April 23rd, 1967. John Coltrane appears for his penultimate public performance before a crowd at Babatunde Olatunji's Center for African Culture in New York City. Three months later, liver cancer would claim his life. He would play once more in front of a live crowd, but the last available live recording is documented here. On this set, he's bolstered by drummer Rashied Ali, bassist Jimmy Garrison, pianist Alice Coltrane, Pharaoh Sanders on tenor sax and Algie Dewitt on bata drum (a Yoruba instrument). For legions of jazz aficionados around the globe, this final live document is something of a Holy Grail. And now, thanks to sound engineer Bernard Drayton (who still had possession of the master tapes), anyone with $15 can finally get their mitts on one of the most historic documents in all of 20th century American music.
Coltrane spent the last years of his life engaged in a mission that few could understand. As witnessed on A Love Supreme and other recordings during those later years, his ultimate objective was that of a continued spiritual awakening. Whereas the objective itself was not that difficult to grasp, Coltrane's means of attaining it were far from conventional. Abandoning the preconceived notions of tonality, and immersed within a musical state of dissonance, Coltrane's music became a communicative attempt at reaching a higher plane.
Spawned during one of the most tumultuous eras in history, Coltrane's ideas were reflective of a period in which the foundations of American life trembled to the core. Influenced by the nation's entrenchment in war, its social and political upheavals, and its civil rights and protest movements, John's music deserted almost any semblance of traditional form in a move toward celestial harmony and universality. In the early months of 1967, faced not just with the chaos of society, Coltrane waged his own personal war with death and his music again shifted. What's documented here is that personal warfare, replete with bursting explosions and a splattering of machine-gun notes.
No sooner than Billy Taylor can introduce John as "one of the most remarkable forces in jazz today," Coltrane comes up front and center on "Ogunde," opening the set with a warm, bluesy moan. But this is only temporary. Almost immediately, the rest of the band in tow, Coltrane embarks on a trans-dimensional flight, bleating and coaxing sounds from his sax, and escalating at a fever pace to the highest register with guttural whoops and hollers. "Ogunde," based on the Afro-Brazilian song "Ogunde Varere," is an almost thirty-minute wall of dissonance, peppered with shrieks and howls. It's as if Coltrane is expending every imaginable source of personal energy here to create a swirling maelstrom of noise.
Coltrane and Sanders swap solos: John rips out with a weeping wail before ascending into a full-blown shriek attack; Pharoah begins playfully, reeling off a fiery solo, dancing around a theme, and then descending into a grunt-filled rage. Ali focuses on polyrhythms and spacial dancing, consistently adding dimensions and crossing barriers, taking the band into something otherworldly, while Garrison's bass remains muscular, anchoring the sound and expanding the framework. Alice Coltrane's percussive plonks and thuds drift in and out of the background before she rolls out her own deft solo, scrambling around the melody and filling the space rapidly with sixteenth notes while the saxophonists quietly wait for their scorching return. Soon, Coltrane roars back in, the band following on his comet's tail. Coltrane and Sanders successively spit out anguished yelps while the band soars into wraithlike dimensions, teetering on the precipice of a volcanic eruption. From here, the track remains full-throttle until it ends with Coltrane and Sanders invoking the spiritual via an ecstatic rite of fire.
After Coltrane humbly gives his thanks to the elated audience, Jimmy Garrison steps into the spotlight for a lengthy bass solo that introduces Rodgers and Hammerstein's "My Favorite Things." A staple of Coltrane's set since the early 60s, "My Favorite Things" had now morphed from The Sound of Music's simple innocence into something altogether beastly and monstrous. Garrison flexes his chops for well over seven minutes with brawn and grit, piecing together a skeletal structure and beating the path for the others' departure into unknown terrain.
What follows is music overflowing with such emotional and spiritual intensity that it floods your living room. Coltrane's bleats and squeals are drenched with a searing pain. It's like the sound of rending flesh, the tune ripped apart and broken into sorrowful hollers and moans. With the band thundering behind them, the two sax players are intent on dousing every inch of that NYC block with their incendiary fury. Explosions, barking yawps, shrill high-register runs, and throaty, rasping groans-- the place sounds like it's going to spontaneously combust. Occasionally, there's slight recognition of the Rodgers & Hammerstein theme as Coltrane references the motif before descending into death howls and mournful prayer. If "Ogunde" was a full-throttled blare, "My Favorite Things" clambers rapidly out of this realm and into permanent celestial gravitation. Coltrane maintains velocity at this pace for nearly twenty minutes, caught in a firestorm from which no one will walk away unscathed.
For every intent and purpose, this is difficult music. It's the demanding sound of a man faced with impending death, yet unafraid to carry forward and remain steadfast to his intense, singular vision of music as a universal bridge. With every note, Coltrane chases a higher power in an attempt to transcend the corporeal. For the unprepared listener, it might all be too much-- not only because of the sheer intensity of noise levels or dissonance, but because this is the sound of a man who knows every breath he draws inches him one step closer to the grave. Yet, the sadness this evokes is overwhelmed by the pure beauty of a man being rebirthed, recreated, and reimagined. The Last Live Recording is a deliriously scattered mess of joy and pain, intermingled and bound up within Coltrane's unbridled and luminescent energy. And now it stands as his parting gesture: one last moment bursting out at the seams with elation and ferocity, an awe-inspiring testament to life.
