help and can acknowledge conversation by moving
her head and smiling. She seemed delighted by our company, tapping her feet to the
music on the stereo (it was Cannonball Adderley). When _Coltrane: A Biography _was
published, Simpkins named his press, Herndon House, after her.

Before my trip I had read about Simpkins’s parents in several civil rights histories.
Dorothy and C.O. were unrelenting, at times militant advocates for equal rights.
Dr. Simpkins was known to carry a gun, including one in the shape of an ink pen 
and loaded with a single bullet. (“Nonviolent tactics sometimes worked better when
you were carrying a gun,” he told me later.) In the 1950s Dorothy was one of the
first black people in Shreveport to refuse to move from the front of a city bus.
The police once pulled her from a bus and arrested her in front of the troupes of
Boy Scouts and Cub Scouts she was escorting. In the early sixties, when Tuffy was
a teenager, two of the family’s houses were bombed by white supremacists.

After only a half hour of conversation, it was clear that Tuffy and Diane operate
as a unit. I asked how they met. They laughed together, looked at each other as 
if to ask, Are you going to tell this story or am I? “We met at the main post office
in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in 1982,” Tuffy began. “I wanted to write a book about
Russia. I didn’t know anything about Russia, so I knew I had to go there and learn
the language, all the nuances and dialects, and I needed a passport. I walked in
the post office and noticed Diane immediately. I got in line for her window. She
was beautiful and I saw that she treated people really well, and she had a beautiful
voice and a wonderful smile. I asked for her phone number. She said, I don’t give
customers my phone number. I gave her my number. She never called.

“So, one day I put on my best suit, cleaned myself up, bought a dozen roses, and
went back to the post office. I had just reread Cyrano de Bergerac, so I wrote a
poem in that romantic style and gave that to her, too. And I gave her ten phone 
numbers. I gave her my father’s phone number, my mother’s phone number, my brother’s
phone number, and a few friends’. I wrote her a note saying, If you don’t trust 
me enough to call me, call these other people as references. She waited about two
days to call. The rest is history. I never got around to my book on Russia.”

They laughed and Tuffy looked at me: “On our first date I learned she already knew
about Monk and Sun Ra.” He shrugged his shoulders. “What could I do? I was done.”

[⌊Simpkins Coltrane Back Cover-1975⌉⌊Simpkins Coltrane Back Cover-1975⌉[

I asked Tuffy when his impulse to write about Coltrane came about. He responded:

> I was working on my senior honors thesis in chemistry at Amherst in 1969. My girlfriend
> at the time, Shela Anderson, was a freshman at Smith College. She noticed that
> whenever I listened to Coltrane I took notes on pieces of paper. I listened to
> a lot of music but it was only Coltrane that moved me to write down my thoughts
> and feelings. Shela was a talented writer and she suggested that I keep my notes.
> I had been throwing the scraps of paper away, so she gave me spiral notebook to
> write in. After one night of thinking about the formulas I was deriving for my
> chemistry thesis, I woke up and declared to myself that I was going to write a
> book on Coltrane. I wanted to know who John Coltrane was. I wanted to know where
> his music came from.

*  *  *

“Trane” might as well have come from Krypton. The man “John Coltrane” is hard to
locate in other people’s memories today, or in the existing studio or club recordings
of his music, which document the known pinnacles, not the fits and starts and hours
and years of rigor and anxieties. A list of facts doesn’t help much, either: his
formative years in North Carolina are difficult to excavate and easy to summarize
or skip over. Plus, the iconographic mid-century jazz photography makes Coltrane
look seven feet tall (a 1947 Naval photograph shows him to be under five-foot-ten,
a normal-size man). The legend is overwhelming.

Distance, distraction, and apathy make the devastating chaos of the 1960s and early
seventies difficult to feel today, too. Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965. Martin
Luther King was assassinated in 1968. The Vietnam War was going nowhere. The country
was on fire, literally in some places, and reactionary forces clamped down, creating
a weird climate of both chaos and torpor. In the 1972 presidential election, the
sitting president, Nixon, carried _forty-nine_ states.

