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McCoy Tyner performs at the 2010 Middelheim Jazz Festival

McCoy Tyner performs at the 2010 Middelheim Jazz Festival

Photo: Peter Van Breukelen/Redferns

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McCoy Tyner: 10 Essential Cuts 10-essential-cuts-jazz-piano-great-mccoy-tyner

10 Essential Cuts From Jazz Piano Great McCoy Tyner

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The Philly pianist, who recently died at 81, tore up the rulebook as part of the John Coltrane Quartet and as a prodigious solo artist
Morgan Enos
GRAMMYs
Mar 7, 2020 - 10:25 am

John Coltrane might not have scraped the heavens without McCoy Tyner there to tether him to terra firma. "My current pianist, McCoy Tyner, holds down the harmonies, and that allows me to forget them," Coltrane said in a 1961 interview. "He's sort of the one who gives me wings and lets me take off from the ground from time to time."

Tyner began playing with the former's John Coltrane Quartet in 1960, just as its leader slipped out of the binds of bebop and embraced modal jazz. But rather than focusing on coloring outside the lines, he chose to anchor the music with a 100-pound weight. With his mighty left hand, he gave Trane, bassist Jimmy Garrison and drummer Elvin Jones a launchpad for explosive improvisations.

The jazz world now mourns its humble-yet-intrepid giant of the piano. Tyner died this week, Friday, March 6, of unknown causes, as reported by his nephew, Colby Tyner, to The New York Times. He was 81.

https://twitter.com/RealMcCoyTyner/status/1236004016062189568

A statement from the Tyner family: pic.twitter.com/uZH2wHKN67

— McCoy Tyner (@RealMcCoyTyner) March 6, 2020

Born in Philadelphia, Tyner cut his teeth in the Jazztet with trumpeter Art Farmer, saxophonist Benny Golson and a revolving-door lineup of trombonists, bassists and drummers. In 1958, a year prior to joining that band, Coltrane recorded Tyner's composition, "The Believer," at Rudy Van Gelder Studios.

When the pair joined forces, the results were some of Coltrane's most memorable albums: 1961's Coltrane Jazz, My Favorite Things and Olé Coltrane; 1962's Coltrane Plays The Blues; and 1965's epochal A Love Supreme, the latter of which was nominated for Best Instrumental Jazz Performance - Small Group Or Soloist With Small Group and Best Original Jazz Composition at the 8th GRAMMY Awards, held in 1966. 

For The Record: John Coltrane's 'A Love Supreme'

After A Love Supreme, Coltrane began experimenting with bigger, more feverish free jazz ensembles. Tyner parted ways with him in 1965, but his story hardly ended there. As a solo artist and as a leader, he won five GRAMMYs, including Best Jazz Instrumental Performance for 1987's Blues for Coltrane: A Tribute to John Coltrane and 1995's Infinity as well as Best Jazz Instrumental Album for 2004's Illuminations. His post-Coltrane body of work proved his ability to play either delicately or maximally when the setting called for it.

To celebrate the legacy of the late Tyner, the Recording Academy is highlighting his 10 essential cuts — with or without Coltrane.

"My Favorite Things" (from John Coltrane's My Favorite Things, 1961)

This Sound Of Music tune began as a cutesy ode to kittens, mittens and kettles, until Coltrane doused it in kerosene and set it on fire. His later disembowelment of "My Favorite Things" aside, the 1961 studio version is the definitive take—an innovative Eastern vamp with a sense of spiritual joy. Over its 13-minute runtime, Tyner cycles Rodgers and Hammerstein's melody to the point of hypnosis. When the key change hits, the quartet takes flight like geese with the moon on their wings.

"Inception" (from Inception, 1962)

When Tyner didn't have Coltrane around, he often let his right hand take over for him. On Inception, his debut album with a trio, bassist Art Davis and drummer Elvin Jones mostly take a background role as Tyner displays breathtaking dexterity on the ivories. Despite the density of his lines, Tyner stays importantly light, breezy and tuneful on the title cut, even as he puts the pedal to the floor during his modal pontifications.

"Reaching Fourth" (from Reaching Fourth, 1963)

If Thelonious Monk was known for his major sevenths, Tyner's calling card was voicing chords in fourths—a technique that helped lay the foundation for contemporary jazz. "Fourth chords have a mysterious stasis, refusing to commit to major or minor," pianist Ethan Iverson explained in a 2018 essay about Tyner. To that end, the title track from 1963's Reaching Fourth, with bassist Henry Grimes and drummer Roy Haynes, is a fiery showcase for Tyner's favorite interval.

"Jinrikisha" (from Joe Henderson's Page One, 1963)

When it comes to clean and simple bossa-and-bop, Joe Henderson's debut Page One is hard to beat. Strangely, Tyner—due to a conflicting contract with Impulse!—was credited on the album art as "Etc." Despite not making the marquee with trumpeter Kenny Dorham, bassist Butch Warren and drummer Pete La Roca, Tyner delivers some of his subtlest, featheriest playing ever across the album, especially on the original "Jinrikisha," named after another word for a rickshaw.

