Outside Counsel

It was a couple of years back when I came across the live recording of "A Love Supreme". The recording wasn't available in the US at the time, and I happened to be reading Lewis Porter's 'Trane biography at the time, so it was a nice confluence of events. The interesting thing about the live version is that it isn't all that different-- sometimes jazz is improvisational, but improvisation isn't what makes "A Love Supreme" jazz. Francis Davis' take on Wynton Marsalis' big band version sounds like exactly what you would be afraid Wynton-- in all good faith-- might come up with: "His problem [is] that spiritual to him mean[s] churchy.... Everything about this new version is misguided.... Unlike in classical music, where a composer's score is regarded as definitive and the goal of interpretation is transparency, jazz takes it for granted that a musician will impose his own sensibility on the material he chooses. This being Wynton, Coltrane winds up sounding like Ellington, right down to the trombone wah-wah. But not even Wynton's crush on Duke explains the twee flutes. "Most of [Coltrane's] innovations were not in what was written, but in how his band played," Stanley Crouch points out in the liner notes. Exactly. So why bother revamping A Love Supreme? Because it's in the syllabus, I guess."

I vacillate, sometimes, about whether "inner life" and "spiritual life" mean the same thing, but when he recorded "A Love Supreme" there was no doubt in Coltrane's mind, and if there is a more personal statement of spiritual life in Twentith Century American music I can't imagine what it could be. In a way I am totally down with Wyton's attempt-- I have no idea what his spiritual life is like, but I respect the fact that his intellectual life compelled him to take something like this on. THere is very little by Wyton Marcalis that I am interested in listening to twice, but think I am starting to understand where he is coming from as an artist.