We all love listening to Miles Davis, Stan Getz and Art Blakey. They were pioneers, artists and ambassadors for American music. Although albums like Sweet Rain and ESP never get old, listening to those records does not support the modern cats out there who continue to keep pushing music forward. Ravi Coltrane, a saxophonist and composer, is one of those players. With his debut Blue Note record Spirit Fiction, Coltrane is out on the scene playing the music we all love and keeping true to artistic expression.

He pulls together a strong group of musicians for his latest recording. With Luis Perdomo and Geri Allen on piano, Drew Gress and James Genus on bass, Ralph Alessi on trumpet and E.J. Strickland and Eric Harland on drums, Spirit Fiction has no shortage of masterful accompaniment. Saxophone virtuoso Joe Lovano played a major role in the making of the project as he helped Coltrane produce the album and played on it as well.

“Joe was a truly supportive producer on this project,” Coltrane says. “He has been an important figure in my life for over 20 years.” It is beautiful to see these two great minds work together to create art.

Filled with unconstrained experimentation, Spirit Fiction is an album that plays with chaos and control. Both aggressive and soft, sparse and abundant, dissonant and restful, Ravi Coltrane’s latest album is that of meaningful conflict. Coltrane tastefully pushes each composition in unexpected directions. In the song “Who Wants Ice Cream”, a moment of refrained interplay turns into an intense and unfiltered dialogue between trumpet and saxophone. With musical forms that are often times evasive, tempos that are abandoned and readopted, and timbre that change from gentle to frenzied, compositions evolve and contort into wildly different products. Spirit Fiction’s edgy and sometimes uneasy feel results in an album that pushes the listener to transcend admiration for what normally is considered pretty or sweet.

With Spirit Fiction, Ravi Coltrane has created a beautiful piece of sonic art. Much like a Picasso painting or an Edgar Allen Poe poem, Coltrane embraces the obscure and the dark. With long moments of dissonance, dynamic and sometimes harsh rhythmic accompaniment, Coltrane urges the listener to test the unfamiliar. To learn how to fully appreciate Coltrane’s latest work is a worthwhile undertaking.

By Zeb Stern

SUNDAY, 06 JANUARY 2013 BY BENSON IDONIJE LIFE MAGAZINE -MUSIC

IF I were asked to name the jazz artist of the year 2012 (as my contribution to the verdict of Downbeat Magazine) my choice would be Ravi Coltrane, the son of the late great saxophone legend, whose influence continues to loom largely over today’s entire jazz activity — even over four decades after his death in 1967.

Much as the young Ravi tries to be himself; much as the new saxophone faithful tries to shed the influence of his father, the dynamics of the legend’s tonal conception added to his majestic poise continue to be evident in his playing. But some of the elements that continue to stand out amazingly in his favour in terms of originality include the great sense of lyricism demonstrated in the approach to melodic themes as well as his improvisational lines, which are executed with machine-gun precision.

One of his major outings has been his impressive performance at Birdland in March 2008. His showing attracted the attention of critics as his quartet took the stage on the opening of a four-night stint.

Once the music started, he commandeered the show on tenor and soprano saxophones with a mix of torrid solos, tender melodic embraces, haunting and melancholic passages that suggested a solemn quest.

You could feel the depth of every note, twists and pockets of lyricism that at times exploded into a wail of anguish. Shy, almost diffident in conversation, Coltrane left all pretences behind, ending surprisingly, with an inside-out version of his father’s Giant Steps, steering the tune into an un-Trane direction with the recognisable theme holding only a slightly luminescent presence. Less than three months later, back at Birdland as a now permanent member of the Saxophone Summit after taking the place of Michael Brecker.

Coltrane again exuded an air of weariness. “I need to take a year off travelling to find out what matters,” he said, “ before taking the stage with fellow reeds mates Joe Lovano and David Liebman.”

BUT while the Coltrane family archivist may have been tired and still not feeling up to par, he gusted and exhilarated on his saxophones, engaging in the dynamic display of the trio of saxophonists largely paying homage to his dad’s later period of music.

