 
Ravi Coltrane has been putting out consistently amazing albums ever since his appearance on the jazz scene, but somehow hasn't found the backing or the consistent appeal of say a Bill Frisell or Brad Mehldau. Maybe people think "how could he possibly be any good" because of his lineage. But the fact is that Ravi Coltrane is an amazing saxophonist and composer. His BMG album "From a Round Box" was a stunning compositional tour de force, as was his opus The Mad 6. Now, like many in the business, Ravi has been downsized to a smaller, non-major label, but the result is equally as stunning, if not more so, than his major label discs. In Flux (which features a bizarro liner note essay courtesy of Ashley Kahn) is the kind of jazz record that gives you hope. Built by Coltrane's regular touring band of Luis Perdomo on piano and the incredible rhythm team of Drew Gress on bass and EJ Strickland on drums with Luisito Quintero guesting on one track on congas, In Flux has a very strong sound, a strong sense of identity.
TC:
Are you the kind of guy who ever listens to your own music?
RC: Well, like I said, the first few records I did
I can't really listen to now. I have a sense of when things are happening
and when they're not happening, and obviously I know when things that
we try work or not. It's one of those things. Over time, your ear gets
to a certain spot, and you've moved on and made some steps and it's
hard to listen to things you've done. On a creative, conceptual level,
you should always be able to listen and say, well at least I was trying
something, and this didn't really work or this thing came together.
TC: Do you feel that playing with the people that you
play with pushes you? I listen to people like Drew Gress and I think,
"my goodness gracious!" I imagine that you get these people
in the same room, yourself included, and it must be kind of inspiring.
RC: They definitely lift you up. That's what's supposed
to happen, really. You're supposed to surround yourself with musicians
as strong as possible. It's not about who's going to be the standout
guy in the band or who's going to get the most attention. It's about
creating a real cohesive unit, one where every part will build the others
up in some way. RC: Sure. Honestly, there's so many jazz records
made these days, that I'll let somebody else do that. When everyone
is doing it, they all kind of cancel each other out. It's like, what
record should I buy with Jack DeJohnette and Dave Holland on it as sidemen?
It may be some unknown guy as the leader, but here's this great rhythm
section. They may have made some great music that way, but the record
company can have so much influence on a new artist or a young artist
that they end up applying these formulas to each and every guy. The
same record ultimately gets made over and over again.
TC: In a way it used to be like that in the old days,
when the producer would say I want to pair this new tenor player with
this particular rhythm section because I think it'll be good. I don't
know if that was necessarily a commercial concern, but it must have
been partially commercial.
RC: Well, I think if someone has a vision that goes
beyond "let me just get some names on my record so I can sell it",
if they say "this guy has a sound that'll work so well with this
veteran piano player that I've known for years, their styles will mesh."
But usually that's not the consideration. I realize that making music
that way can be very limited. You'll have great playing, because you're
hiring the best players, but connecting as a band happens over time,
whether you've got great players or not. You can have a band of all-stars,
but you'll have them for one day to rehearse and one day to record.,
and you can only bring so much to the table. If you've got some hard-ass
music that's gonna be impossible for people to play. With that you can
find some cats who just got out of school, say to them, I've got this
great idea, it's probably gonna take us six months to get it together,
so lets get some crappy gigs and get it together. You'll end up with
something that's really tight. I gotta slow down, I'm getting too excited!
What you can get to with a band can be as great as what you can achieve
with some great instrumentalists in the course of a day's rehearsal.
I've got some music that you just can't put in front of most people
and make it sound good right away. Making it feel good, that takes time
and it takes knowing the person and having a relationship on the bandstand.
TC: Isn't that diametrically opposed to the great mythos
of jazz, where a bunch of guys walk into a room without knowing what
they're gonna be playing and boom! it happens?
RC: Well, everything is about knowledge. There's
all ways to do it. I never said you've gotta do it this way and not
that way (laughing). Some people say, you gotta learn this and you gotta
learn that, otherwise you're not playing jazz. I don't believe there's
this set rule or method. You find a balance.
RC: Yeah! (laughs) I grew up listening to funk music
and western classical music, and jazz became very serious for me later
on in my life. I always felt like the rhythm is something we need to
address. For decades, the greatest improvised music has been delivered
to us in a four-four rhythmic world. Amazing things have happened with
that type of swing feel. For me now, I'm more excited to hear people
that are doing things derived from that, but are trying new ideas rhythmically.
