A friend of mine once remarked about the later music of John Coltrane and Miles Davis that the two musicians departed from the jazz tradition through completely opposite exits. Miles (for the moment we'll forget his unrelentingly mediocre '80s output) tended toward submergence of his voice. His '70s albums-- from the fiercely swaggering Jack Johnson to the seismic twin live sets recorded just prior to his six year hiatus, Agharta and Pangea-- were mired in electronic noise and chugging rhythm. He put a wah- wah on his trumpet and claimed that he wanted the instruments to be indistinguishable from one another. The move was toward collectivity in sound, an idea Miles associated with African music (certainly refracted through the lens of Hendrix's guitar).
Coltrane, canonized as a saint by at least one church I know of in San Francisco, moved in the absolute opposite direction: toward singularity-- the transcendence of his own searching voice above all else. Even the symbology with which the two musicians presented their music moved in opposite directions. Davis presented himself in a kind of a primeval paganism, as the Dark Magus-- the Sorcerer-- and cloaked his songs in a tellurian rhetoric: earth and evil. Coltrane, however, adopted an almost Christian lexicon after the psalmic perfection of A Love Supreme; he fancied his archangelic music a kind of personal liturgy.
And after a restless life of continuous ascension, Coltrane's final album reached the cosmic heights of Interstellar Space. Now, we can debate volumes on the merits and flaws of Interstellar Space, an album stripped of the legendary quartet, featuring only Coltrane and Rasheed Ali on drums. We can suffice to say that it was 'Trane's nod to the music of the spheres, and that it is accordingly difficult and complex. The idea of covering this album, also suffice to say, is lunacy. However, free- jazz drummer Gregg Bendian of Interzone and guitarist Nels Cline have attemptd to do just that.
Now, I'm ever wary of the phrase "plays the music of," and it can be excused when we're talking about Gershwin or Bacharach, but the idea of someone else playing John Coltrane's music is basically paradox. Surprisingly enough, Cline and Bendian make the right decisions: they play in the spirit of John Coltrane: ascendant, noisy, searching and free. Cline's guitar- playing offers such non- stop feedback- soaked freakout that it almost approaches the sound of a continuously connecting modem. Bendian's drumming is similarly abstract but manages to always sound like creative, ballsy rock drumming rather than the nimble coloring of Ali.
In reality, this album owes more to John McLaughlin's Mahavishnu Orchestra and the great '70s fusion that Miles himself inspired than any sound John Coltrane ever produced. (I can't help but think of the guitar/ drum duo of John McLaughlin & Billy Cobham rather than 'Trane and Ali.) But there is no doubt that the album is inspired or, at least, possessed.
Interstellar Space Revisited is a forward- thinking, millennial interpretation of Coltrane's later music. But the frontiers of jazz were so wildly transgressed a mere five years after Coltrane's death, and the album seems to constantly reference that first flowering of electrified jazz that occurred under the shadow of Miles rather than Coltrane. Nevertheless, the album is angularly beautiful in its own right and, for all the noise and tweaks, there is indeed a sense of humility in the playing. After all, how can you ape the spiritual questing of another? At best, you can ascend to modest heights and then humbly thank St. John Coltrane for achieving those grand astronomical reaches for the rest of us. And Cline and Bendian have achieved this, noisily, but with grace.