His angular original, The Thirteenth Floor from the Summit’s recent D, Seraphic Light proved to be one of the set’s highlights, with its oblique swing pounced upon by the tenor saxophonist Liebman on soprano and Lovano on clarinet.

Coltrane’s maturation-his prowess on the saxophone as well as his increasing ease with leading and collaborating has come a long way since he took the plunge as a novice player at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia in 1986, and made his bona fide launch into the jazz life as member of Elvin Jones’ band in 1991.

He’s stepping out of the shadow of being John and Alice Coltrane’s son, and creating his own shadow over the jazz world.

Having just turned 47, Coltrane seems poised to break out. The urgency evident in his saxophone playing underlines his personal commitment to his horn. “I didn’t want to be an improviser because I’m John Coltrane’s son,” he said, “but because I love to improvise. It’s why I love John Coltrane, Joe Henderson and Wayne Shorter. We gravitate to it, and it consumes us.” But his last name still induces a suspicious pause with some jazz aficionados. You would think that the son of John Coltrane would have an easier time securing a stand in the fold. But he modestly balks at the notion of being an opportunist set to lay claim to a hereditary throne. “I want to be as personal as I can,” he said. “To respect and honour musicians and their legacies- whether its John Coltrane, Lester Young or Dexter Gordon – you can’t copy their sound. You can trace their roots and see the arc and shape of their development, but you can’t be a copycat. The only means to create something new is to become inspired and express it in a personal way.”

THE last time I saw Ravi Coltrane in actual performance, he was a prominent member of a TV jam session that included, among many musicians, pianist Chic Corea and the Afro rock singer, Angelique Kidjo. The mood and dynamics of the ensemble sound changed as soon as he came in with a saxophone solo that owed so much to John Coltrane in style and technique, and yet demonstrated a melodic exploration in lyrical design that was amazingly original. Ravi has developed a distinctive style.

The young Coltrane’s first Jazz Machine performance was in Los Angeles and led to a two-year stint on the road. Those early days could not have been easy for him as he was still struggling to step out of his father’s shadow. Encouraged by older musicians such as Elvin Jones, the drummer who held the famous John Coltrane Quartet together rhythmically and of course his own determination to be himself, he eventually came into his own.

With the Saxophone Summit where he replaced Brecker, they paid tributes to John Coltrane with performances of the saxophone legend’s songs. But did he ever imagine that one day he would be associated with a band that pays tributes to his father? “Tribute bands to my dad are something I’ve always avoided,” Coltrane said. “Why recreate? But it was entirely different with Joe Lovano and Dave Liebman.”

When Brecker passed on, Liebman thought that Coltrane would be the perfect replacement. ‘’Ravi stood out: His vibe is great, his sound is great and his legacy is great,” he said. “He’s still a work in progress, but you can hear his growth, his energy. Plus he is from a different generation from Joe and me. He articulates in a different way.”

Rather than bask in all the glory of his lineage, Coltrane has ramped up his own music and is currently writing the next chapter of his family history. He certainly has found his own voice; and even though the elasticity of his vocal chord has not reached the crescendo, it was loud enough for recognition in 2012. It stood out remarkably.

“Cross Roads”

HAS BEEN NOMINATED FOR A GRAMMY IN THE CATEGORY OF

‘BEST IMPROVISED JAZZ SOLO’

THE 55TH ANNUAL GRAMMY AWARDS AIR FEBRUARY 10TH AT 8PM ON CBS

Wednesday, 14 November 2012

“He’s one of the most important and influential musicians alive today,” words you might think appropriate for the son of one of the true giants of the saxophone. Though they were in fact used by Ravi Coltrane to describe his cousin – über-producer/beat-maker/conceptualist Stephen ‘Flying Lotus’ Ellison (here to play London’s Troxy on Friday) – who had dropped by to catch Trane Jr at Ronnie Scott’s. Ellison’s presence was wholly apt too from the perspective of what both his aunt Alice, and in turn his uncle John, were always striving to expand and explore new horizons. Ravi too wears the mantle of his father’s legacy with such ease and grace, not weighed down by his own or anyone else’s expectations. Thus if Ellison’s cosmic electronica continues aunt Alice’s mind expanding, spiritually-charged works then Ravi’s rich reimagining of his father’s legacy delves deeper into that inner world of harmonic space and metronomic time-stretching. For an hour or so Ronnie Scott’s was just about the hippest place to be on the planet; FlyLo sitting stage-right beaming at his cousin and his band tearing it up with hearty good humour and deadly intent.