Tuffy Simpkins began researching _Coltrane: A Biography _in 1969 and published it
in 1975. During that span, he interviewed more than a hundred subjects, almost all
of them black: musicians in New York, Coltrane’s childhood friends and schoolteachers
in North Carolina. The tone he found for his book is imbedded in Coltrane’s cultural
moment, which was described by the late poet, playwright, and performance artist
Sekou Sundiata in Steve Rowland’s outstanding five-hour radio documentary, _Tell
Me How Long Trane’s Been Gone_:

People can mistake being fierce for being angry, you know, and they are not the 
same, and I think there was something fierce about what [Coltrane] was doing, something
driven about what he was doing, you know, and I think that was in tune with the 
times, you know. When I speak about this consciousness, and this developing consciousness,
developing at a very rapid rate, a very rapid pace, affecting every segment of society,
certainly every segment of the black community. There’s sort of a breathlessness
to the sixties and the seventies, as if in fact there’s not enough time to get it
all said, to get it all done, a sense of urgency that it has to happen now.

*  *  *

The next morning in Shreveport, Tuffy and Diane picked me up at the bed-and-breakfast
and drove me to the suburban house where the elder Dr. Simpkins lives with his wife.
Along the way, we meandered through the old neighborhood where the family lived 
through those years of civic strife. As with many black neighborhoods across America
in the sixties and seventies, this one was fissured by a new downtown highway bypass,
part of urban renewal, or “Negro removal,” as James Baldwin called it.

We stopped at Dr. Simpkins’s old dental office, and went inside the back room where
he held strategy meetings with dissenters and activists a half century ago. We also
saw the vacant lot where the almost-finished Simpkins family home was bombed in 
1962. (A _Jet _magazine story on the bombing valued the home at fifty thousand dollars—
about four hundred thousand in 2013 money.) We then drove into an affluent neighborhood
on Cross Lake and pulled into the driveway of the home of Tuffy’s father and stepmother.
The large house features a patio with a swimming pool and cabana. Below is a boat
dock on the lake.

The elder Dr. Simpkins could pass for a man ten or fifteen years younger. Over a
lunch of sandwiches and high-end rum, I listened to the memories. Dr. Simpkins told
this story about his grandfather, Oscar Seymour “Seeb” Simpkins, who owned valuable
real estate in nearby Mansfield: “When some whites wanted to take the choice land
he lived on, he got his guns and told a white friend who came to warn him, as he
took a swig of whiskey, You tell ’em to hurry up cause I’m damn tired of waiting.”
They never came and Seeb kept his land.

In 1962, the second Simpkins house was bombed, this one a vacation home on a lake.
Dr. Simpkins was in the crosshairs of white supremacists in northwest Louisiana 
who saw him as the principle agitator in that region. As a result, or as part of
a concerted effort, the company insuring his dental practice canceled his policy.
Dr. Simpkins was pulled in two directions: his instinct was to stay home and fight
for equality, but he also wanted to send his kids to college. The kids’ safety and
well-being came first, so Dr. Simpkins gathered the family in the living room and
told them they’d be moving.

The family eventually settled at 197th Street and 110th Avenue in Queens, and Dr.
Simpkins set up his practice there. (In 1990, he moved back to Shreveport and was
elected into the Louisiana House of Representatives.) Naima Coltrane, John’s first
wife, owned a dashiki shop a few blocks away, on Hollis Avenue. She and her daughter,
Saida, became Dr. Simpkins’s patients. When Tuffy expressed interest in writing 
about Coltrane, his father encouraged him to reach out to Naima; she was the first
person he interviewed for the book, and she later gave Tuffy contact information
for many of his sources.

*  *  *

In the car, I asked Tuffy about his process for writing _Coltrane: A Biography_.

I know I made many mistakes, but I had to write regardless of what people might 
say about it or critics might think about it. I wanted to capture the feel of Coltrane,
who he was, what his music sounded like, what the times felt like—I wanted to use
whatever mode of writing was necessary to capture that feeling. I wanted the book
to palpitate, to move and feel, to have blood running through it. To be Coltrane,
as much as a book can be somebody.

I was concerned about how white people would feel about it. I thought it might offend
them. Some of the things—the anger, the bitterness of the black experience—were 
expressed in a tough manner. But I decided I wasn’t going to change anything. I 
just let it be out there like it was.

The audience I developed in my mind’s eye was an audience of black children, as 
though I was talking to my own children. Something about writing for children imposed
an absolute truth in my effort. I thought that was the best way for me to put the
truth out there without any compromise.

