I’ve tried. I’ve really tried. NPR did a week of morning reports on it, and every morning I’d wake up flailing for the radio, mumbling, “God, what is that awful noise?” and then lying there, chagrined, as their reporters wax poetical on how important and influential and ground-breaking it was. I kept my mouth shut and decided I was being a Philistine, not giving ol’ John the benefit of the doubt.
Well now I’ve given him the bee oh dee… and I’m sorry, but it seems like he was being aggressively atonal for the sake of making the notes conflict. Important, influential, ground-breaking? Maybe. But fun to listen to? Not for me. Sheer agony. I derived no pleasure from listening to it. I struggled to focus on it. I just can’t “get” it. It sounds as though he were trying all the other notes on the scale to make sure they weren’t the right notes, and then just when you think he’s going to do the right one, the chord changes and he has to try another set of wrong notes.
I’ve been a Phish fan, a Brubeck fan, a Radiohead fan, a Deadhead, and more: I know noodling when I hear it, and I tolerate it when I know something brilliant is coming up, or if it’s building to a revelation of some sort. Deadheads who engage in certain substances have berated me for not “getting” the noodling - recognizing its value as music on its own, apart from the revelation at the end - but we usually end up agreeing to disagree. Is this the fundamental point I’m missing?
Please convince me I can be “saved” and that I don’t have to hang my head and feel dumb whenever anyone says how great Coltrane is.
My Jazz Resumé
Ramsey Lewis - good melody, good rhythm, makes me bounce around in my seat.
Duke Ellington - two thumbs up for pretty much everything.
Herbie Hancock - love it.
Dave Brubeck - absolutely brilliant, got me into Zeppelin & Ben Folds, taught me all about time signatures, and more.
Antonio Carlos Jobim - a little out there, but catchy.
…
Coltrane - stinks on ice. No?
Coltrane can be difficult, but no more so than Ornette Coleman, Wolff, Berg or Stravinsky. Heck, have you ever tried to truly appreciate twelve-tone compositions. I love atonality, and the best I can do is appreciate it academically.
The problem with Trane at this point in his career is that was really pushing the envelope of the upper harmonic extensions, but IMO, hadn’t really managed to internalize the emotion behind the theory. IMHO, Naima and Giant Step are a whole lot more satisfactory in this regard.
I would go into more detail but to really understand it there’s a lot of pretty out there harmonic theory that I’d need to explain. I’m willing, but only if you want me to. It can get dry.
Not that understanding the theory will instantly make it appealing, but the perspective will ease the difficulty in listening to it immediately.
I tend to believe that later Trane and Ornette’s whole harmolodics period were about 1/3 pushing the theoretical boundaries of the form, 1/3 playing for other musicians and not the public at large, and 1/3 general masturbatory noodling.
A Love Supreme for me was one of those things that I hated the first time I listened to it, but then, for some reason, even though I hated it, I went back and listened to again. Didn’t like it the second time, either. Then a couple of months later I listened to it again–even after not liking it twice in a row–and thought “Well, that’s not so bad. There are parts that are OK.” Then I listened to it again a couple of days later, and it was the best thing I had ever heard in my life. When I have this reaction to music, it usually becomes one of my all-time favorite pieces. Does this happen to anyone else?
Come to think of it, this happens to me with people, too.
Actually, you’re not entirely off-base in this description. In the opening statement of the suite, Coltrane plays the main theme in all 12 possible transpositions consecutively. It’s like 12-tone music in a way.
So how much effort do you want to put into trying to appreciate music that you don’t like to begin with? If the answer is enough to sit down and tackle a book that involves some moderately complex harmonic exegesis, I can’t recommend Lewis Porter’s superb John Coltrane: His Life and Music highly enough. One thing this book will clarify is how Coltrane made the journey from bebop and bar walking in the '40s and '50s to where he was at in 1964.