Coltrane’s quartet are tight – both personally and musically – casually reminding themselves of the music from a sheaf of charts, but soon immersed eyes-shut in their own private inner versions of the music. Pianist David Virelles – also at last year’s LJF with Steve Coleman – was the perfect linear foil to Ravi’s vertiginous solo sojourns, finding salty sweet chords, adding a sour edge to the tenorist’s pungent ideas. Bassist Dezron Douglas was also outstanding, his sound a highly cultured blend of Charlie Haden’s sparing but spot-on note choices, and Jimmy Garrison’s dark and deep groove power. Drummer Johnathan Blake was the wild card in this tough and tender trio, his playing in a constant state of flux. First working his two ride cymbals and hi-hat with little additional percussive adornment; he built the entire set to a swooshing, swinging climax. But it was the undeniable and closely proximate presence of legendary beat-maker Flying Lotus, sitting just a few feet from him that sparked a curious change of tack – as Blake turned on some snapping, robotically precise breaks of his own on the appropriately titled, Ralph Alessi-penned, ‘Transition’. Ellison laughed in wry acknowledgement of the gesture.

Such good-humoured finesse from this superlative band hit even greater highs when all three lifted their leader, corralling his ideas and spurring them on further still as each sax solo bobbed and weaved. The set itself was a mix of old and new material – Monk’s ‘Skippy’ providing a suitably off-kilter starting point. From there the band drew on Ravi’s recent Spirit Fiction album, with its mercurial mix of sinewy melodies and subtle, shifting rhythms. Concluding the first set with a raptly received ‘Countdown’, one of his father’s many knotty mathematical puzzles, here given a suitably post-Glasper, post-Lehman working over, it begged the question did Trane invent math-jazz? Certainly Nicolas Slonimsky’s groundbreaking theories – that also inspired Frank Zappa and many others – underpinned the likes of ‘Giant Steps’, ‘Countdown’ and ‘Satellite’. Yet it’s to Ravi Coltrane’s credit that he sidesteps cliché and confounds expectations, wrapping up any high-minded concepts in his glowing tenor tone, and a vortex of heavy rhythms, all dispatched with vigour, fearlessly carrying his father’s legacy into a new century and beyond.

– Mike Flynn

The most adventurous aspects of Coltrane’s approach on Spirit Fiction are the inventive recording techniques he uses for several cuts and his playful use of space and complex meters. On the title track, his long-time quartet, which includes Luis Perdomo (p), Drew Gress (b), and E.J. Strickland (d), recorded separately as two duos and superimposed the outcomes to create this unearthly collage. Gress’ dark and stinging basslines propel the quartet’s haunted vibe, driving the anxious emotions of caution to panic and then back.

However, Coltrane also enlists Ralph Alessi (tp), James Genus (b), Eric Harland (d), and Geri Allen (p)—the quintet from his second album as a leader, From the Round Box (2000)—who help the saxophonist to convey more expansive ideas. The whimsically titled “Who Wants Ice Cream” may be closer to standard post-bop fare with Coltrane and Alessi’s graceful back and forth, but “Yellow Cat” features more dissonance and chaos. Here, the two horns solo over each other, trading barbs like two angry schizophrenics while the warmth of the rhythm section, led by Allen’s modal vamps, serves as a contrast to resolve the tension. The highlight of the album, “Fantasm,” actually features the trio of Coltrane, Allen, and saxophonist Joe Lovano, who produced this LP for Coltrane. Lacking bass and drums, it’s a brilliant yet more mercurial reinterpretation of the obscure tune composed by drummer Paul Motian (known for his trio work with pianist Bill Evans).