*  *  *

The practice of remaking a Broadway show tune—a staple of white American popular
culture at mid-century—into something more exotic, by exploring and taking apart
the tune’s melodic, harmonic, and chordal structures and improvising around those
structures before putting them back together, was the underpinning of postwar jazz,
both white and black. It had hints of scandal and risk: exploiting or one-upping
a standard pop song by Gershwin or Cole Porter or Howard Arlen was hip, underground
entertainment. The exercise reached its zenith in 1961, when Coltrane covered “My
Favorite Things,” written by Rodgers and Hammerstein for the 1959 Broadway production
of _The Sound of Music_. He turned a two-minute forty-four second song into a thirteen-
minute warhorse of dominion.

But that was never Coltrane’s motivation, and he proved it in the six years after“
My Favorite Things” by developing music that was not based on preexisting chords
but on modes and scale structures that gave him more freedom. The elements that 
mattered to him the most were rhythm and pure sound, influenced by music from Africa
and India. One tune might span an entire set in a club, seventy-five minutes or 
more. For many listeners, Coltrane provided a model for breaking free from constraints,
for evolving into a spiritual being free of Western conventions. In 1965, his quartet
held residency at New York’s downtown club, the Half Note, and owner Mike Caterino
reported that at least ninety percent of the audience was black, a much higher number
than other black musicians drew in his club at the time. That moment is long gone,
but thankfully preserved, in part, by the many recordings Coltrane left behind.

*  *  *

The opening paragraph of _Coltrane: A Biography_ reads like a poetic note jotted
by Simpkins on scratch paper in his final semester at Amherst.

Moments. Moments of great emotion never die. They are like purple diamonds swirling
through the ages, or lavender pulsation burning, magnificently, about the mortal
universe.

Four paragraphs later, he writes, Through courage comes freedom. It takes courage
to express what you feel, to meditate as you need. Emotional depth and mastery of
technique rarely throb within a single pulsation. John Coltrane possessed, and was
possessed, by this gift. His story begins with his ancestors.

The book goes on to describe Coltrane’s family background with emphasis on his maternal
grandfather, Reverend William Wilson Blair, an A.M.E. Zion minister and relentless,
trailblazing leader for equal rights:

(Re. Blair) denounced the white man from the pulpit, teaching that we should work
together for our common advancement. Some Blacks thought being so straightforward
with “important” white folks was improper, and that conditions for Blacks need not
be improved. Others shuddered as he unleashed attacks with all the fury of the holy
ghost.

The analog between Rev. Blair and Dr. C.O. Simpkins, the gun-carrying dentist, is
clear but unstated in the book, as is the prominence of Coltrane’s family in High
Point in the 1930s with the Simpkins family’s in Shreveport in the 1950s.

The strength of the book comes from firsthand stories Simpkins obtained through 
his interviews. He tells the story of a teenage Coltrane and his best friend, James
Kinzer, one day secretly following home John’s schoolyard sweetheart, who lived 
on the poorer side of High Point. After she entered her house, the two boys knocked
on her door. When she answered, she burst into tears, ashamed and embarrassed by
her poverty.

Another story comes from Calvin Massey, a trumpeter and friend of Coltrane’s from
Philadelphia, where Coltrane moved with his family after graduating from high school,
in 1944. In the late forties, a black drummer named Nasseridine, a converted Muslim
and close friend of Coltrane’s, was beaten to death by white Philadelphia police
after being confronted while kneeling on his prayer rug on a street corner. In another
story from Massey, he and Coltrane were put in jail by Philadelphia police simply
for “corner lounging.”

*  *  *

Simpkins received early interest in his book from established editors and publishers,
but after several false starts, he took control of the process and self-published
it. He knew that would mean limited distribution—he printed two thousand hardcover
copies—but he had a singular vision for the book, a particular document he wanted
to leave behind.

The last edition was published in 1989, when Black Classic Press reissued ten thousand
paperback copies. Though Simpkins isn’t anxious to author a new edition, he says
that if he did, he’d want it published exactly as it was the first time, with the
same handful of misspellings and typographical errors and no index. The book is 
a piece for the time capsule.

