What I've Been Listening to This Week

John Coltrane - Heavyweight Champion
The Complete Atlantic Recordings

Seven CDs (7!) of everything Coltrane recorded at Atlantic Records between 1959 and 1961, including Giant Steps, Naima, Bags and Trane, and My Favorite Things and much, much more. There's even his album with Don Cherry, The Avant Garde. There's one whole disc of outtakes and alternate cuts. While on the Prestige set, you can hear Trane developing his sound, by this time he had fully found his voice, including the "sheets of sound," and the clusters of notes played so fast they almost sound like chords. The man was playing with fire.

Listen to his rendition of My Favorite Things. I can hear it in my head. After a brief piano introduction by McCoy Tyner, Coltrane steps in and takes the first solo of the piece on soprano sax. Not too long a statement - just the basics, a few bars of improvisation and out - selflessly turning the piece over to Tyner barely two minutes into the song. Tyner's ensuing piano solo is a classic - he takes his time with it, and lets it build according to its own momentum. At first, he's just playing the very basics of the melody - all left-hand chord progressions with almost no "fill" or improvisation. But when the right hand finally does come in and begins tickling out some high counter melodies, it seems to be floating in another dimension over the left-handed chords. Tyner alternates between these two modes - simple vamping on the chords and embellishment with the higher keys - teasing the listener back and forth. Tyner was clearly also a master of his instrument, and knows that he has the listener in the palms of his hands.

After Tyner's piano masterpiece, Coltrane comes back in, briefly restates the melody and then lets his soprano sax soar into the stratosphere with long and lovely phrases, while never losing touch with the ground. This is the Main Event, the Heavyweight Champion floating like a butterfly as Ali would have said. His playing ascends into a pure meditation on the potential of the soprano to sing and to soar, and yet it never becomes a challenging listen. The man was clearly in love with the beautiful sounds he was making, and he lets each long line take flight - you can almost hear the flapping of wings beneath the sound as each line takes off. And when he finally comes back to the chorus and restates the melody to close out the piece, the notes are still the same but everything's now different: after having carried the listener with him into the heavens, life back on earth never seemed more beautiful.

Amazing . . .

That's what I was playing as I drove over to the fabulous Atlantic Station this evening to go to a presentation at the Fox Sports Grill on, appropriately, the development of Atlantic Station. The head architect gave a slide show on the history of the project, from the mid '90s when it was still an steel mill eyesore adjacent to downtown Atlanta, through its brownfield development, to its current mixed residential-office-retail ("live, work and play") status. The best part is that it's only about two miles from my house, which was nice and toasty and warm when I finally got back in on this particularly cold, raw evening.