One would be hard pressed not to see the correlation of Spirit Fiction to his father’s indelible, avant-garde classic, A Love Supreme. That 1964 masterpiece was recorded when Coltrane, Sr. was beginning to realize fully his own musical language through free jazz but also had found himself reborn through Eastern spirituality. Because A Love Supreme is so highly regarded, nothing could fairly be compared to it. Nevertheless, that intangible, almost “spiritual” character of both albums is very different. Ravi’s “spirits” run a much wider gamut of moods, whether it’s romantic (“The Change, My Girl”), mischievous (“Klepto”), or agitated (“Spring & Hudson”), but still it never reaches the level of being an unfocused hodgepodge. Once again, he masterfully conveys his understanding of the free jazz form, and yet never duplicates his father in the least. In fact, Spirit Fiction may just be his most forward-thinking album thus far.

-Cyril Cordor

18 September 2012

This first Blue Note album from John’s son came out a few months back and has taken some getting into, but the perseverance has been worth it.

It’s very much an album of two halves, but these halves are inter-spliced, so that the journey from first track to last is a more complex, yin-yang one.

The one half is a Ravi’s regular quartet, with pianist Luis Perdomo, bassist Drew Gress and drummer E J Strickland, and because it is a touring band of familiars, the modus operandi is intrinsically looser and more instinctive. Three of the pieces, of which the opener, Roads Cross, is a prime example, are credited to all four as composers.

The other half is a quintet, with more formal arrangements, and comprising Ravi, Ralph Alessi on trumpet, Geri Allen on piano, James Genus on bass and Eric Harland on drums.

That second band is much easier to get into initially, and the warmer embrace of the other four brings out some of Coltrane’s finest solos – try Klepto, for example. But as familiarity with the album increases, so the quartet tracks begin to have their effect – especially the quiet thoughtful tenor ballad The Change, My Girl(it’s difficult to completely eradicate John Coltrane’s Ballads album from one’s mind when listening to Ravi rising and falling so lyrically).

Ravi Coltrane’s compositions are sometimes musically intriguing and challenging rather than listener-friendly, and his playing too can sometimes feel a little academic, but ultimately it’s his rich and engaging personality, especially on tenor, which draws the listener in and begins to make sense of the writing.

The final cherry on the top is the addition of fellow saxophonist Joe Lovano (he is credited also as co-producer) on two non-originals, Ornette Coleman’s Check Out Time, and Paul Motian’s Fantasm. Coltrane filled the shoes of the late Michael Brecker in Lovano and Dave Liebman’s Saxophone Summit band, and the bond between the two is clearly strong.

The bringing together of a great name and a great label augurs well – let’s look forward to more Coltrane Blue Notes.

Mike Ragogna: Ravi, let’s get into the concept of your new album, Spirit Fiction.

Ravi Coltrane: I wouldn’t call it a play on words, but I do like to let the listener decide what the meaning of those words may suggest to them. It’s a little abstract, but not too abstract.

MR: You’re the son of jazz icons, Alice and John Coltrane, and in the song “Marilyn & Tammy,” you’re talking about your other relatives.

RC: That song in particular, yes. It’s dedicated to my mother’s sister, Marilyn McLeod and her daughter Tamra Ellison. They were best friends in all of their time together; Tammy passed away, sadly, a few years ago. There’s something about this tune that reminds of their vibe and their energy together.

MR: Speaking of energy, how do you get inspired?

RC: I’m inspired by the challenge of it, the unknown. It’s always been very exciting for me, when things have been mastered before to recreate the past in a way that’s more traditional. That doesn’t always excite me that much.

MR: You had Joe Lavano with you on this project overseeing as producer. You also had two variations on the “bands” you used. Can you go into how you approached this album creatively?