*  *  *

At Tuffy’s house, I marveled at the box of his original interview tapes that he 
brought out of a closet. He interviewed iconic saxophonists Ornette Coleman and 
Sonny Rollins separately on the same day, June 1, 1972, two weeks before five men
were captured during the second Watergate Hotel burglary and a month before the 
movie _Superfly_ was released.

Listening to the tapes today, a prevailing image emerges for me: a young black medical
student finds his way into all of these different living rooms around New York and
in North Carolina in the early 1970s. He sits for hours, listening. I can hear James
Kinzer in High Point telling the story about Coltrane’s teenage girlfriend; I can
hear Calvin Massey telling about the police murder of the drummer Nasserdirine; 
I can hear saxophonist Jimmy Heath talking about looking into Coltrane’s coffin 
in the summer of 1967 and thinking to himself, “He looked like a simple boy from
the country.”

It is more difficult to write about John Coltrane than almost any other major 20th-
century artist. By the standards of many jazz musicians his life was uneventful.
Sure, he had a heroin habit for a while and Miles Davis punched him, but once he’d
experienced the “spiritual awakening” described in the liner notes of A Love Supreme
he dedicated himself to his music with extreme single-mindedness.

Novelists and poets lead eventless lives too, but since they’re working in the same
medium as the person writing about them there is a compensating overlap between 
creation and commentary. Instrumental music leaves the critic straining across an
abyss. How to convey what’s happening in this non-verbal, contentless form? One 
way is to explore the relationship between music and the larger social context from
which it emerged.

The problem, as Ben Ratliff acknowledges in his consistently stimulating new book,
is best understood within the hermetic context of, um, music. While hardly unique
to Coltrane, this dilemma profoundly affects the way we listen to him. Recorded 
on November 18 1963, the mournful “Alabama” is assumed have been written in response
to the bombing of a church in Montgomery, Alabama, two months earlier. A few years
ago, however, the jazz critic Francis Davis provocatively suggested that if this“
was what Coltrane meant for the piece to be ‘about’, he kept it to himself in the
recording studio, not saying a word about the deaths of those children to the pianist
McCoy Tyner or the drummer Elvin Jones, both of whom were sidemen at the session.
As far as they remember, the piece didn’t even have a name yet.”

If this sounds vaguely blasphemous then it is an indication of the other obstacle
to writing about Coltrane: the sheer awe he inspires. Sonny Rollins is a great saxophonist.
Miles Davis was a genius. Coltrane was – what? A visionary seeker? A saint? Miles
may have taken music in “New Directions” but Coltrane was compelled “to go cosmic”.
The words are those of the trumpeter Charles Tolliver, who spoke for many when he
said Coltrane “was God”. Founded after his death in 1967, the Church of John Coltrane
in San Francisco was of similar mind, though this belief proved rather costly when,
in 1981, his widow Alice sued for 7.5 million bucks for copyright infringement.

Coltrane’s death, aged 40, had about it the air of self-immolation. Rashied Ali,
who duetted with him on the last studio recordings, Interstellar Space, reckoned
Coltrane “exhausted the saxophone”. Ratliff wonders if this is to understate the
matter: did he also exhaust jazz itself?

Ratliff’s unusual approach to the compound difficulties of writing about Coltrane
is not to rehearse the story of his life but to trace the history of his sound. 
Not just the way he sounded – and we run into familiar linguistic shortcomings quite
early on, when that sound is described as “large and dry, slightly undercooked” –
but the evolution of what jazzers used to refer to as his “concept”. Ratliff then
extends his investigation, in the second half of the book, to examine Coltrane’s
legacy.

Coltrane’s style evolved in traditional journeyman fashion: he heard Charlie Parker,
played alto with Dizzy Gillespie’s big band, switched to tenor and toured with Earl
Bostic. After a brief period with Davis he did a long stint with Thelonious Monk.
What Ratliff calls “the beginning of Coltrane’s trance music” can be heard in 1958
when he was back with Davis, playing the Monk tune “Straight, No Chaser” on the 
album Milestones. A year later the Davis quintet recorded Kind of Blue but, impatient
to pursue his own explorations of the potential for modal jazz opened up by Davis,
Coltrane formed his own quartet with Jones, Tyner and Jimmy Garrison (bass). They
remained together for six years. During that stretch, Tyner estimates, they “rehearsed
four or five times”. The rest of the time they were performing and recording, flat
out.

