‘A Ritual for John Coltrane’

The centenary of John Coltrane’s birth in Hamlet, North Carolina falls later this month; many commemorative events will take place. Yesterday afternoon at Cafe Oto, in the first of four monthly Sunday matinee concerts, Evan Parker led something he titled ‘A Ritual for John Coltrane’, which turned out to be the sort of tribute that summons the spirit of the dedicatee without trying to mimic the substance. I may have mentioned before that the first time I interviewed Evan, at his home in the early ’70s, I was impressed by a shelf of LPs with orange and black spines: Coltrane’s albums on Impulse, of course, in their original US editions. Over the years I learned more about his love of the great man’s work, and the inspirational effect it had on the development of his own playing. Yesterday Evan sat at the centre of an expanded performance space, with his soprano saxophone and a suspended gong. He was flanked by Matt Wright, his partner in Trance Map, at a table with a laptop and a turntable, and by Filipe Gomes of Ramsgate’s Arco Barco studio, also with a laptop and other electronic devices. At the four corners of the space were a quartet of percussionists assembled by Mark Sanders, himself standing at an array of larger gongs, cymbals and small upturned bass drums, with Miles Levin, Jim Bashford and Tymek Jozwiak each seated at minimal kits of varying configurations. After the room had fallen silent, Evan began proceedings by striking the gong. His strokes precipitated a very gradual accretion of sounds from the other players, creating an abstract tapestry of rustles, taps, pings and other noises, with the subtle infiltration of electronic sounds at its base. After many minutes of this, and a fade to a silence in which we heard Coltrane’s voice speaking about his desire for growth as a person, Evan picked up his soprano and began the first of several improvisations against the constantly shifting sound-quilt. He is 82 now, more than twice as old as Coltrane was when he died in 1967. Yet his playing is still mesmerising in its unquenchable flow of invention, based on all the techniques of blowing and fingering developed over the decades and powered by circular breathing as well as a constantly active imagination. I suppose you could trace it back to… [TheTopNews] Read More.