One heady riff

Once, there was a review. Jazz musician Don Ellis, critiquing John Coltrane’s latest release in a 1965 issue of Jazz magazine, wrote: “It is a basic fact of life (psychologically and physiologically) that any one thing repeated for too long a time without variation becomes boring.” As Ben Ratliff notes in his profound little book, “Coltrane: The Story of a Sound,” the next issue of Jazz ran a letter in response from free-jazz trumpeter Charles Moore. “The feeling of this music is more important to me than the technical matters; a feeling that you, Mr. Ellis, have insulted, thereby declaring yourself as another of my many white enemies. And for that, along with your ideals and your artifacts from ancient history, you must die.” Forty years later, Moore (now a professor of music at UCLA) tells Ratliff that he mostly meant the ideals and artifacts had to go -- but still, 40 years later, plenty of people want to argue about the saxophonist John Coltrane.

Probably more poetry has been written about Coltrane than any other jazz figure: Has anybody ever composed a poem about Wynton Marsalis? Only 40 when he died, Coltrane still has not been absorbed by the culture, Ratliff suggests; the jazz world hasn’t gotten past what he did, and his death from liver failure in 1967 temporarily stopped jazz -- as a business, as an art form -- in its tracks. “Coltrane” is an examination of the rails leading up to the impasse and the lines that lead out of it in all directions.

This is a book divided into two parts. The longer first portion is devoted to drawing in broad strokes the musical story of the saxophonist’s ever-growing musical style. The second half shows how that style affected the musical culture in all directions. “This is not a book about Coltrane’s life but the story of his work,” Ratliff writes. It’s not a full-fledged biography -- not even close -- but it does more than simply attend to the ins and outs of a great body of recorded work.

Ratliff casts Coltrane as several sorts of American archetype, putting him convincingly in the line of protean workhorses like John Henry or Lou Gehrig, who achieved apotheosis through their monumental labor -- a labor they themselves were profoundly unable to describe. As Ratliff shows, Coltrane was a disappointing interview, willing but remote. Above all, he was modest: “I have searched through his written and spoken comments,” Ratliff says, “and unless I’m mistaken, Coltrane never used the word ‘art’ on the record.” Art: Along with all those poems, the a-word has probably never been used in conjunction with another jazz musician as much as it has with Coltrane.

Ratliff also places Coltrane in the gallery of great American gunslingers like Clint Eastwood, Johnny Cash, Walt Whitman, and John Wayne in “The Searchers” -- lugs who straggle out into the town square and face down threats from all sides, without a glint of defensiveness or resentment. They live or die doing what they always do, and things either work out or they don’t.

Placing Coltrane in such company can make the man seem reserved and boringly iconic. But one great thing about this book is that Ratliff isn’t afraid to describe the moments when Coltrane’s performances failed him or when his intentions -- especially later in his brief life -- seemed less than clear and graspable. Ratliff lets Coltrane the geek shine bright: “He could look like a bumpkin; he had problem teeth, a wide waist, and was often photographed wearing ill-fitting, high-water pants.” This was a man who practiced for hours, playing on a blood-soaked mouthpiece while friends patiently waited outside his house. He studied the bagpipes and memorized harp exercise books, and one of his masterpieces, the saxophone workout “Giant Steps,” is with its insanely demanding chordal structure a monument to tedious geekery.

As a pop critic at the New York Times, Ratliff has turned me on to more music over the last few years than any other writer -- jazz and international sounds are his specialty. The listening skills of a great critic and the ability to convey what he hears are what he brings here, in a book that accomplishes its goal of describing the growth and radical transformation (over and again) of the most influential personal playing style of the second half of the 20th century. Ratliff has studied music, and he manages to fold the musicology in with quick jabs that push the story of a sound forward. And when the Mixolydian mode fails him, there is always plain old English: After shooting off some sparks of technical analysis regarding Coltrane’s solo on “Straight, No Chaser,” Ratliff sums up by saying, “[I]t’s like dirty motocross.” Beautiful.

As you’d expect from a veteran newspaper critic, Ratliff is great at drawing a big picture in a few deft marks. In two paragraphs, for instance, he absolutely nails the Silly Putty oeuvre of saxophonist Albert Ayler. But although his strengths play well to discussions of LPs and solos, what one may wish from “Coltrane” is more long-form narrative, in which Ratliff pulls back from the ticktock of his chronological flow to get at deeper truths. Coltrane, after all, was a master of time himself, pulverizing it by repetition and bigness that refuted our biological clocks. Who better to step out on?

This book shows how Coltrane bonded with the fellow saxophonists he adored -- Earl Bostic, John Gilmore, Eric Dolphy, Ornette Coleman, Ayler -- going well beyond the usual musicianly influence peddling to achieve a sort of voodoo possession of their styles. He practiced with many of them, broke their playing down until it was subsumed into his. (His relationship with Sonny Rollins seems fascinatingly distinct -- they were twin titans on different poles, deeply respectful and, one suspects, freaked out by the talents of the other.)

Ratliff explains the influence musicians have on one another’s styles, but things beyond music -- books and ideas and philosophy, lovers and locales -- help shape a style, as well. For the most part, “Coltrane” rules these out of bounds, and the loss is ours. “This is not a book about Coltrane’s life but the story of his work.” It’s a great story, told with lucid interest that steers clear of hyperbole. Now will somebody please write the book about Coltrane’s life to match it?