TURTLE ISLAND QUARTET
A Love Supreme: The Legacy of John Coltrane
Telarc
It does sound a bit over the edge on the face
of it: a number of John Coltrane compositions and tunes
associated with Trane, including his masterpiece suite,
“A Love Supreme,” performed by a modern string
quartet. After all, others, including the venerable Kronos
Quartet, have tried interpreting the work of modern jazz
giants with decidedly mixed results. But the Turtle Island
Quartet has a great track record on its recorded projects:
Art of the Groove, Danzon, On the Town; all these
discs demonstrated the group’s ability to swing and
to adapt music previously played by a very different instrumentation
to the string quartet format.
The group starts off with a breezy rendition
of “Moment’s Notice,” originally recorded
by Coltrane on the Blue Train album. Already the
group exercises its keen rhythmic sense, and the slapping
walking bass (baritone violin, actually) drives the piece
along as effectively as any full jazz rhythm section. “La
Danse du Bonheur” is a John McLaughlin composition
that speaks to Coltrane’s influence in the exploration
and adaptation of Indian music into the jazz and, eventually,
popular music lexicon. Again, the group creates a great
deal of rhythmic excitement using pizzicato punctuation
to take the place of explicit drums and tabla. The effect
is that the listener’s mind completes a rhythm section
at times, ‘hearing’ one where there is, in fact,
none.
TISQ takes on the modal side of Coltrane on
several tracks. The first, “Model Trane” is
a long-form structure with two modal changes. It’s
rather like Miles Davis’ “So What,” which,
not coincidentally, is included on this disc as a bonus
track. On “So What” the group uses rhythm again
as a device to create their own arrangement of the work
without radically disrupting the melodic or harmonic content
of the piece. And, of course, “My Favorite Things”
was one of Coltrane’s favorite jamming vehicles, particularly
on soprano saxophone. The group takes this one lightly,
and the whole thing hangs together very nicely.
So, what about the album’s centerpiece,
“A Love Supreme”? Well, the group has found
a way to render the musical content of Coltrane’s
masterpiece as well as to continue to build upon it in a
way that is both respectful and refreshing. David Balakrishnan’s
arrangements allow us to recognizer the essential elements
of the piece, yet also find ways to express the spirit of
the music in ways that are better suited to the string quartet
format. The opening “Acknowledgement” section
weaves some of Coltrane’s thematic development through
the different voices in the group and also uses newly improvised
sections and elements composed specifically for the string
quartet. The “Resolution” section really swings,
and Balakrishnan finds a way to approximate the titan chords
of McCoy Tyner. “Pursuance” replaces Elvin Jones’
drum solo with a lyrical statement of the section’s
theme, while the closing “Psalm” is still a
musical word-prayer in the manner that Coltrane originally
performed it, but TISQ takes it a little more lyrically,
at times with an almost gospel overlay.
At the end of the day, jazz listeners will
find much to like about this recording, as long as they
accept the premise of the string quartet arrangements to
begin with. It’s hard to imagine that Coltrane would
have anything but praise for the performances contained
herein. TIQ’s A Love Supreme truly is an
homage to the legacy of John Coltrane and, though it takes
his music seriously, it still revels in the musical interplay
between musicians that is the very definition of the act
of creation.
