The Olatunji Concert: The Last Live Recording

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Olatunji Concert: The Last Live Recording
Live album by John Coltrane

Publication
(s)

1967

Label (s) Impulses!

Format (s)

CD

Genre (s)

jazz

Title (number)

3

running time

63:46

occupation

production

Bryan Koniarz

Studio (s)

Olatunji Center of African Culture

chronology
Expression
(1967)
The Olatunji Concert: The Last Live Recording -

The Olatunji Concert: The Last Live Recording is a jazz album by John Coltrane , recorded on April 23, 1967 at the Olatunji Center of African Culture, New York City . It was the last live performance recorded by John Coltrane before his death on July 17th, 1967. The concert was recorded in 2001 on Impulse! Records released.

The Olatunji concert

The Olatunji concert is considered a historical document of Coltrane's last concert recording three months before his death from liver cancer. Coltrane played with his band in Baltimore on May 7th , but there are no recordings.

The Olatunji Center of African Culture was named after its founder, the percussionist Babatunde Olatunji and was located at 43 E, 125 Street in New York. Coltrane had been friends with Olatunji since 1961, when they performed with their bands at New York's Club Village Gate . Coltrane and Olatunji planned to tour Africa together; the saxophonist then supported Olatunji's project of a cultural center with donations. Coltrane's band finally made its first appearance in the center, which opened on March 27; For this purpose, Olatunji had developed a program called Roots of Africa , which included the Coltrane concert. Coltrane referred to this program focus by adding the other percussionists to the band and the Afro-Brazilian folk song Ogunde Varere . The Coltrane band performed twice in total, at 4:00 PM and 6:00 PM; Bernard Drayton's recording comes from the first concert.

At the concert in April 1967, in addition to the regular band members with whom Coltrane had worked since 1966, such as Coltrane's wife, the pianist Alice Coltrane , the tenor saxophonist Pharoah Sanders , the bassist Jimmy Garrison and the drummer Rashied Ali , the percussionists Algie DeWitt (on the Batá drum) and Jumma Santos with. The first title of the concert, Ogunde, began after a brief announcement by the pianist Billy Taylor ("[...] one of the most remarkable forces in jazz."). The title played here has little in common with the impressionist version on the studio album Expression ; While the studio version lasted just three and a half minutes, Coltrane and his teammates extended the improvised performance to almost half an hour, with long solo sections full of bursting intensity. Ogunde is based on the folk song Ogunde Varere ; Coltrane knew the piece from the arrangement of the composer Francisco Ernani Braga . Braga translated the title Prayer of the Gods , describing him as a Negro Spiritual in African dialect.

John Coltrane played a first solo and then handed over to saxophonist Pharoah Sanders; this played its screaming notes in the highest registers, interspersed with short melody sections over and over again, and thus created a high level of intensity. Alice Coltrane followed with a “volley of sixteenth notes” (Wild) before she could hear the melody of the piece again. Coltrane then returned with his solo playing to explore the extremes of saxophone playing. My Favorite Things , the second piece of the concert, was a Coltrane classic since the 1961 Atlantic album of the same name . According to David Wild, this final version of the Broadway classic My Favorite Things is "light years from the origin of the piece". It began with a longer, dark bass solo by Jimmy Garrison, which was "like the calm before the storm," wrote David Wild in the liner notes . “Coltrane starts on the soprano, nasal, angular. Fragments of the topic are only briefly alluded to. Sanders builds a solo out of sound fragments before Coltrane takes over again and finally plays with Sanders. "

Rating of the album

Richard Cook and Brian Morton , who exclude the album from their regular rating in their Penguin Guide to Jazz , regard it as a historical document with, however, poor sound quality, which was apparently not recorded with the intention of a later release. The Olatunji concert is a “wild, boisterous performance, strongly dominated by Pharoah Sanders, who is about to shake off his friend's coat”. The album thus documents the direction that Coltrane's music would have taken if he had not died three months later.

Rolling Stone magazine voted the album at number 88 in 2013 in its list The 100 Best Jazz Albums .

The titles

  • John Coltrane - The Olatunji Concert: The Last Live Recording (Impulse 589 120-2)
  1. Introduction by Billy Taylor : 35
  2. Ogunde (Coltrane) 28:25
  3. My Favorite Things ( Richard Rodgers / Oscar Hammerstein ) 34:38
  • The front cover of the album shows an excerpt from the original concert poster on which Coltrane is playing the flute. The full poster is reproduced inside the album.

literature

Web links

Notes and individual references

  1. ^ Compare David Wild: liner notes. On March 17th he went to Rudy Van Gelder's studio in Englewood Cliffs for the last time to record pieces such as Ogunde and Expression , which then appeared posthumously on the Expressions album (AS 9120).
  2. ^ Before the concert, Coltrane asked Bernard Drayton, a son of swing bassist Charles Drayton and an acquaintance of drummer Milford Graves, to record the concert in the Olatunji Center . This happened outside of his contract with the Impulse! Label.
  3. Rolling Stone: The 100 Best Jazz Albums . Retrieved November 16, 2016.