Six months after A Love Supreme, the quartet was back at Van Gelder’s studio, and the Transition session picks up right where the heart of Pursuance left off on the last beat. After two statements of the head, Coltrane zooms off as the band swings in support.
Coltrane in Context
By June 1965, A Love Supreme had already been out for five months, and it wasn’t a slow-burn public discovery, it was a sensation. Down Beat magazine put Coltrane on the cover of its annual readers’ poll issue that April, dubbed it “the year of Coltrane,” inducted him into its Hall of Fame, and gave the album a five star review. Whatever else was happening in his life, John Coltrane walked into this session already knowing he’d made something enormous.
At home, Alice was roughly six months into her second pregnancy, expecting Ravi that August. The band itself carried a recent scar: five weeks earlier, on May 26, Elvin Jones had been in jail on drug charges, and long time Coltrane friend/collaborator Roy Haynes sat in on drums for a session that produced “Dear Lord,” “One Down, One Up,” and “After the Crescent.” By June 10, Elvin was back behind the kit, but the band had already proven, out of necessity, that it could function without him. That crack in the door would widen considerably over the next year and a half.
The Haynes sessions produced a few notable moments worth adding to this log. “One Down, One Up” finds the Haynes-era quartet kicking its heels up through a knotty chromatic head with multiple layers of chord planing, the band pumping and throbbing in waves rather than the clean kinetic slaps Elvin’s version of this group is known for. Haynes isn’t a slouch, he simply lacks the history, and it leaves you curious what this same tune sounds like once Elvin gets his hands back on it.
“After the Crescent” is the real find of the session, built around a Tyner solo that pushes the band into a genuine nethersphere of harmony and rhythm, polymetric call and response dissolving into something like a melt vector, before Coltrane refocuses the group and drives it to the outer reaches of his horn, squeaks, squonks, alternate fingerings, harmonic howls, until the whole band all but drops dead at the twelve minute mark. “Dear Lord,” by contrast, is a beautiful mid-tempo swinging ballad, a needed balancing act against the outrageous exploration surrounding it.
This post is part of The Ascension Years, a session-by-session listening journey through John Coltrane’s final years. Start from the introduction to follow the whole series in order.
The Transition Session
Recording took place on Thursday afternoon, June 10, 1965, at Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in Englewood Cliffs. The band consisted of John Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, and Elvin Jones. The tracks cut in this Transition session were: Transition, Welcome, and, with A Love Supreme’s extended architecture fresh in mind, the five-part, 21 minute opus Suite (i. Prayer and Meditation: Day, ii. Peace and After, iii. Prayer and Meditation: Evening, iv. Affirmation, v. Prayer and Meditation: 4 A.M.).
The reissue history on this material is genuinely tangled: Welcome and Vigil (recorded six days later, on June 16) originally appeared on the Kulu Sé Mama LP, while a fourth piece from this same session, “Dear Lord,” was later reassigned to the Dear Old Stockholm compilation. What we’re discussing here is the session as it actually happened in the room, not as any single album packaged it.
Transition
Two statements of the head, and Coltrane zooms off as the band swings in support. His first squeaks unlock the door for Tyner to start exciting the extended harmonies, pushing Trane further and further out the farther the band gets.
Every large architectural cycle kicks off with a large root-note klang, a jazz and experimental hallmark used by everyone from Phish to Meshuggah. In all these examples, the jams get further and further out only to cycle back to the ensemble drop on the one. Did he get this from Indian music, or from his study of Ravi Shankar? Worth investigating.
The interiors of each cycle get progressively more scrambled, with Jones, Garrison, and Tyner vacillating from propulsive swing to headbanging power chords. Elvin dances spectacularly throughout, pushing, pulling, and keeping the connection between Tyner’s outrageous comping and Garrison’s angular swing. Somehow Coltrane sews the whole thing together, leading, unifying, and blasting to the stratosphere before finally passing the baton to Tyner as the band swings and complements.