"Pt. 1 — Acknowledgement" (from John Coltrane's A Love Supreme, 1965)

A Love Supreme is well-known as Coltrane's transformational statement, in which he escaped from drugs and alcohol and into the arms of his Creator. Despite his inventions, the results would be nearly unrecognizable without Tyner. His stabbed chords—again, fourths!—on "Pt. 1 — Acknowledgement" are the what-ifs, second-guesses and entrenched doubts intrinsic to any hero's journey. Meanwhile, Coltrane plays the role of Arjuna, slaying psychic monsters with his horn.

"Blues On The Corner" (from The Real McCoy, 1967)

Tyner continued playing with Henderson after Page One, joining him for Blue Note classics In 'n Out (1964) and Inner Urge (1966). The so-called "Phantom" returned the favor on The Real McCoy, a quartet date with bassist Ron Carter and drummer Elvin Jones that featured three of his signature songs: "Passion Dance," "Search For Peace" and "Blues On The Corner." The latter tune is the wittiest and best of them all, in which he stretches the titular form like taffy and reveals universes within.

"Song Of Happiness" (from Expansions, 1969)

One of Tyner's most cerebral works, Expansions features contributions from trumpeter Woody Shaw, tenor saxophonist Wayne Shorter and alto saxophonist Gary Bartz; the latter two are also respectively credited on clarinet and wooden flute. At this stage, Tyner's playing had grown borderless and oceanic, and "Song of Happiness" shimmers like refracted light, with flutist Bartz merrily approximating birdsong.

"A Prayer For My Family" (from Sahara, 1972)

Tyner rang in the 1970s by signing to Orrin Keepnews' Milestone label and recording Sahara, a terrific African- and Japanese-inspired album in which he played the flute and koto. Transcultural voyaging aside, Sahara's center of gravity is "A Prayer For My Family," an impassioned work for solo piano that manages to be both trippily multidimensional and straight down the church aisle.

"Walk Spirit, Talk Spirit" (from Enlightenment, 1973)

Recorded at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland with saxophonist Azar Lawrence, bassist Juni Booth and drummer Alphonse Mouzon, the sprawling Enlightenment is firmly in former associate Coltrane's impassioned-seeker mode. Sitting through its 70 minutes can lead to brain melt, but the swaggering, ill-tempered closer, "Walk Spirit, Talk Spirit," makes this demanding trip worth it.

"Love Surrounds Us" (from Uptown/Downtown, 1989)

Tyner mostly stayed strong throughout the 1980s, a trying era for jazz. Despite occasionally dated era production, he made excellent work with his trio and his big band. Uptown/Downtown, recorded over two nights at the Blue Note in Manhattan, shows the latter in fighting form. Muscular, driving and exciting, "Love Surrounds Us" could have been recorded in any decade and proves that even in his third act, Tyner was formidable with or without his old boss Coltrane.

The GRAMMY Jazz Family Tree

Chick Corea in 2014

Chick Corea

Photo: Leon Morris/Redferns via Getty Images

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Remembering Chick Corea remembering-chick-corea

In Remembrance: Chick Corea Played In More Ways Than One

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The through-line of Chick Corea, a 23-time GRAMMY-winning pianist, and his body of work was a sense of childlike joy and discovery
Morgan Enos
GRAMMYs
Feb 16, 2021 - 7:11 am

Chick Corea was one of the most advanced thinkers ever to grace the piano, but he rarely spoke in terms of minor-third intervals or the Mixolydian scale. Drop into virtually anything the man said about his art, and it’ll probably hinge on two words: fun and games.

"Trust yourself to say, 'I don't know what I'm going to do next, but I'm just going to do it because it's fun,'" Corea advised in a YouTube clip in 2020 while talking about his old colleague, Miles Davis. That year, when speaking to JazzTimes, he continually circled back to the phrase, "That's not the game I'm playing." "Oh, would you call that music?" he asked in the 2019 documentary Chick Corea: In the Mind of a Master, between virtuosic runs on the keyboard. "I don't know; I don't care what it is. It's just a lot of fun, you know?"

Corea's fealty to fun made him into a boundless, filterless fount of ideas—great ones. They're all over his boundary-busting 1970s band Return to Forever, his luminous albums with vibraphonist Gary Burton, his Akoustic and Elektric Bands, and beyond. Talk about a batting average: across almost 90 albums, he won 23 GRAMMYs and was nominated fo/r 67. Currently, he's in the running for the 63rd GRAMMY Awards for his trio album Trilogy 2, featuring bassist Christian McBride and drummer Brian Blade.

Sadly, Corea won't find out if he'll add a 24th GRAMMY to his shelf. After a brief battle with recently-diagnosed cancer, the piano titan died Tuesday, Feb. 9, at his home in Tampa Bay, Florida. He was 79. "It is my hope that those who have an inkling to play, write, perform or otherwise, do so," he said in a statement. "If not for yourself, then for the rest of us. It's not only that the world needs more artists; it's also just a lot of fun."

And fun was arguably Corea's entire MO, from his stylistic interplay to his pianistic touch to the way he dealt with his audiences.

