John Coltrane - Ascension
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CD Details
Artist: John ColtraneEdition: Music CD
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Format: Original recording remastered
CD Release Date: 2000-06-06
Music Label: Polygram Records
Soundtracks:
- Ascension-Edition II - John Coltrane
- Ascension-Edition I - John Coltrane
Music reviews of Ascension
Music Review: A Musical Tour-de-Force Thrill Ride
Rating: 5 Stars
Prologue added:
Some of the reviewers have written that this music is somehow farcical or that it lacks substance. There was a time when I would have agreed. Fortunately, I found a way to approach this music. I was giving this some thought this morning while listening to Coltrane's Om and ruminating on how form eventually started to reveal itself in what originally sounded like a mess. It occurred to me that the later works are very much like those puzzle pictures we used to see back in the 90's. When you first looked, it was just a rectangle with a bunch of tiny random shapes and colors. Your friend kept telling you that there was a clipper ship in that picture. You strained to see it, got frustrated, put it down, picked it up, tried it again without success. And then you found that when you stopped trying to see that clipper ship and simply relaxed a 3D hologram emerged from the backdrop and yes, there really was a clipper ship hidden in that mess. That's what listening to Coltrane's later day works are like. The emperor is in fact wearing cloths, you just haven't relaxed, put away your preconceived notions for "looking" allowed yourself to see them.
Original Review:
There is so much I want to write about Ascension that I'll probably update this review from time-to-time. First, Robert Rub III and his "Emporer's New Clothes" review. Robert, I know exactly where you are coming from and I've written much the same sort of review about other "post-modern" works. I'm afraid I can't agree in this case though, for one thing, Coltrane has an incredible pedigree of a career. The man KNEW exactly what he was doing. That pedigree legitimizes this work. I fear you have sold yourself short in this instance. You have to get beyond your comfort zone in order to discover what is happening here. Anyway, enough of that.
Ascension is a wild roller-coaster ride with twists and turns and free-falls that take our breath away. And when the first 40 minute ride is complete we get to say "Let's do it again!" and listen to the 38 minute Ascension I (which was really take 2 in the studio).
Ascension is Coltrane as Shiva (the Hindu destroyer & creator), this session is truly the continental divide of Coltrane's solo career and yeah, he destroys what he built up, but he also creates something very new, so new in fact that we have to step away from our assumptions about what music should be in order to glimpse what he has discovered.
Ascension is so much like life. We are all improvisers. We go through life with our own framework (values) but whether we admit it or not, we are wingin' and making up our lives as we move along. We encounter others, it changes us. We oscillate from chaos to order then back to chaos. Ascension is very much like that oscillation from chaos to a kind of improvised order.
People who call this noise are not REALLY listening to what is happening. When the horns play together, the players are communicating to one another, call and response, shouts, hollers. It's incredibly powerful stuff. Then we get the lone voice of a soloist, telling his story. Freddie Hubbard stands out in particular, what an amazing player. Is it any accident that he ended up on some of the most important "new jazz" works such as Out to Lunch, Ole, Point of Departure?
If there is one single flaw with Ascension, it might be that Hubbard's mic is too hot and at times his playing obscures the other players (during the ensemble passages).
Ascension is an awe-inspiring work. It isn't easy to listen to this music. Your ear has been trained to what is called "natural cadence", resolving the V7 to the I chord. Coltrane, in his role as Shiva, offers no such rest for you. You have to be willing to go with him, destroy what you know and then listen. This is the key to listening to every Coltrane work from Ascension onward (like Meditations for instance). That's it, that's all I'm gonna write. Yeah, I like the pretty stuff, like Trane's earlier work, or the Miles Davis Quintets. But I can dig Ascension too! Let go and let it wash over you.
Description of Ascension
All products are BRAND NEW and factory sealed. Fast shipping and 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed.Few works remain genuinely controversial 35 years after their inception, but Ascension can generate as mixed a response today as it did when it was released. In May 1965, Coltrane assembled 10 other musicians for one of his most ambitious recordings, a 40- minute piece that was a landmark in the free-jazz movement and a key moment in Coltrane's sponsorship of the younger members of the New York avant-garde. Along with his regular rhythm section--McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, and Elvin Jones--the band includes trumpeters Dewey Johnson and Freddie Hubbard, tenor saxophonists Archie Shepp and Pharoah Sanders, altoists Marion Brown and John Tchicai, and Art Davis playing bowed bass. The improvised ensembles shout and cry with galvanizing power, their tension testifying to Coltrane's influence and the saxophone's dominance in the style. It's both brilliant and flawed work, however, in ways that go to the heart of Coltrane's musical thought. It's rooted in modal music, with a brief pentatonic figure (a variation on the opening motif of A Love Supreme) as its basis. While it's broken up by the intense ensembles, the string of solos seems too close to a Jazz at the Philharmonic approach to free jazz. The horns stretch toward energy music, while the rhythm section, particularly Tyner, seems rooted in modality. As a result, the soloists often come off the soaring blowouts to find themselves with little more support than a reiterated chord, and they sometimes seem to merely run out of steam. It's still startling music, though, and necessary listening, whether for the sheer power of the ensembles, the sustained creativity of Coltrane and Sanders, the stylistic contrasts in the horn players, or the acerbic understatement of Tchicai, so effective in the midst of the maelstrom. Coltrane couldn't decide on which of the two versions he preferred, and Edition II was covertly substituted for Edition I during the run of the original LP. This CD manages to include both. --Stuart Broomer
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