by Keith Raether
Published in Earshot Jazz, April 1995, Vol. 11, No. 4
Late in the morning on Oct. 1, 1965, drummer Elvin Jones was rummaging through Jan Kurtis' kitchen in Lynnwood, banging on cast iron skillets, tapping on stainless steel pans. Searching for a new sound. Saxophonist John Coltrane sat quietly at the kitchen table, interrupting his inner focus only to smile at Jones or talk about song charts. Saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, pianist McCoy Tyner, bassists Jimmy Garrison and Donald Rafael Garrett -- the rest of Coltrane's band on a West Coast tour that began in San Francisco -- listened with purpose. Seattle saxophonist Joe Brazil completed the circle.
"Coltrane seemed to be thinking about a lot of things," says Kurtis, 30 years after he recorded Coltrane's seminal Live in Seattle double album and the otherworldly Om later released on Impulse Records. "There must have been an enormous amount of music going on inside of him."
Jones, meanwhile, had a cosmos of sound evolving around him. When he wasn't playing pots and pans like a sock cymbal, he was filling soda bottles with water, testing them for timbre. Coltrane had come to Seattle the previous day with his working band, augmented from the usual quartet by Sanders and Garrett, to play a two-night engagement at the Penthouse in Pioneer Square. Kurtis took the call to record the group.
"I was doing a lot of remote recording at the time," he remembers. And Coltrane was doing even more experimenting. In 1965 the saxophonist recorded at a prolific rate, as if he had received a divine calling. Ascension, recorded in June, broke new ground. The musical conception came to Coltrane in a dream, a dream in which he and his group played without reference to chords or chordal sequences. Within the music Coltrane set up dialogues of tonal and atonal sections similar to the parallel octave passages found in African vocal music.
Saxophonist Marion Brown, one of the players on the date, described the session as "wildly exciting." "We did two takes and both had that kind of thing in them that makes people scream," he said. "The people in the studio were screaming." Just as Coltrane and company would scream, literally, on the night they recorded Live in Seattle...
Sun Ship, a quartet album, followed Ascension in August. Between the two recording dates Coltranes' group traveled to the south of France for the Antibes Jazz Festival in Juan-Les-Pins. Coltrane was clearly searching for new sound, sound that would convey the vastness of the universe inside him. "I don't think I'll know what's missing from my playing until I find it, if you understand me," he told a writer for Melody Maker at the time.
Such was Coltrane's state of mind and music when he brought his group to Seattle in late September. He had turned 39 a week before he arrived. He'd thought long and hard about the composition of the band, and now Sanders and Garrett, old friends based in the Bay Area, were with him to intensify both ends of the musical spectrum. He'd thought about time, in the abstract and in the context of his group. Maybe the music needed to be free of meter. Maybe he needed to do away with the harmonic moorings of a piano. He had miles to go before he slept.
Kurtis, whose true musical interests were in Nashville, didn't know Coltrane from Bobby Goldsboro when he got the call to engineer the Penthouse date. But he knew a world about recording and brought the better part of his recording studio, Camelot, to the Pioneer Square club. "I think it was Bob Friede of KRAB-FM who contacted me about the recording -- 30 years is a lot of water under the bridge," he says. "I didn't know anything about Coltrane's music. And I certainly didn't know then how groundbreaking it was."
Kurtis lent his best recording equipment to the cause: an Ampex 350-2 tape recorder, two Ampex six-channel mixers, two Sony condensor mikes for Jones' drums and a large-diaphragm mike for Garrison's bass. "Everybody in the group had at least one mike," he says. "It was a studio setup for the most part. There wasn't a lot of live recording being done like that back then. I wanted to go all out."
On an emerald night in Seattle, Coltrane's group responded in kind. "Evolution" unfolded for 36 minutes, filling the better part of two sides of the original double album. "Body and Soul" and "Afro-Blue," traditional by comparison (and released for the first time on the new GRP reissue of Live in Seattle) were stretched light years beyond their limits. "Cosmos" demonstrated that Sanders was very much a "free" player and a perfect match for Coltrane at the time. "Out of This World," a serene, long-line ballad by Harold Arlen (from the 1945 film), first recorded by Coltrane in 1962, reached so far toward Andromeda that Kurtis didn't recognize it from the opening theme.
Coltrane was anxious to hear the playback of the tape and spent the rest of the night with headphones on. He was so impressed with the technical quality of the recording ("The tape was incredibly clear," says Kurtis) that he asked to come out to Camelot the following day. Kurtis had just finished converting the building next to his Lynnwood house into the Seattle equivalent of Rudy Van Gelder's studio in Englewood Cliffs, N.J. He was more than happy to oblige."
I was in my late 20's at the time, and it was all I could do just to concentrate on getting the mike setups right," he remembers. "Of the band, I remember Elvin most of all. When he found out I was a drummer, he showed me some licks. I could never play them in a thousand years. He also tried to explain what the new music was all about."
Coltrane was pretty quiet all day but very friendly. Everybody in the group was friendly -- and very respectful of the place. There was a lot of work to be done in a short time, of course, and the band was busy trying out things before we started to record."
To prepare for what writer David Wild would later call "the cathartic, acid-etched' music on Om, Kurtis put Jones' drums behind barriers, or "splays," that absorbed his voluminous sound in three inches of insulation. Garrison and Garrett had their own "cubbyholes" for maximum clarity and resonance. Coltrane, Sanders, Tyner and Brazil, who played flute on the date, claimed the rest of the room as their universe.
"It was a remarkable experience just watching them work," says Kurtis. "I was in a kind of Oz. Coltrane didn't say a lot, but he was in control of everything the band was doing. They were so far ahead of the times."
The Om session began around noon with an incantation: "I the Oblation and I the Flame into which it is offered / I am the fire of the world and this world's mother and grandfather / I am Om Om Om Om Om Om! Om!" The music stopped six hours later but didn't end.
Two months after Om was made, Coltrane was at the Village Gate, leading a band that featured percussionist Rashied Ali in addition to Elvin Jones. It was the saxophonist's first experiment with a two-drummer format. On Nov. 23, he recorded Meditations in the company of both Ali and Jones. A few weeks later, Tyner and Jones left the band."
A musician like John shouldn't have to depend on piano all the time," Tyner would say later. "Sometimes the piano, as an orchestral instrument, can get in the way of a soloist, especially a horn player." Especially a horn player with the sound and singular purpose of Coltrane."
There is never any end," Coltrane told music writer Nat Hentoff after the Meditation recording. "There are always new sounds to imagine, new feelings to get at. And always, there is the need to keep purifying these feelings and sounds so that we can really see what we've discovered in its pure state. So that we can see more and more clearly what we are. In that way, we can give to those who listen to the essence, the best of what we are."
For two days in Seattle 30 years ago, Coltrane didn't stop at giving us the best of what he was at the time. He gave us a glimpse of the musical universe to come.
