*** John Coltrane STELLAR REGIONS
(Impulse!)
Late-period Coltrane
masterworks like A Love Supreme, Meditations, and
Expression worked as integral suites, typically free flying, but
calibrated in terms of tempo, dynamics, textural density, and songform flux.
Stellar Regions is less cohesive. It's a collection of pieces discovered
and titled posthumously by the saxophonist's widow, Alice, and son
Ravi and,
except for "Offering" (from Expression), all unreleased until now. They
cohere only in that they were all recorded on February 15, 1967, five months
before Coltrane's death. Tunes tend toward the dirge-like, with Coltrane's
aggressive tenor wrestling through multiple tonalities, hitting on a rhythmic
motif and riffing against himself with it in every register, down into the
depths of darkness, bending up again toward the light. A couple of themes have
a surprisingly Steve Lacy-like
staccato attack ("Configuration," "Stellar
Regions"). It's exalted, sometimes terrifying music. When Coltrane enters after
Rashied Ali's drum solo on "Configuration," he finds a phrase -- guttural,
impassioned, split with vibrato -- that comes from another realm. It's as
though those drums took him somewhere, and now he's trying to tell us about
it.
-- Jon Garelick
|