RC: I had a lot of ideas, a lot of ambition, and sometimes, not all of it works. You might try a thousand different things and only find five that you think are worthwhile. I always overplan a little bit when I do these recordings. I try to record more material than I know will even fit on the album, just to give me the option to arrange things after the fact. Joe Lavano was a guy I have been hanging out with since the late ’80s. He’s a mentor, a great friend, and obviously, one of our greatest saxophonists out here. I’ve been working with him more closely over the last five years or so in the group saxophone summit along with David Liebman. I’m liking his style in the studio; I made a few record dates with him just to watch him do his thing in the studio–very clean, very efficient, and a little bit of that old school edge. I thought that would be a good thing for me to incorporate into my sessions. I had performed a little bit with my regular band in a few sessions last year, and I knew I was going to record some more. I had this idea of reforming an older group that’s featured on my second record, From The Round Box, which is a quintet. It was an interesting turn of fate having these sessions with two different groups and have the music work together and balance out.

MR: You’re a great improviser, of course, and I want to ask you about the song “Roads Cross.” It’s one of the great improv moments on the album, and it starts off the album, setting the mood. Can you talk about how it was created?

RC: Sure, thank you for commenting on that, that’s the whole idea with “Roads Cross.” It’s an introduction for the album. The album, for all intents and purposes, starts with the next track, “Clepto.” “Roads Cross” is saying, “Here we are, this is what we’re about, we’re going to dig as deep as we can in regards to improvisation and focused listening, like a kind of unified collective of improvisers.” For me, that piece, “Roads Cross,” and the other take of it, which is called “Cross Roads,” really illustrate where I feel we’re coming from as improvisers. We like to do spontaneous improvs during the course of a day in the studio. We have some planned materials, some tunes and whatnot. Then we’ll throw some ideas in, we’ll take a break and say, “Hey let’s try an improv where half the bands does this and the other half does that. Roll the tape, let’s go!” That’s essentially how it was. A bunch of them don’t work, then you have one or two that really do. I think they were some of the strongest pieces we recorded.

MR: I also want to bring up another experiment you had on the project. You tell me if its improv or not. On “Spring & Hudson”–as in the NYC streets–it’s just you and E.J., the drummer. You recorded it in such a way as to emulate The Half Note.

RC: Yeah, I was literally facing my drummer E.J. Strickland. We set up some stereo microphones in front of the saxophone and I was moving as if I were on a stage with him. I had a little more flexibility in that regard. I love playing duets with people. If we’re playing on a stage, my back is to the musicians. When you can face a musician directly on, you can start picking up on visual cues; you can see him lift his stick up, you can see when he is going to hit the drum; you can start to mirror the energy of their physical movements. It affects the improvisations when both musicians are looking dead at each other. The title does come from the quote “The Half Note.” The bandstand was so small that the musicians were forced to set up right next to each other facing each other. You can hear how that proximity affects the way they improvise and how well they can anticipate each other’s moves.

MR: There’s something romanticized about playing those smaller clubs where you have challenges performance-wise. How do you feel about that, looking at it after all these years?

RC: It affected the work. I don’t know if music would have progressed and grown the way it did if it wasn’t cultivated and developed in small clubs. To play this music on a giant stage in front of a giant audience is a totally different thing. When you’re in a tight room where you can literally hear every note at every moment, every beat at every pulse, you can get a certain type of precision, a certain kind of exactness to your feel and your phrasing to how the music flows. It’s hard to imagine this music developing the way it did in any other type of environment.

MR: After a club date, you theoretically go home and you sleep, then you wake up. Then after a dream, you come up with a title for one of your songs, which is called “Change My Girl,” right?

RC: We usually don’t sleep after the club dates, the sun’s usually coming up and we have to get ready for the next day’s work.

MR: (laughs) I was just setting the question up, but let’s get into the song’s title coming to you in a dream.

RC: I like to keep a list of titles and things. You might be walking down the street and a phrase might come to your head. You say, “That could make a good title,” so I just write them down. That was from a dream that I had years and years and years ago. A bunch of us were at a session and trying to decide what tune to play next. Somebody was saying, “What about this, what about this,” then someone said, “What about ‘Change My Girl?’ In the dream, I said, “Okay, fine, let’s play that, everyone knows that tune.” It seemed so casual in the dream, as if it were a standard that everybody knew. So I woke up, wrote it down, and here we are decades later.