Armando Anthony Corea was born in Chelsea, Massachusetts, on June 12, 1941. "Chick" came from "cheeky," his aunt's baby-name for him due to his chubby cheeks. His trumpeter father sat him in front of a piano at four; at eight, he began taking lessons from the Boston concert pianist Salvatore Sullo. After high school, he moved to New York City to study at Columbia and Julliard but soon drifted from academia into the nightclub circuit. Initially steeped in bebop artists like trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and pianists Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell, Corea soon became enamored with music from south of the border.

The music of [the bebop] era was quite demanding. You had to be into it to really grasp it," Chick told All About Jazz in 2020. "Whereas when I heard Latin music, that beat I heard coming out of New York and out of Puerto Rico and out of Cuba—Eddie Palmieri and Machito and these bands—that gave me a whole other emotional outlook to music. I thought, 'Wow, this is uplifting, happy music, and it struck something.'" Corea touched on this sense of exuberance in his work with Latin-adjacent artists, like saxophonist Stan Getz, trumpeter Blue Mitchell and flutist Herbie Mann.

Corea's interest in this sphere also led him to the guitar master Paco de Lucía, a close friend and collaborator for decades; Corea wrote "The Yellow Nimbus" as a duet with him. "When we played together, I thought I would see a yellow cloud around his head, like a circle," he explained in his 2020 live, solo album Plays. ("Paco inspired me in the construction of my own musical world as much as Miles Davis and John Coltrane, or Bartok and Mozart," Corea said six years prior upon de Lucía's death.)

Latin influences also permeated Return to Forever, Corea's enchanting fusion band that always seemed to hover a few inches above the ground. But even though albums like 1972's Return to Forever and 1973's Light as a Feather were commercial successes, this wedding of musical hemispheres wasn't to court crossover success, but chase that ineffable feeling of freedom.

"It's the media that are so interested in categorizing music," he told The New York Times in 1983, a year after "The Yellow Nimbus" came out. "If critics would ask musicians their views about what is happening, you would find that there is always a fusion of sorts taking place. All this means is a continual development—a continual merging of different streams."

Genre aside, Corea spent his life combing through every mood and format he could think of, from starlit, quasi-ambient duets (1973's Crystal Silence, with Gary Burton, to classically-minded post-bop (1981's Three Quartets, with tenor saxophonist Michael Brecker). The last few years of Corea's life marked an explosion of diversity and prolificity. In 2016, he underwent a six-week stand at New York's Blue Note club with more than 20 different groups. 

Three years later, his Latin interest crescendoed with Antidote, a jubilant collaboration with the eight-piece Spanish Heart Band. "The game I like is where we become a unit," Corea said in In the Mind of a Master, released concurrently with Antidote. "Everyone's giving and taking, and all [are] creating the music."

No matter which context he was in, Corea's effervescence is evident in his playing itself. His fluid phrasing and jewellike tone, which appeared almost fully-formed with his first two albums, 1968's Tones for Joan's Bones and Now He Sings, Now He Sobs, made even his knottiest material pleasing to the ear. About his way with a Fender Rhodes, "It's almost like his fingers bounce off the keys," WBGO's Nate Chinen told NPR in 2016. "His touch on that instrument is really distinctive. You know it's him within a note or two."

This accessibility and distinctiveness are testaments to Corea's emphasis on communicating to the listener, and he couldn't have done so if the music flew over peoples' heads. This became a primary value to Corea in the mid-'70s, when he converted to Scientology and underwent an auditing system that set him on a lifelong psychospiritual journey.

"A very simple thing happened to me right in the very beginning," Corea told The Village Voice in 1977. "I experience this in live hundreds or thousands of people in front of me—I now have the ability to give across a musical communication with clear intent. I know what I'm doing and who I'm communicating to, and I give the communication across, and I see what happens in front of me." (Corea dedicated myriad albums to Hubbard and remained a highly visible member of the controversial religion until the end of his life.)

In what would be Corea's final album, Plays, he eschews a superstar's trappings: no backing band, no staid reverence, no canned commentary. "Here I am with my piano," he declares at the top, alone onstage. "The piano's tuned up all nice, but now we have to tune up. Yeah, we." At first, it's an awkward moment. He plays a middle A; the giggling crowd tentatively sings it back to him. One note becomes two; two becomes three, and so on.

But by the time Corea lays into a medley of Mozart's Piano Sonata in F, and George Gershwin's "Something to Watch Over Me," the gag reveals itself to be something much more profound. Suddenly, the barriers vanish. His game opens up to everyone. His fun becomes ours.

10 Essential Cuts From Jazz Piano Great McCoy Tyner

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Lee Konitz

Lee Konitz performs in 1992

Photo: Frans Schellekens/Redferns

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Remembering Jazz Saxophone Legend Lee Konitz remembering-jazz-saxophone-legend-lee-konitz-cool-jazz-pioneer-and-miles-davis

Remembering Jazz Saxophone Legend Lee Konitz, "Cool Jazz" Pioneer And Miles Davis Collaborator

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Konitz, who died at 92 due to complications from COVID-19, recorded and featured on several dozens of albums as a leader or sideman alongside many jazz greats
John Ochoa
GRAMMYs
Apr 18, 2020 - 4:00 pm

The jazz world lost one of its most revered artists this week (April 15) with the passing of Lee Konitz, the legendary, award-winning composer and saxophonist best known for his pioneering work in the "cool jazz" style as well as his contributions to Miles Davis' Birth Of The Cool sessions between 1949 and 1950. 

