Tonight was just me randomly grabbing a few things off the shelf that were stacked up… among the discs were a couple of Pixies discs, Nico, and the Special Ultimate Über Edition of John Coltrane’s ‘A Love Supreme’.
The Pixies I mostly associate with the end of high school. Tamiko and I saw them open for U2 in Sacramento right before they broke up. I got into them more after seeing them. ‘Bossa Nova’ is perhaps part of the darkest album that I relate to my senior year of high school, a time where Tamiko and I had our most ups and downs (actually – mostly downs), my hair went through multiple colors, and my mood was often moody. ‘Bossa Nova’ fits into the mold pretty well. For some time, this dark horse of an album was my favorite Pixies disc until times got happier and ‘Doolittle’ took its rightful place at the top of the Pixies mantle. Not that ‘Bossa Nova’ doesn’t still have some good tracks, but it is just harder for me to get into the mood to hear Black Francis scream ‘Rock Music’ then it is to throw on ‘Hey’.
I have two Nico discs (not including my Velvet Underground collection). The first is ‘Chelsea Girl’ which Nico didn’t particularly care for herself. She says:
“I still cannot listen to it, because everything I wanted for that record, they took it away. I asked for drums, they said no. I asked for more guitars, they said no. And I asked for simplicity, and they covered it in flutes! … They added strings and – I didn’t like them, but I could live with them. But the flute! The first time I heard the album, I cried and it was all because of the flute”
On the one hand, I feel bad that she didn’t like the album so much. But all the things she is complaining about is also what I think makes the album so good. The second disc, a collection that contains a few tracks from ‘Chelsea Girl’, ‘Peel Slowly and See’ and more of her later work is only really strong because of those initial tracks. Both times I have listened to that disc, I’ve just gone back and put on the originals instead. Sorry Nico – I think the producers knew what they were doing. I can understand how she must have felt hearing the end result though, and I wonder why she allowed it to be released. Or maybe she didn’t have a choice?
‘A Love Supreme’ is easily in my top 10 albums. John Coltrane (as anyone who has read this blog probably knows) is easily one of my top 10 favorite artists. At the moment, it is hard to think of another album that would top it actually, but this is a fault of my own brain. Whenever one of my favorite albums comes to my mind, it tends to mask out the others that it would compete with. My mind just draws a blank about what could compete with it, and as long as I keep this brain problem in mind when thinking about my favorite albums, I will avoid saying something foolish like ‘this is my favorite album of all time!’. But there are certainly worse things to say in one’s life then ‘A Love Supreme’ is the best album ever made. It IS a masterpiece, recorded by THE Coltrane Quartet by Rudy Van Gelder. For decades, it existed only as the four tracks that make up the album, and I remember finding a bootlegged CD pressing of the single performance of the suite. I paid $40 for it, and was blown away at hearing the piece so differently. The live performance (now included in a cleaned up form on this two disc set) is from a festival in Antibes. It is just as beautiful. In some moments, even more so. In a couple of points, the playing pushes the performers to the max, and there are moments where some aspect falls apart. Coltrane runs out of breath, or the moment just gives McCoy Tyner a moment of pause. These ‘mistakes’ though are beautiful. They show these performers attempting to bring together this masterpiece in a live context, and it sounds so emotional. Those moments are their humanity, and when it comes down to it, it is humanity that this music is about. ‘A Love Supreme’ came out two years before Coltrane died. He had been through a number of hells, and had come through them a deeply spiritual and emotional man. The poetry that accompanies the work and the love that he describes couldn’t possibly have been played straight in performance, and I remember being struck when I first heard this recording how appropriate all these moments were. They made the work even more powerful. I’m so glad there is this other performance that was captured, but even more glad that there aren’t any more. A polished live performance could ruin the beauty of the one that does exist. And I’m not sure that the perfection that exists on the recording deserves to be anywhere else but on the studio one.