MR: And that’s obviously also how you got the title “Who Wants Ice Cream?”

RC: (laughs) For me, it’s “Who Doesn’t Want Ice Cream?” It’s redundant. That’s a Ralph Alessi song. He is a great composer and also a master at coming up with these very idiosyncratic titles. It’s a fun song with a fun title. I think people like the title as much as the song. It’s a win-win situation.

MR: You have three numbers by him on this project.

RC: Yes, he composed three pieces, and he is featured on a few others.

MR: You also cover “Check Out Time.”

RC: That’s right, Ornette Coleman is one of our biggest leaders. We’ve been following his music for as long as we’ve been on this planet. I have recorded his music before, and always feel compelled to play his music. Again, he is one of our great heroes. To be in a recording session with Joe Lavano and Geri Allen and not go into an Ornette Coleman song is not the right thing to do. He did two records on Blue Notes. One was called New York Is Now, the other is Love Call.

MR: You also do a Paul Motion song called “Fantasm.”

RC: Yes we do, “Fantasm” is a beautiful composition. Paul had just passed away maybe about a month or so before that session. Joe’s relationship with Paul dates back to late ’70s, ’80s. I think he was in his twenties when he met Paul for the first time. I asked Joe if there was a song that he thought would be appropriate to do. He said right away, “Fantasm.” I felt like it was something that needed to happen in that moment.

MR: Ravi, what advice do you have for new artists?

RC: Keep an open mind. Music lives not only in the present, it can also live in the future. People have this idea that jazz lives only in the past. Obviously, we have great monuments and great pillars from the past that will always guide us and inform us. But really, they were trying to make sense towards the future. I don’t think you can listen to Thelonius Monk without realizing that it’s really what’s happening. His command and knowledge of tradition and what came before him is firm. But really, his desire to move forward and express a more personal vision in music, that’s when innovation happens. We’re not often taught as young music students to use our intuition and imagination. We’re taught to emulate and copy the past. A lot of us get very comfortable doing that and feel no desire to rely more on our intuitions. Following our path to “what if” is much harder to teach or instill in a young person. For me, there are great benefits with trying to embrace that. All you have to do is look at the past; that’s what these guys did. The John Coltranes, the Miles Davis’, the Charlie Parkers took on the past but embraced the future even more so.

MR: Beautiful answer, Ravi. I have a question from David Proctor Hurlin, an amazing jazz drummer here in the Midwest. He asks you, “In the context of improvisation, how does one balance accountability to musical form and structure, and accountability to total desire.”

RC: Accountability…I’m trying to understand how he’s relating that to improvisation.

MR: Maybe the actual performance to the musical form and structure?

RC: What are our goals as improvisers? To play something we’ve worked out in advance, or actually play something that is totally caused by the moment, that’s played for the moment, for the purposes of the moment. Identifying what our roles truly are as jazz musicians, that’s key, really. Some people are like, “I just want to swing, I just want to carry the flag for the tradition.” That’s a moot level, that’s first gear. It’s a necessity that is a natural component, but it’s what comes after that. As far as accountability goes, we have to do more than master the past. We have to embrace something more personal, and hope that it will lead to something new.

MR: Do you ever feel your parents John and Alice smiling down on you?

RC: I hope so, I hope they’re smiling.

MR: When you create music, do thoughts of them ever come to you?

RC: They are in my thoughts all the time. They are a part of everything I do. Not in a romanticized kind of way. I can’t even articulate it. It’s just there.

Tracks:
1. Roads Cross
2. Klepto
3. Spirit Fiction
4. The Change, My Girl
5. Who Wants Ice Cream
6. Spring & Hudson
7. Cross Roads
8. Yellow Cat
9. Check Out Time
10. Fantasm
11. Marilyn & Tammy

 August 10, 2012

By ZACHARY WOOLFE

“Ambition sometimes gets a little out ahead of you,” Ravi Coltrane said. He was sitting in his living room in Brooklyn, next to his son’s tiny drum kit, talking about his new album, “Spirit Fiction.” “You start imagining more than you can actually pull off, and you cross that line from possibility into impossibility.”