Konitz, who died in Manhattan at 92 due to complications from COVID-19, held a prolific seven-decade career, which included runs and collaborations with several icons in the jazz world, including Charles Mingus, Dave Brubeck, Chick Corea, Bill Evans, Stan Kenton's Orchestra, Warne Marsh, Lennie Tristano, Bud Powell and several others. 

Born in 1927 in Chicago, Konitz began his jazz journey at a young age. Inspired by early jazz and big band greats like Benny Goodman, he began on clarinet, at age 11, which he traded for a tenor sax and then moved to the alto sax. By 1945, he went pro and began to work with fellow jazz musicians, and future regular collaborators, like Jerry Wald, Tristano, Claude Thornhill and his orchestra, Gil Evans and Gerry Mulligan.

Between 1949 and 1950, Konitz joined icon Miles Davis and several other musicians in a series of recording sessions, which would later comprise the latter's 1957 compilation Birth Of The Cool, a landmark album in the jazz canon. The album, along with Konitz's unique style, would go on to help establish and define the "cool jazz" sound, a more subdued, lighter take on the genre that broke away from the faster, complex bebop style then dominating the era. 

Read: 'Bitches Brew' At 50: Why Miles Davis' Masterpiece Remains Impactful

Miles Davis, Lee Konitz and Gerry Mulligan at the "Birth of the Cool" recording sessions in 1949

Lee Konitz (center), alongside Miles Davis and Gerry Mulligan, at the Birth Of The Cool recording sessions in 1949

While Konitz was "influential in the development of the so-called cool school," The New York Times writes, he also varied his style, "from an early unaccompanied saxophone solo album, to post-bop, free improvisations and a string of innovative duets," Billboard notes. Altogether, he recorded and featured on several dozens of albums as a leader or co-leader and sideman, including works with jazz icons as well as non-jazz artists like Elvis Costello; Konitz played on the latter's 2003 album, North.

Like the true jazz serviceman he was, Konitz continued to perform live into his 90s before his passing, The New York Times notes.

Lee Konitz is survived by his five children, three grandchildren and one great-granddaughter.

10 Essential Cuts From Jazz Piano Great McCoy Tyner

Little Richard performs at the Apollo Theatre in 2006

Little Richard performs at the Apollo Theatre in 2006

Photo: Theo Wargo/WireImage for Consilium Ventures

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Little Richard Was Rock 'N' Roll's Lightning Storm little-richard-was-lightning-storm-awakened-rock

Little Richard Was The Lightning Storm That Awakened Rock

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The screamer-songwriter was like nothing America had ever seen, and his unbridled joy made rock 'n' roll come alive
Morgan Enos
GRAMMYs
May 10, 2020 - 10:21 am

In your mind's eye, picture a few rock superstars: Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Jimi Hendrix, Tina Turner, Elton John, AC/DC, Prince. Chances are you thought about one of them in the past week. Now picture none of them picking up an instrument, none of them writing a tune, none of them entering your life. If Little Richard hadn't been born in 1932, this would arguably be the world we live in—a passable, but perhaps joyless place.

Little Richard didn't just play the piano passionately, or sing about joyful subjects. He was like an alien dispatched from Andromeda to administer humanity a joy inoculation. Imagine 1950s America getting an eyeful of him: his circus-freak pompadour, his gender- and race-ambiguous makeup, his flash of sequins. Just as exotic was the tortured glossolalia he screamed as if he was on fire: "A-wop-bop-a-loo-bop-a-wop-bam-boom!" from 1955's "Tutti Frutti." But as the first chapter of nearly every rock biography will attest, pent-up girls and boys all around the war-torn world read him loud and clear.

The artist born Richard Wayne Penniman, who died Saturday (May 9) at 87, wasn't the King Of Rock 'N' Roll (that's Elvis Presley), and he wasn't its founding father either (that's Chuck Berry). Watch the 1931 film Frankenstein: If rock music is Promethean Man in the watchtower lab, then Little Richard is the electrical storm that animates him, and the terrified populace is ... well, the terrified populace. But while a mob eventually cornered Frankenstein's monster in a windmill and set it ablaze, Little Richard's impact was, and still is, uncontainable. 

Soon after Little Richard dropped "Long Tall Sally" in 1956, Paul McCartney decided it'd be the first song he sang in public. When asked to describe his life's aspiration in his high school yearbook, Bob Dylan wrote: "To join Little Richard." A pre-Ziggy Stardust Bowie took notes on his hairdo, among other things. Hendrix would join his band in a decade and form The Experience a year after he left. Tina Turner based her early vocal delivery on Little Richard's. Elton John heard him and closed the menu of life choices: "I didn't ever want to be anything else." AC/DC singer Brian Johnson once described him in Genesis 1:1 terms: "There was nothing, and then there was this." As for Prince, the "gestures vaguely at everything" meme will have to do. Little Richard was a bell nobody could unring, and his chime still resonates unceasingly.

