Anniversary tributes are nothing new in jazz, but Branford Marsalis and Dianne Reeves head straight to the heart of the matter as a way to chime with John Coltrane’s centenary, which falls on the autumn equinox this Wednesday.
He has form in this having paid tribute to Coltrane before for instance on the Love Supreme segment of Footsteps of Our Fathers issued more than 20 years ago where there is also a nod to Sonny Rollins (who died earlier this year).
As a player steeped in the greatest traditions of jazz and one of its most acclaimed present day interpreters Steepee (yes, indeed, as he was known in the earlier part of his career) rather than revisiting the more obvious landmarks of Coltrane’s immense catalogue, Dedicated To You returns to the unusually intimate territory of John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman, the 1963 Impulse! album that brought Coltrane’s tenor together with Hartman’s baritone voice across six standards.
Here Marsalis joins forces not with a male singer which would have been too obvious but with the greatest living female jazz singer no less in Dianne Reeves, whose voice brings a different character to material closely identified with Hartman for more than six decades.
People new and old are exploring the Johnny Hartman sound. For instance the best thing I have heard this year was a concert undertaken by Marvin Muoneké and Mark Lockheart with the great Gary Crosby in the band over at Chelsea’s Cadogan Hall.
The six songs from the Coltrane/Hartman album are all here: Irving Berlin’s ‘They Say It’s Wonderful’; ‘Dedicated to You’ by Saul Chaplin, Hy Zaret and Sammy Cahn; Guy Wood and Robert Mellin’s ‘My One and Only Love’; Billy Strayhorn’s ‘Lush Life’; Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart’s ‘You Are Too Beautiful’ and Peter DeRose and Sammy Gallop’s ‘Autumn Serenade.’
Marsalis also brings in three instrumental pieces from Coltrane’s repertoire: ‘Big Nick’, originally issued on Duke Ellington & John Coltrane, ’26-2′ from The Coltrane Legacy (later interpreted by Coltrane’s son Ravi on Mad 6) and ‘Central Park West’ from Coltrane’s Sound.
The idea has a curatorial precedent at least in part. The novelty is that the singer isn’t male. But Kurt Elling’s Dedicated To You: Kurt Elling Sings the Music of Coltrane and Hartman, released by Concord in 2009, also took the Coltrane/Hartman repertoire as its starting point. Elling’s live Lincoln Center recording used arrangements by Laurence Hobgood for voice, rhythm section, the Ethel Quartet and tenor saxophonist Ernie Watts, and won the Grammy for Best Jazz Vocal Album.
Is this new one as good as that. YES. There is an interesting parallel between the two projects in that neither treats the 1963 record simply as something to be copied. Reeves isn’t attempting to reproduce Hartman’s sound – exactly how could she, Sherlock? – while Marsalis does not recreate Coltrane’s role note for note nor does he sound really Coltranian. If you want to hear somebody who sounds more Coltranian – oh I’d go hear JD Allen maybe or Nat Birchall and hundreds of other people! And it is inconvenient to acknowledge, even if you are a Marsalis fan – and count me in – that Watts’ playing on the Elling album is far more monumental than Marsalis’.
But the point beyond “likes” and “dislikes” here is what happens when these songs are brought into a different musical relationship. ‘Lush Life’, in particular, has a long history of attracting individual interpretations, while ‘My One and Only Love’ and ‘You Are Too Beautiful’ remain closely associated with the balance Coltrane found between accompaniment and melodic commentary on the original album. Reeves has a very pure voice and brings every note alive.
The current very long running Branford Marsalis Quartet: Marsalis on saxophones with Joey Calderazzo on piano, Eric Revis on bass and Justin Faulkner on drums are fantastic.
The instrumental additions allow the quartet to move beyond the ballad setting. ’26-2′ brings one of Coltrane’s more structurally demanding pieces into the album. ’26-2′ is a contrafact of Charlie Parker’s ‘Confirmation’, retaining Parker’s underlying form while substantially reharmonising it through what became known as ‘Coltrane Changes’ – rapid shifts between tonal centres a major third apart. In effect, Coltrane keeps the basic road map but radically alters the route, creating a progression in which the harmony moves too quickly for an improviser simply to settle into one key. The challenge is not just the number of chords, but having to anticipate each new tonal centre while simultaneously keeping track of the original structure, making ’26-2′ a particularly concentrated example of Coltrane’s increasingly sophisticated approach to harmonic movement.
‘Central Park West’ returns to the more spacious side of his writing in a duet between Marsalis on soprano saxophone and Calderazzo on piano.
The recording itself was made over two days at Spivey Hall, the concert hall at Clayton State University in Morrow, Georgia. There was no formal rehearsal beforehand apparently. Instead the musicians worked through the material together in the studio, with arrangements developing as they played. Reeves is heard on the six songs from the original Coltrane/Hartman album, while the instrumental Coltrane pieces provide the quartet with room to operate separately from the vocal programme.
It all makes absolute sense – even after only a few listens so far, the album having come out just yesterday – to instinctively put this wonderful album at the top of Marlbank‘s favourite albums of the year, just above one of Branford’s younger brother Wynton’s big band releases, as you can see by looking at the updated list here.
- The Branford Marsalis Quartet and Dianne Reeves play this year’s EFG London Jazz Festival at the new British Airways Arc venue in Olympia on 21 November
