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In the liner notes to the last album that John Coltrane helped design, producer Bob Thiele quotes Coltrane, a mere two days from his death, discussing a name for this album: "Expression. That's what's it is." There could not be a more accurate statement to describe the music on this important, but long neglected, album.
For listeners who'd been following along, especially those attending the turbulent live shows from 1966, this must have been surprising. Coltrane, after all, had been moving more and more to a volcanic blast of music, shifting his quartet after the departure of McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones to spotlight the lush tension of Alice Coltrane's piano and expansive, multi-rhythmic drums of Rashied Ali. Over this, which lacked the propulsion of late-period Classic Quartet, Coltrane and partner Pharoah Sanders would often lay waste to melody, creating a creature of raw sound. But even within this, there could be traces of the old, melodic Trane: "Peace on Earth", for instance, a track recorded in February, 66 (but unreleased at the time of "Expression") and often played in concert, offered the suspended melody line that so many loved about "Alabama" or "A Love Supreme: Psalm". In 1967, Coltrane began to return to one of his strongest assets. He used less of Sanders (Pharoah only appears on one track here, "To Be", and then is limited to piccolo and percussion) and returned the lyrical "heads" to the songs. Sure, Coltrane was still experimenting with harsher sounds (for the best example of this, see the astounding duo album Interstellar Space), but here he anchors all four pieces with warm, inviting melodies. And then he does something truly original.
For his final works, Coltrane used the lack of structure within the band to create an elastic playing field, something that could turn in any direction at any moment. Listen to "Offering", for instance, which begins with an instantly hummable melody line, as it morphs in several directions: here, it's an affecting ballad, there, it's a torrent of extreme sound, but all of them are moving in and out of each other without any sense of formal transition. Coltrane had finally, in a sense, found what he was looking for with this last band - a group that could go anywhere at any time, where the structures of the song could move freely between sounds. A vehicle, in other words, for expression, which is indeed exactly what this album is. Long left in the used bins of Impulse's catalog (the record received a quicky remaster in 1993 and remained untouched through all of the remasterings of the 90s and 2000s, leaving listeners with vastly inferior sound, though they did get the bonus track "Number One", which is available on Jupiter Variation which should get a domestic re-issue soon), this album is finally available at the sort of sonic clarity that a Coltrane fan can proudly play loud, and that's exactly what his followers should do.
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- Reviewed in the United States on February 22, 2012
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Top reviews from other countries
- TonyReviewed in the United Kingdom on April 12, 2010
Coltrane's last great studio masterpiece
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