Not quite worthy of a love supreme.
A New York Times critic examines the jazz saxophonist’s style and legacy.
What hath Trane wrought? That’s the double-barreled question posed by Ratliff (The New York Times Essential Library: Jazz, 2002), one of the most thoughtful and reliable of daily newspaper critics. The work of John Coltrane, who enjoyed widespread influence both during his ’60s primacy and long after his death from liver cancer in 1967, is considered in two discreet parts. The first charts the autodidactic evolution of Coltrane’s music, from early journeyman performances through tenures in the bands of Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk, and into his work as a leader, from his masterly chord-based explorations to his pathfinding free playing. This succinct section will be of most use to the reader with intermediate understanding of music theory; the unschooled will be frustrated by some of the more technical passages. (Some will also find themselves yearning for a critical discography, which is not to be found.) The second part takes a provocative and wide-ranging look at Coltrane as a kind of musical and cultural mirror. Though the musician was a reticent explicator of his own music, his sound both absorbed and reflected the social, political and spiritual upheavals of its time, and his later performances marked a stylistic dividing line for jazz musicians. (“See, cats are still trying to recover from the Trane explosion,” saxophonist Von Freeman notes.) The many ways in which Coltrane and his innovations have been apprehended and debated receive a lively, discursive, occasionally windy treatment from Ratliff. While the writer is justly skeptical of claims by Coltrane’s champions and detractors alike, he seems hesitant to forge a strong opinion of his own. He upends many clichéd positions about Trane, but in the end appears uncertain about exactly what is important or enduring in his oeuvre. This ambivalence mars what is otherwise a largely stimulating reconsideration of a jazz icon.
Not quite worthy of a love supreme.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-374-12606-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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