Frilly, expressive, curious, dexterous, but with pounding power chords, Tyner drops into cul-de-sacs of glitchy fragments, repeated, expanded, furious flurries that drop back to earth for each teental ka-blam. The playing throughout veers from bombast to detailed ensemble embroidery, continually jaw-dropping in its focus and fight.
Trane flies back in, perhaps one chorus too late, with angular scronches, astonishing asides, and abstract solo-polyphonics leading a near sax-and-drum battle, the third, fourth, and fifth “holy shit” moment of the listen. How many times can this jam go to the mountain? Endless times. Trane dials in the head, the band rages, and then collapses into a large drum and piano flourish.
If this is the Transition session, I’m completely here for it.
Welcome
Welcome opens with a quote of Johannes Brahms’ Op. 49, No. 4, Wiegenlied (the famous “Lullaby”), a detail worth noting given the current goings-on in the Coltrane household. Drums, piano, and bass provide a gorgeous wash underneath, with Tyner running scales and arpeggios between Coltrane’s soaring melody. Elvin’s toms accent the proceedings elegantly and sound like orchestral tympani. Garrison drops in to anchor the melody with phenomenal grace and delicacy. Tyner drones and creates beautiful twinkling arpeggiated atmospheres alongside Jones’s sizzling cymbals.
A gorgeous ballad, and a striking contrast to what just came before it.
Suite
Prayer and Meditation: Day. The title suggests inspiration from a morning raga of some sort. The introduction swirl introduces a drone chord and very specific scalar material for exploration. Almost immediately, Jones pushes into an undefinable “jazz” groove, driving as Garrison and Tyner hold on while Trane sings long tones above.
A transition into a new tonal center and hemiola groove possibly indicates we’ve moved into Peace and After. The teental klang is still in effect as a structural device, with the rhythm section splaying out into unrelated yet strangely locked divergences. Elvin being Elvin, Garrison digs in hard with the bow. Resolution arrives in the form of drones and tender melodies. The band filters out and Garrison takes center stage with col legno battuto double stops that transition into almost kora-like chordal melody work. The experimentation has become sacred and timeless.
Prayer and Meditation: Evening opens with a louder swirl, what was delicate repeated more forcefully and with less delicacy. The head sounds like an evolution of “Countdown” from Giant Steps. The groove is propulsive and swinging and again echoes Pursuance. Was A Love Supreme already out and heralded as a masterpiece at this point? Had the recording gotten into the performers’ heads, so they were repeating some past glories, or is it just the band dynamic? Trane explores every range of his tenor, singing, screaming, honking, and hollering as the band blazes into the thick of this Evening rag.
The Countdown head signals a transition into Affirmation, a brief Elvin Jones drum solo. Thunderous yet delicate. The band returns for drony washes that continue to explore the opening scalar material for Prayer and Meditation: 4 A.M. Why 4 a.m.? The end of the set? The closing of the club?
The Records
Everything referenced from this Transition session:
- John Coltrane — Transition (1993, Impulse!/GRP CD reissue; source for this session’s material)
- John Coltrane — Dear Old Stockholm (44.1kHz Stereo stream via Qobuz, Impulse! Records)
The System
All listening sessions on a Fisher 400 stereo receiver (1963) into Klipsch Heresy IV speakers via an Onkyo DX-C390 six-disc CD changer, connected to a WiiM Ultra network streamer via TOSLINK optical. Digital-to-analog conversion handled by the WiiM Ultra’s onboard ESS ES9038Q2M SABRE DAC.
About Spacefuzz
Spacefuzz is the recording project of Charles Morogiello, a composer, artist and guitarist based in Phoenix, AZ. He has studied, performed or recorded with Mel Powell, Morton Subotnick, Terry Riley, Wadada Leo Smith, Lou Harrison, Don Preston (The Mothers of Invention/Frank Zappa), Billy Martin (Medeski Martin & Wood), Mark Karan (The Dead, The Other Ones) and many more. His latest album, Crush Depth: A Dub-Sonic Submarine Symphony in Four Sides, is out now on vinyl and digital via Bandcamp. Explore the Spacefuzz discography or read more about the project. Stream on Apple Music, Spotify, Tidal, and Qobuz.