Even among his fellow rock 'n' roll pioneers, Little Richard was something strange and different. While Presley was a humble country boy and Berry was a poet with a guitar, Little Richard was a living remix of Baptist and Pentecostal church and the minstrel shows, traveling circuses and drag revues on which he cut his teeth. Beginning when he was 18, he had a few false starts in the studio: Incensed by his flamboyance and perceived impudence, Peacock Records owner Don Robey beat Little Richard so badly, he required surgery. Undeterred, Little Richard sent Specialty Records a demo two years later; producer Robert "Bumps" Blackwell described the tape as "looking as though someone had eaten off it." After Little Richard repeatedly called their staff begging them to listen to it, they relented and set up a recording date at J & M Studio in New Orleans. 

Read: Remembering The Life, Legacy And Music Of Little Richard: Rock Pioneer And GRAMMY Lifetime Achievement Award Recipient

Still, the recording session wasn't working; Little Richard was frustrated that his sound wasn't catching fire. He remembered "Tutti Frutti," a naughty song he had absentmindedly written while working as a dishwasher at a Greyhound station. He cleaned up the song's sexual references, and after a lunch break, he let it rip with that nonsensical, unforgettable refrain. The exuberant resulting single, which was a watershed for black vernacular in a pop song, hit No. 2 on the Billboard Rhythm and Blues Chart and was added to the Library Of Congress National Recording Registry in 2010. In 1998, "Tutti Frutti" was inducted into the GRAMMY Hall Of Fame.

"I wrote 'Tutti Frutti' in the kitchen, I wrote 'Good Golly Miss Molly' in the kitchen, I wrote 'Long Tall Sally' in that kitchen," Little Richard later explained to Rolling Stone in 1970 about the bus stop gig; he followed up "'Tutti Frutti" with those just-as-exultant barnburners. The cover of his 1957 debut album, Here's Little Richard, featuring a close-up of Richard in mid-scream that would make Edvard Munch proud, is the ultimate truth in advertising: There's zero ambiguity about what the music inside will sound like.

And that sound was unbridled liberation—from whitewashed suburbia, from hellfire religion typified by the preacher in 1978's The Buddy Holly Story, from the anodyne pop on the airwaves. (The Billboard pop chart in 1954 was full of downtempo tracks by Rosemary Clooney, Kitty Kallen and The Crew-Cuts.) After Little Richard experienced a religious conversation and left secular music in 1962, coming back to a music scene dominated by the British boys who idolized him, like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, was no easy task. After flower power and Woodstock made his provocations seem quaint, he soon became a thing of the rock 'n' roll revival circuit.

A zip code away from his macho peers, Little Richard was a rock star that LGBTQ folks could look up to before coming out was the norm, and he galvanized Bowie and Prince to tear up the rulebook of gender expression. And his unspoken message, whether to those in a bind over their sexuality or not, was abundantly clear: No matter who you are, scream it out. That scream was one-size-fits-all for the human experience. When you hear Macca howling like a maniac on "I'm Down," "Hey Jude" and "Oh! Darling," understand that The Beatles' keyhole to jubilation—and therefore, everyone's—had a Little-Richard-shaped key.

The songs Little Richard co-wrote or interpreted all have the same feeling of anticipation, which is applicable to every stage of life: the last minutes of school on a Friday, the beginning of an unforgettable night out, the first blush of romantic attraction. He's ready to cause trouble, but the good-natured kind—the kind that doesn't put anybody down, but instead drags everyone off the couch and into a raucous block party. His songs exist at the perpetual "here we go" moment, the exhilarating flash on the rollercoaster when your stomach plunges.

We're gonna have some fun tonight. Everything's all right.

Remembering Elvis Presley: 5 GRAMMY Facts

Alice Coltrane circa 1970

Alice Coltrane circa 1970

 

Photo: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

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Alice Coltrane's 'Ptah, The El Daoud' At 50 alice-coltrane-ptah-el-daoud-50-year-anniversary

'Ptah, The El Daoud' At 50: How Alice Coltrane Straddled Heaven And Earth

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The pianist-harpist's home-recorded album, featuring Joe Henderson, Pharoah Sanders, Ron Carter and Ben Riley, is otherworldly yet drenched in the blues
Morgan Enos
GRAMMYs
Dec 30, 2020 - 8:39 pm

Every morning, the alto saxophonist Lakecia Benjamin rises before the sun, settles behind her 88-key electric piano and offers wordless thanks to the Creator. "My goal is to get to it before sunrise," she tells GRAMMY.com from her New York apartment. "That's when the universe is most receptive, right before the day is about to break and everyone gets in their prayers. I'm there before everyone." 

Right then, Benjamin plays a composition that means more to her than any denominational hymn: "Turiya And Ramakrishna," the worshipful blues from pianist, harpist, and composer Alice Coltrane, off her 1970 album Ptah, The El Daoud.

Benjamin last performed "Turiya And Ramakrishna" for a paying audience back in March. That was at Dizzy's Club at Jazz At Lincoln Center during the release show for her tribute album, Pursuance: The Coltranes, on the cusp of the national COVID-19 lockdown. 

"'Turiya And Ramakrishna' puts me in a place of worship," Benjamin says of her setlist, which invariably features the tune. "I usually take that moment to get deeper into how the audience and I are feeling. I try to bring them into a place of worship to realize this song is not the same as the rest. It's not a church song, but for her style of music, it is. Whether they take it as a church song or not, I'm going to the next step." 