Coltrane often embellished the core quartet with extra players and instruments but
after the addition of a second drummer (Ali) and tenor player (Pharoah Sanders) 
the centre could not hold. Tyner and Jones quit (“All I could hear was a lot of 
noise,” the drummer complained). Garrison stayed till the end, alongside Ali, Sanders
and Alice Coltrane on piano.

Ratliff correctly insists that Coltrane always “did his best work in quartets, no
matter how much a fifth member had to offer”. Revered for his uncompromising oddity,
Eric Dolphy lacked an “internal clamp on time”; his presence, “instead of intensifying”
the benchmark Village Vanguard residency of 1961, invariably “made it slacker”.

The fact that Ratliff gets so much right makes some of his decisions of emphasis
all the more surprising. For anyone wishing to trace the tensions and transitions
that led the quartet to swell into a sextet before dissolving into the eventual 
quintet, there is an absolute godsend in that Meditations was recorded first with
Tyner, Jones and Garrison and then rerecorded and rearranged a few months later,
in November 1965, with the addition of Sanders and Ali. Shelved at the time but 
released posthumously, the quartet version is performed on a precipice. Coltrane
drives ahead even though there is nowhere to go. As the first track, “Love”, moves
into the second, “Compassion”, there is an interlude of sublime weightlessness. 
From then on we are pretty much in freefall. Ratliff chooses not to examine this
forensically crucial evidence. When considering the final tour of Japan in the summer
of 1966 he does not even mention the single most extraordinary feature of the resulting
four-CD set: going right back to his days with Gillespie, Coltrane plays alto.

Ravi Shankar was “disturbed” by the frustration, turbulence and turmoil he detected
in this terminal phase of his friend’s career. Having produced music of an unprecedented
intensity, Coltrane was heaven-bent on achieving still greater intensity. As a consequence
the main question jazz had to face after his death was very simple: if your starting
point is a scream where do you go from there? The answer, in brief, is that you 
keep on screaming until you’re hoarse. Or – never a bad idea when faced with a dead
end – you go back and, like the brothers Marsalis, consolidate the pre-free tradition.
Or you move sideways, out of jazz, towards rock (Davis) or “world” music. Some people(
Archie Shepp, David Murray) did two of the above. A few (Sanders, Don Cherry) did
a bit of all three.

Ratliff’s problem in examining the post-Coltrane aftermath is inextricably tied 
up with the excellence of his credentials. He is the jazz critic for the New York
Times. To his credit he deploys a wider range of cultural reference than many jobbing
music critics (“Ali Akbar Khan, Thomas Bernhard, Björk, James Brown, [and] Mark 
Rothko” all come pouring out in one extraordinary outburst) but his outlook is provincial
in two important ways. Blinkered by the New Yorker’s assumption that his city is
the centre of the world, he appears deaf to the claims of great British Coltrane-
obsessed tenor players such as Evan Parker or Alan Skidmore. While acknowledging
Coltrane as a determining influence on composer Steve Reich – who saw him play about
50 times – Ratliff tends to confine himself to jazz as a narrowly defined and increasingly
atrophied musical form.

Expand the search area and Coltrane’s enduring presence is felt in all sorts of 
unexpected places and ways, from the pioneers of Detroit techno, to the Australia-
based, post-everything trio the Necks. These links are revealing precisely because
they are not obvious in the way of the genealogical connections between Coltrane
and the sax-playing Parkers, Charlie and Evan. For Lloyd Swanton, bassist with the
Necks, it was not the saxophone but “the hypnotic rhythm section vamp on the first
version of ‘My Favorite Things'” that set him thinking along the lines of hour-long,
tranced-out grooves that came to characterise the Necks’ output.

To return, Coltrane-like, to where we started: Ratliff has set himself an almost
impossible task. Coltrane’s music was so powerful that it mystified even those who
were part of its creation. A couple of years ago the American poet Philip Levine
told me how, in the early 1960s, a friend had taken him to hear the quartet play
a club date (in Detroit, I think). Blown away by what they heard, they were quite
incapable of making sense of it. Fortunately the poet’s friend knew Elvin Jones 
and asked him, in the interval, what Coltrane was up to, what they were doing together.
Jones shrugged: “Beats the shit outta me,” he said.

**By Sam Stephenson**

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