On the wall nearby was a framed photo of Barack Obama standing in the White House gazing at a black-and-white photo of another musician, a saxophonist like Ravi. “To Ravi,” it is inscribed. “From a huge fan of your father’s.”

Not a little of the ambition of the new record is due to the ever-present specter of Ravi’s father, John Coltrane, one of most influential musicians of the 20th century. “Spirit Fiction,” with its rhythmic complexity and slippery structures, doesn’t so much challenge John’s legacy as move astride it. The album radiates a quietly adventurous artistry and a serene self-confidence.

That serene feeling emerged from conditions that were anything but. “Spirit Fiction” is Coltrane’s first record for Blue Note, the most legendary label in jazz and the company that in 1957 released “Blue Train,” the classic that made John Coltrane’s name as a bandleader. For the “Spirit Fiction” sessions, Ravi pushed himself and his bandmates hard. After recording tracks with his longtime quartet, Coltrane felt the urge to return to the studio again, this time in hastily arranged sessions with a quintet of musicians he has known since college. Thrown together with tape running, the quintet played with refreshing looseness, hitting on a mood that Coltrane had been seeking.

The final record contains tracks from both ensembles. Cobbling it together was an exhausting effort that strained some relationships; Coltrane’s quartet, formed in 2003, has gone on hiatus in its wake. It was a lesson his father might have passed along to Ravi: artistic searching sometimes leaves collaborators in its wake.

John Coltrane died of liver cancer at age 40 in 1967, when Ravi was not quite 2. He was raised by his mother, Alice, herself a brilliant composer and performer whose music — a trippy, meditative style of jazz that brought harps, synthesizers and chanting into the mix — was heavily influenced by her Eastern-inflected spiritual practice.

As a boy, Coltrane was sensitive, shy and a little nerdy. He aimed at becoming a filmmaker or a photographer. But he played the clarinet in his high-school marching band, and music — jazz, symphonic, pop (his aunt is the Motown songwriter Marilyn McLeod) — was always around.

“I used to sit in my mom’s car, back in the days when you could play the tape player without having to cue it,” he said. “And I’d literally just sit there after school and play tapes and stare out the windows just looking at the trees moving in the wind.”

He left high school after his older brother died in a car crash in 1982, and as he put it, “I just let a bunch of time pass.” When he emerged, he had left photography behind and returned to his musical roots. He began hanging out with serious jazz lovers, people who for the first time instantly recognized his surname.

“I had been anonymous in that regard,” he said. “Someone would say, ‘John Coltrane — I know that name. Wasn’t he a blues singer?’ I was just me growing up. No one knew who John Coltrane was. He was still an underground figure in many ways.”

He decided to study music and enrolled at the California Institute of the Arts. “Showing up with a saxophone and having the name Coltrane,” he said, “I immediately recognized that this was going to be distracting for people.” But it was also an opportunity. He spent summer breaks in New York with Rashied Ali, the drummer whose free-form style helped define John Coltrane’s late period. During daily jam sessions in Ali’s apartment, Ravi impressed older musicians who once played with his dad. Right out of school he scored a gig in the band of Elvin Jones, who played in John Coltrane’s legendary quartet of the 1960s. He proved himself on grueling international tours, but there were still people attracted solely by the novelty value of his lineage. Some record companies were more interested in getting him to join supergroups made up of the sons of jazz greats than in his own work.

“There were a lot of people who just wanted to take advantage of these things that for me — I felt, Man, I’m not here for that reason,” he said. “Anyone who knows me ultimately understands what I’m doing and why I’m doing it.”

In his airy home studio, he keeps his mother’s Steinway piano and his father’s saxophone, its keys capped in pristine mother-of-pearl. There’s a bass clarinet that belonged to Eric Dolphy, who played with his father. The miniature drum kit seems to have seen the most recent action, though his son Aaron, after begging for it, promptly grew bored by it. I asked Coltrane, who just turned 47, if he wanted Aaron and his brother to grow up to be musicians.