These days, critics are reappraising Coltrane as an artistic equal to her husband, John. But of all her albums, from her early days as a Detroit bebopper to her recordings as the spiritual director of an ashram, Journey In Satchidananda (1971)—Ptah's follow-up—gets the most ink. (It was her only album to make Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums Of All Time list, at No. 446.) 

But Ptah, The El Daoud, which turns 50 this year, deserves a seat at the table, too.

Ptah, which Coltrane titled in tribute to the Egyptian creator god of Memphis and patron of craftspeople and architects ("El Daoud" means "the beloved" in Arabic), contains abundant hypnotic power and emotional import. These qualities relate to the inner journey Coltrane underwent at the time, the fact she recorded Ptah at home, her quintet's performances, and the album's matrix of ancient Vedic and Egyptian references.

By all accounts, Coltrane conceived Ptah, The El Daoud, and its predecessors, A Monastic Trio (1968) and Huntington Ashram Monastery (1969), during a period of grief and spiritual evolution. In the years after her husband, John, died of liver cancer in 1967, she experienced physical, mental and metaphysical phenomena, as documented in her 1977 spiritual memoir, "Monument Eternal." 

"Sometimes, my heartbeat shifted to the right side of my body. All of the hair on my head would stand on end as if it were electrically charged," Coltrane wrote, citing the "extensive mental and physical austerities" she underwent during this time.

As evidenced by the track titles from this period, like "Lord Help Me To Be" and "IHS" (or, "I Have Suffered"), she interfaced with her traumas and pushed past them into a transcendent space. "My meaning here was to express and bring out a feeling of purification," Coltrane stated in Leonard Feather's liner notes to Ptah, The El Daoud. "Sometimes on Earth, we don't have to wait for death to go through a sort of purging, a purification."

"A lot of those tracks [on A Monastic Trio], like 'I Want to See You' and 'Gospel Trane,' I think of them as mourning because she'd suffered that loss," harpist Brandee Younger tells GRAMMY.com. "And by the time we get to Huntington Ashram Monastery, you know, that title speaks volumes. So then we have Ptah, The El Daoud: 'This is my next phase, and it's more than what you got before.'"

"You know what I think is cool about this album, but also [about] just her in general?" pianist Cat Toren asks GRAMMY.com. "She had four young kids, and she had lost the love of her life. I think that's huge. It speaks to her power as a woman, to go forth no matter the adversity of what else is going on in her life. I would be interested to know her support network and how she was able to produce this incredible work under such challenging conditions."

Vijay Iyer, a pianist, composer and Harvard professor, is careful to note that Coltrane's spiritual quest was more far-reaching than her husband's loss. "She was in public life from 1960 until [her death in] 2007, and for four of those years, she was married to John Coltrane," he says. "Yes, she was grieving, but there was something else she went through in those years that was the beginning of a much larger transformation. Not to reduce her role in the family or her relationship to [John] or anything like that, but she was on her own journey, too."

"When [John] passed, it's not just his passing; it's the combination of his passing, plus mothering, plus careering, plus the world is in unrest," Younger says. "I feel it would be impossible not to be affected by that combination of factors. In the big picture, she went through a serious transition, and there's no question about that because it's written in the book."

"I mean, think about it," she adds. "That happened in that house, where she recorded that record. How could one not affect the other?"

John and Alice Coltrane's home in Dix Hills on Long Island, New York

John and Alice Coltrane's home in Dix Hills on Long Island, New York | Photo: Steve Pfost/Newsday RM via Getty Images

As with A Monastic Trio and Huntington Ashram Monastery, Alice Coltrane recorded Ptah, The El Daoud in the basement of her ranch-style house at 247 Candlewood Path in Dix Hills on Long Island, New York, which she and John shared from 1964 until his death; she remained there until 1973. Tenor saxophonists and flutists Joe Henderson and Pharoah Sanders, bassist Ron Carter and drummer Ben Riley accompanied her on the recording.

Read: Hank Mobley's 'Soul Station' At 60: How The Tenor Saxophonist's Mellow Masterpiece Inspires Jazz Musicians In 2020

"When I hear that record, the first thing I hear is the room," saxophonist-clarinetist Jeff Lederer tells GRAMMY.com, describing the rich, boomy atmosphere of Ptah, The El Daoud as "comforting." "It's not a [Rudy] Van Gelder sound or anything, but you can feel [like], 'Wow! She was making this record in her house.' It's not the kind of sound you'd expect."

In that regard, Steve Holtje, a keyboardist, writer and the manager and producer of the long-running, Bernard Stollman-founded label, ESP-Disk', views Ptah as something of a landmark. 

"It's not the first time anybody ever did this—it's not even the first time she did it—but I have a certain fondness of placing this album in the lineage of DIY recording," he says. "It happens that Ed Michel at [jazz label] Impulse! got the producer credit on this, but I'm not sure how much a producer he was in terms of influencing the music." 

"Was she a Billie Eilish in the making?" Ashley Kahn, the author of "A Love Supreme: The Story Of John Coltrane's Signature Album" and "The House That Trane Built: The Story Of Impulse Records," asks GRAMMY.com. "The self-produced, self-sufficient musician idea has been around for many, many years and expressed in many different ways." 

