This bit from your notes rung particularly true for me:
Quote:
It's like it took the language created in A Love Supreme, and twisted it, bent it out of shape, and made a spiritual successor to Coltrane's universally hailed masterpiece that feels off-kilter, unstable, and imperfect in all the right ways
Coltrane's free jazz explorations aren't for everyone, but do you have any advice for people who struggle with all the squealing and overblown notes? Did this brand of free jazz resonate with you immediately or was it a matter of adapting your ear?
Anyway, the squealing and just wild all-over-the-place-ness of this particular brand of free jazz was honestly just perplexing at first (though not quite as perplexing as my notes which can be labeled with more or less the same descriptors). I think it's just a matter of an increase in familiarity with the style, but also a matter of contextualizing the style within the body of work of the musician in question (or perhaps just in the timeline of jazz development as a whole). Like before Meditations, Coltrane certainly leaned towards this kind of explosive honking of notes (just as I slowly leaned towards my own honking and overblown notes in an attempt to describe it) but this was generally just an accentuation placed over his more post-bob influenced compositions, which whilst being far from simplistic or compositionally pedestrian to even the slightest degree, are comparatively more accessible; I think following Coltrane's musical trajectory as his techniques evolved (often in conjunction with many of his contemporaries) the slow progression into this kind of crazed "wtf is going on" free jazz if far easier to digest when you've taken the slow (and totally beautiful/worthwhile journey) through the stylistic progressions leading up to this particularly wild style. Who knows, I imagine a bunch of people could just jump right into it and be enamored immediately, but, at least in my case, it was a matter of following jazz as a developing art form until it arrived at this point, and by the time I got there, as fucking insane as this method of composition/performance appeared at first glance (and really as fucking insane as it continues to appear, just received a little differently), at this point it seemed a surprisingly logical progression, and fell into place in my own personal contextualization of jazz (especially as it pertained to Coltrane's work) pretty perfectly.
tl;dr listen to Coltrane. Listen to lots and lots of Coltrane
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