“Secretly, I’d love — ” He stopped himself and started to laugh. “Well, I can’t put that out there. Because it’s up to them — it’s up to them. They’ll be great no matter what they do. They’ll be cool no matter where they go in life.”

Ravi Coltrane - Spirit Fiction (Blue Note 509999 18937 2 7 – CD Review by Chris Parker)

This is an uplifting, heart-warming release for many reasons. Most importantly, it’s good to know, from the abundance of evidence provided by this highly accomplished album that Ravi Coltrane is not in the least overburdened with the expectations inevitably involved in his bearing the names of two of the greatest improvisers of the twentieth century.

In addition, it’s great to hear music still being performed on the Blue Note label that in so many ways – by involving a stellar cast under benign and intelligent direction from a talented leader; by containing cultured but accessible music firmly rooted in the tradition, yet very much of the moment; by carrying on a family tradition begun with a classic Blue Note album, John Coltrane’s Blue Train – emulates the recordings of the label’s heyday under Alfred Lion.

Featuring two excellent bands – Coltrane’s regular quartet completed by pianistLuis Perdomo, bassist Drew Gress and drummer E.J. Strickland; the quintet from From the Round Box (2000) completed by trumpeter Ralph Alessi (who contributes three pungent originals), pianist Geri Allen, bassist James Genus and drummer Eric Harland – on an intelligently arranged programme of three free-ish excursions and three more straightahead pieces (including the simple but ravishingly beautiful ballad “The Change, My Girl” from Coltrane himself, plus tunes from Paul Motian and Ornette Coleman involving co-producer Joe Lovano on characteristically elegant tenor, this is a classy but immediately enjoyable album, its varied material impeccable played by top-class musicians.

AUGUST 6, 2012

BY: MICHAEL NANK

After just getting back to Seattle from spending time at the Vancouver International Jazz Festival I wondered if I might experience a jazz drought of sorts. It was possible, given that Vancouver brings in some of the best jazz musicians to the Pacific Northwest for a 10-day fest every year unparalleled in this region. (Here is one of my jazz dispatches from this year’s fest.)

Fortunately, this summer of Seattle jazz proved to be drought-proof thanks to Ravi Coltrane’s two-day stint at Dimitriou’s Jazz Alley.

Coltrane stopped by the Emerald City in support of his most recent effort, Spirit Fiction, which marks his debut outing with Blue Note Records. But before he busted out any new works from his latest release, Coltrane grabbed his soprano sax and eased into the night’s 100-minute set with the Johnny Mercer, Jerome Kern classic composition “I’m Old Fashioned.” That his father, John Coltrane, made a memorable recording of this track back in 1957 was not lost on the near capacity crowd.

The set kicked into high gear as Coltrane leaned into his horn and wasted no notes on “Who Wants Ice Cream,” which shares a track on Spirit Fiction, before his band settled back into the Thelonious Monk composition “Epistrophy.”

A highlight of the evening was “For Turiya” which Charlie Hayden had written for, and performed with, Ravi’s mother Alice Coltrane in 1976. Ravi went on to make a recording of “For Turiya” with Hayden after Alice’s passing in 2007. Coltrane’s rendition on this night brought with it all of the deliberate and poignant lines that evoked the spirit of Alice Coltrane and echoed back to both his earlier recording with Hayden as well as Hayden’s original tracks with Alice.

It is clear that Ravi relishes in his time on the Jazz Alley stage. Between numbers Coltrane recounted memories of his previous gigs in Seattle — all the way back to his first time on stage at Jazz Alley in 1991 when he was performing with Elvin Jones.

Thankfully he keeps coming back for more. This time around Coltrane brought a relatively new group of band members along with him (at least playing together in this quartet) including David Virelles (piano), Hans Glawichnig (bass) and E.J. Strickland (drums).

Sweat soaked in the end there was never a doubt that Coltrane and his quartet left nothing up on stage as the final notes of Bob Dorough’s “Nothing Like You” rang out – leaving the Seattle jazz scene a verdant place indeed.

Check out www.ravicoltrane.com for additional info on Spirit Fiction and his other works that span over the past 20-plus years.