"It's a Black female artist taking control of her music," Holtje states. "That's really important."

"It may be that that sensibility was in the air at that time," Iyer adds. "A sense of self-determination to make this work for you on your terms, rather than a transaction with a corporation, which doesn't necessarily have your best interests at heart. Particularly for Black artists in the 1960s and '70s, that was a movement."

"It's homey. It has that Sunday-afternoon-after-church vibe," bassist Melvin Gibbs tells GRAMMY.com of the feeling "Turiya And Ramakrishna" exudes. "Even the Van Gelder records were recorded in a living room, so it's not that far out of context in the sound of jazz, but it feels like your relatives were playing for you. That's evocative for me." 

"The room is the invisible instrument. The other member of the band is the room in which you record the live date," vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Georgia Anne Muldrow tells GRAMMY.com. 

But when it comes to record-making, a lush-sounding room doesn't mean much without stellar musicians within its walls.

"Ptah, The El Daoud has darkness and richness of tone that speaks to me, and some of that comes from the incredible sound of every musician [on the album]," keyboardist Jamie Saft tells GRAMMY.com. "The musicians on this record, their tone is as rich and developed and important as it gets. Joe Henderson and Pharoah [Sanders] have some of the greatest saxophone tones of all time. Alice Coltrane's piano tone and Ron Carter's bass tone are so important to jazz music." 

Aside from "Lord Help Me To Be" on A Monastic Trio, where Sanders tears a hole in the firmament, Ptah, The El Daoud is Coltrane's first album with horns. 

"I think what makes this album so great is that you get to hear her comp with great horn players," pianist Matthew Shipp tells GRAMMY.com. "The beautiful plant and flower that her chordal language and her touch had [relates to] the interplay of those two horn players."

Joe Henderson circa 1970

Joe Henderson circa 1970 | Photo: Tom Copi/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

The musicians featured on Ptah hail from both the avant-garde and straight-ahead jazz scenes. 

"This rapprochement between those two styles was very deliberate on [Coltrane's] part," Holtje says. "Ben Riley is best-known from Thelonious Monk's quartet. And before that, Riley had been playing with the Johnny Griffin/'Lockjaw' Davis quintet, which was very much a popular style."

Holtje goes on to note that while Carter played with Miles Davis and Henderson had come off a string of exploratory-yet-tonal albums on Blue Note, Sanders was "Albert Ayler-influenced—a real firebreather in Alice's husband's band." 

"Aside from Pharoah, Alice's band on this record looks, to me, like a deliberate move away from associations with John," he observes. "And to do that, she put together a set of musicians who were not especially associated with each other."

Read: 'Bitches Brew' At 50: Why Miles Davis' Masterpiece Remains Impactful

As for the rest of the rhythm section? 

"Ron Carter's walking on air. You can't get away from the fact that this is a blues-based, cosmic cat," Shipp enthuses. 

"Ron is maybe one of the two or three most important bass players in the history of jazz from a harmonic standpoint," drummer Gerry Gibbs adds. "Alice's music only has a few chords; usually, it doesn't have a lot of chord progression. So that gives Ron a lot of space to use a lot of his harmonic brilliance.

"Ben [Riley] was a very soft drummer," he continues. "He never really played much with a crash cymbal; he usually played with a ride and a flat cymbal. He was never a basher." 

"He's the kind of drummer I'd like to be," Muldrow adds. "The kind that supports what's going on and makes statements through the ways he supports the music. There are things he does with the brushes on that record that I'll never forget."

"There's this real attention to groove and the meaning, the importance of that," Iyer says of Riley's performance. "Even when the [music] seems to kind of wash along, there's precise attention and care for how the pulse is expressed. You hear her dealing with that in a way you don't as much as when she plays with Rashied Ali. It gives this album a certain backbone that's important."

Despite its harmonic and rhythmic dust devils, Ptah has an undeniable core and pulse.

"'Ptah, The El Daoud,' to me, sounds like a battle cry of sorts," Younger says. "The interplay between Sanders and Henderson, and the way Coltrane favors the low end of the piano for nearly the entirety of the head and horn solos, gives it this riveting edge."

"After it's all done," she continues, "'Turiya And Ramakrishna' is the perfect release. Spiritually, and she references this in so many of her composition titles and writings, she sought to express a state of nirvana. This track achieves just that. That blues, the way it just keeps going, this cyclical driving-home, and then how the bass moves underneath it to give all types of new qualities to this one scale—it's just beautiful how she did that."

"There's stasis in here, but it keeps moving. It's like a spiral," guitarist Brandon Ross says of Coltrane's pianism on "Turiya And Ramakrishna." "It's moving laterally, but not in a broad sense. It's elevating each time to the cycles in another dimensional field of its orbit."

"She's going back to the roots," Kahn says about "Blue Nile," for which Coltrane switched from piano to harp, with Sanders and Henderson picking up alto flutes. "But never mind bebop; it's a blues. It has that comfortable feel, yet the sound, textures and mysterioso, in-the-air feel is like waking up in the morning and looking out the window, the same window you're familiar with, and you see the lunar surface or the rings of Saturn. It's both comfortable and otherworldly at the same time."

