Brecker and Coltrane Deaths - The Lessons of Legends

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Brecker and Coltrane Deaths - The Lessons of Legends

By Howard Mandel

Copyright © 2007 Howard Mandel

It wasn’t until the very last hours of the International Association for Jazz Education’s 34th annual conference weekend, held in midtown hotels in New York City, that news spread of the deaths on Saturday, January 13, of saxophonist Michael Brecker and keyboardist Alice Coltrane.

Nearly 10,000 jazz musicians, student instrumentalists, teachers, schools represented by chief administrators, non-profit arts agencies, television broadcasters, radio station directors and programmers, record company executives, website developers and jazz journalists had spent three days, morning past midnight, in special performances, scholarly papers’ presentations, instructional clinics, public interviews, panel discussions, web-site launches, personal networking and the commercial exhibition hall. Conference attendees could easily have had 20 or more quick, intense business and social contacts that Saturday without knowing the extended jazz family was down by two. But I bet we all left the conference sobered by the fullness of Michael Brecker and Alice Coltrane’s particular jazz lives.

Michael Brecker, who died of leukemia at age 57, was a hero especially to the kind of high school and college kids who come to New York for IAJE, which brings them together to learn and sets them loose to party with peers from all across the country and the world (French jazz was a special focus of the conference this year, with a special stage, reception and honored profile). Brecker had the amazing finger dexterity, formidable breath control, steely tone, literacy and superlative consistency that can be acquired through the focused study and relentless practice that professional jazz education - if not the old school jazz life - has promoted as key to student’s success. Equal to his technical facility, Brecker had a genuine belief in jazz as art, inspired originally by John Coltrane’s early ’60s records, as well as a realistic sense of his own urban, urbane circumstances.

Arriving on the scene at the right time, the late 1960s, from some of the right places (born in Philadelphia, he and his brother, trumpeter Randy, were enrolled in the early jazz program at University of Indiana), he flourished working in the pop-rock-jingle recording studios, playing chorus-length sax solos eventually for international stars like Paul Simon, Aretha Franklin, Billy Joel and Aerosmith as well as in festival and concert hall collaborations with mainstream modernists including pianists Herbie Hancock and McCoy Tyner, guitarist Pat Metheny and orchestra leader Claus Ogerman, among others.

He and Randy co-owned the New York night club Seventh Avenue South, an electrically-charged jazz joint that hummed with exciting after-hours action. Michael was a crucial member of several cutting-edge ensembles, including vibist Mike Manieri’s all-star Steps Ahead, in which he played the Electric Wind Machine, and the Brecker Brothers Band, in which he updated rhythm ’n’ blues tenor licks with a hard, slick sheen and some tuneful, taut twists. He completed an album for the Heads Up! label just before his death, but his most recent release was Wide Angles, featuring complicated charts for Quindectet (15-pieces). I remember Brecker’s surprise appearance at the climax of Hancock’s Carnegie Hall JVC Jazz Festival concert last summer, in which he blew a super-compressed, energy-packed statement on “One Finger Snap” that must have used every note in every saxophone register three or four tmes, always in alternate sequence, prismatically, with rests and accents perfectly distributed. It was the kind of solo that leaves listeners tempest-tossed, yet enlivened, enlightened, refreshed. Brecker’s solos often squeezed a lot of information into a little space, and gave the sense that they would reveal secrets upon being unfolded.

Brecker was in my direct experience (the encounter is reprinted in Future Jazz) was a modest, hardworking man. He’d struggled with his disease for almost three years. He knew his music had won him the love of strangers because thousands of jazz fans volunteered, during his illness, to be tested for the suitability of their bone marrow as transfusion matches with his. He was less appreciated by critics than by music buyers - he won 11 Grammy Awards, but many fewer polls, while his music got deeper over the years, But even those who didn’t ever like his projects respected Michael Brecker’s commitment and artistry. He was a jazzman for today.

If the IAJE attendees perhaps thought of Brecker as an icon, idol and big brother, they may have considered Alice Coltrane (neé McLeod) a mother figure who’d been who’d once been the spiritual muse of a jazz giant, a musical god. Her 2004 album Translinear Light, on which she’d played piano, organ and synthesizer (but not harp, her other instrument) was fairly well received, yet she was mostly a legend. She had withdrawn from public performance in the late 1970s to concentrate on operations of a Hindu monestary she had founded in California; when she performed subsequently, it was to benefit her religious activities, or occasionally to accompany her saxophonist son Ravi Coltrane. She typically added serenity, timelessness and airy grace to his grittier, penetrating modal-melodic explorations, and this rare mother-son collaboration was a tender joy to behold. She was 69 when she died, the cause reported as respiratory failure.

Of course, both Ravi and Alice were expanding upon the work of John Coltrane, her husband and the father who died when Ravi was two. She was Coltrane’s second wife, marrying him in 1966 after they’d already had two children together, also replacing McCoy Tyner in Coltrane’s touring and recording band. What she offered musically is evident on Coltrane’s ’66 Impulse! album Live at the Village Vanguard Again: waves of oceanic rubato rumbling in support of his relentless, sharklike drives through a ferociously abstract “My Favorite Things” and gorgeously lyrical “Naima.”

After John Coltrane’s death in ’67, Alice sustained her career playing with Pharoah Sanders, Rashied Ali, Carlos Santana, Frank Lowe and others of Trane’s circle, but her interest in secular music waned until Ravi’s mid ’90s emergence. She did protect John’s legacy and served as executor of his musical estate; in that role, among Alice Coltrane’s great contributions to jazz was her daring decision to have Ornette Coleman compose string parts to dub under Trane’s solos for the posthumous album Infinity. She had a vision - like her husband’s and Coleman’s, too - that stretched well beyond worldly constraints, with enormous compassion. Alice Coltrane, like Michael Brecker, embodied aspects of jazz - values, and experiences -- seldom taught in any school, but essential for those who love the music to at the very least consider.

Howard Mandel is president of the Jazz Journalists Association and author of the book Future Jazz.

[Lazaro Vega]

Amen.