"Whereas the harp can be more glissando-focused, the way she plays piano, she gives you everything. But the use of the blues is always present," vibraphonist Joel Ross tells GRAMMY.com.

"The only track where Pharoah asserts himself in the whole avant-garde sense is 'Mantra,'" Holtje adds. "That is the longest track, so that is the track where they have the most time to explore, if I can use that word. So that's kind of a natural thing to be happening there, but Pharoah also had a good grounding before he went out. I'm sure he respected Joe Henderson, and I'm sure Joe Henderson respected him."

While Muldrow characterizes Ptah as "a nice little cutaway, a rest stop," Iyer and Kahn see it more as an on-ramp. 

"There are many effective doorways to Alice Coltrane's world," Kahn says. "It's an unbelievably kaleidoscopic mixture of music that'll leave stretch marks on your ears and brain as far as what is possible. It combines so many different musical traditions on this planet in a way that feels very organic and satisfying on a bunch of different levels: culturally, intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. Ptah, The El Daoud is as effective as any other doorway that I would recommend for any listener trying to get into Alice Coltrane and grasp what she's about. But it shouldn't be the last stop, either. It should be a welcome mat, and it's a very effective one."

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Ptah, The El Daoud is a tribute to God through ancient Vedic and Egyptian lenses, and the parallels between the two cosmologies run deep. 

"You're talking about ancient evidence of contemplating the universe. That's the point of relation," Muldrow says. "Ptah, that's coming from Africa, up from Ethiopia into the Nubian civilization, all the way into what we call Egypt today." 

"Bringing the Black experience to the Sanskrit thing, I feel like there's a circle that gets completed," she continues. "What dovetails everything is the history, the landscape and the people. That's what brings it all together, and she was completely aware of it. She's quite a scholar."

The album's heavily stylized, Jim Evans-painted cover features a wealth of emblematic information. 

"If you look at this album cover, it's got many different images in it," cultural scholar and essayist Menzi Maseko tells GRAMMY.com over Zoom from Zimbabwe. "What you see in the hieroglyphs are the names of God and of becoming. It says, 'The father of beginnings, the creator of the egg, the sun and the moon.' It's got the cobra at the bottom, which symbolizes cunning, superior intellectual capability and danger."

"The fact she even mentioned the word Ptah, to me, is like a whole history lesson," bassist Lonnie Plaxico tells GRAMMY.com, connecting Ptah to the ancient Egyptian vizier named after the deity. "I would tell people to go look at 'The Teachings Of Ptahhotep,' and you'll understand why she [evoked him]. I encourage people to go check out who Ptahhotep was. I think that was her intent. It's like a seed. I think she was putting the seed out there, like, 'You should know about this person.'"

Regarding the importance of Egyptian and Vedic systems to Coltrane, "I wouldn't put one over the other; it all becomes this percolating stew," Iyer notes. "There are all these different influences, from Islam to ancient, pre-Hindu Indian spiritual practices to Kemetic systems of knowledge. All of that intersected and had that transformative impact on Alice Coltrane to the point that she then took on the name Turiyasangitananda."

To Maseko, to make an album bearing Ptah's name is a sacred action. 

"It is all in devotional service to the Supreme Being," Maseko says, with a hint of awe. "She's immortalizing the name of Ptah, but every musician is involved in the creation of that work. Pharoah Sanders carried on the tradition. Joe Henderson carries on the tradition. Last year, you probably didn't know you would be doing this, but you're doing it because it's the will of Ptah. We didn't plan it. It's something inside your DNA, inside you and inside me, that has brought us to this moment. It's a miracle, bra'. It's an unfolding of the divine will."

In early November, Benjamin, clad in white and gold, emerged from the lockdown for a livestreamed gig at Jazzfest Berlin, her first since the album release show at Dizzy's. Midway through the set, she, Plaxico, pianist Zaccai Curtis and drummer Darrell Green changed gears and took the socially distanced crowd to church.

"That last song we played was an Alice Coltrane song entitled 'Turiya And Ramakrishna,'" she said on the mic. "Most people tell me it sounds like a love song. It's a constant seeking out the Creator, your purpose, and why you are here and getting closer to the source of the one that gave you life. It is a love song, but it's a love song to the universe."

While that "love song to the universe" may be under-discussed among casual jazz fans, its inspiration ripples forth via these musicians' hearts, minds and hands. To the question of why a jazz layperson should hear Ptah, The El Daoud, Muldrow takes what feels like half a minute for silent contemplation. 

"Because it will make you feel better," she finally allows. "You're going to hear something special in this record. You're going to feel love in this record. If I were to give this to a layperson, I'd say, 'Man, you're going to feel better after you listen to this.'"

"If you're not versed in Alice Coltrane, why do you need to hear it?" Younger asks. "Because 'Turiya And Ramakrishna' will save your life. If it doesn't save your life, it'll change your life." 

Brandon Ross sounds captivated, serene, even a little solemn while reflecting on the same track. "What else can I say about this, man?" he asks as it burbles in the background. "It's self-explanatory. They need to play this when I die, as a lift."

'Giant Steps' At 60: Why John Coltrane's Classic Hard Bop Album Is More Than A Jazz-School Worksheet

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