I spent a lot of time playing with Steve Coleman, he is an unbelievable
jazz historian, and our love for the history of music is huge. We'll
sit around talking about Sonny Rollins for three hours, or Charlie Parker
for three hours or some Sonny Stitt solo. We love this music! But we
also see that there's things that we can use within this music that
gets us some other places.
TC: You obviously enjoy the role of producer and you were
the producer on your Mom's record, which came out very nicely. Not to
nit-pick, but why did you opt for the electronic tabla by Jack DeJohnette
instead of getting a real tabla player?
RC: (laughs) Well, the idea was not to have a tabla
player play the song with Alice Coltrane, the idea was to have Jack
Dejohnette, myself and Alice Coltrane make music together! (laughing)
Jack comes with an arsenal of instruments…
TC: It is Jack DeJohnette, so I'm whining about it. That's
a good answer! How do you feel about being a musician with an obvious
identity on the soprano saxophone in a day and age when the soprano
saxophone is so viciously stigmatized by smooth jazz?
RC: (laughs) Well, that along with the trumpet and
the tenor saxophone…
TC: Yeah, but nothing says "Smooth Jazz" like
a soprano sax!
RC: Obviously Kenny G's thing is ingrained in a lot
of people's minds. People who think of smooth jazz as being jazz. I
meet those people on airplanes a lot. They say, "oh you play jazz?
I really like jazz!" and then they name all these smooth jazz players.
I'll say well, those guys are cool, but I'm more interested in the music
that was made by these kind of guys, and they've never heard of any
of those people. I don't know what to say about the soprano. It's about
money. If Albert Ayler's records sold more than Kenny G's records, then
everyone would be playing like that. The record companies are not concerned
about anything really (laughs) except money! If a 14 year old girl who
dances around half naked is gonna sell more records than Joni Mitchell
or John Coltrane or Thelonious Monk, or Igor Stravinsky, then what do
you think we're gonna see everywhere we turn. To suggest that smooth
jazz is not music, or that these guys can't play, I mean, come on. There's
so much music in the world, it's impossible to like everything. I can't
say I like everything I've heard. I don't even get into whether music
is good or bad, just whether it speaks to me.
TC: My theory is that it's all about what they decide
they can market. They could decide to market Ravi Coltrane and Ravi
Coltrane would be much more successful. All that it takes, is someone
in power to say "yeah we can make it happen" and it'll happen.
RC: Marketing money does help tremendously. You can
take someone completely unknown, like a Jamie Cullum, unknown in this
country anyway, and spend 100,000 dollars on promotion…
TC: And boom, everyone loves him.
RC: Yeah! Not to say anything negative about him
or his record, but it can work! He may not ever be as big as Britney
Spears or Madonna, but you can take someone who's completely unknown
one minute and expose it to enough people that it'll find an audience.
TC: Do you feel like BMG and Sony failed you in that respect?
RC: Well, here's the thing, man, $100,000 just to
promote a jazz record is very rare. The jazz budgets aren't even close
to half that. A normal jazz budget, just to make the record is gonna
be between twenty and fifty thousand dollars. Fifty is a stretch, really.
They're not gonna spend that much to promote it. When you sign your
name on a contract, you don't assume your face is gonna be on a billboard
in Times Square. But you do hope they'll at least try to get your music
to an audience that'll be interested in the music.
TC: I've been listening to your music since the first
album, and I think you're not getting the credit you deserve. I don't
want it to sound cruel or cynical, but you seem like an overlooked musician
to me.
RC: This is the thing. I would for everybody to get
to hear the record, especially if it's a good record. The last record
I wasn't that wild about. Particularly the sound of the recording I
thought was heinous. That was Sony, a company with so many resources,
but I still can't arrested in this town, you know what I mean? I just
have to remember that it's about the music, and let me try to make a
decent record and really say something. I don't make enough records
anyway.
TC: It was a long time coming, this one.
RC: It's been at least two years between records.
If I'm going to wait that long, I may as well try to do something meaningful
to me on some kind of level.
TC: Do you feel spiritually about music?
RC: Yeah. It's something that happens at the beginning
of your career, and you have these grand ideals and deeper goals. You
move on and five or ten years later, you're hustling for gigs, you're
arguing with your record company about stupid things, critics are writing
weird things about you, and music has turned into something else. Then
you get to another point, maybe ten years down the road, and you start
to get back into touch with the reasons you play music in the first
place. There's a deeper element involved that goes way beyond how much
money you make, how many records you sell, whether the critics dig it
or not.
TC: Do you play music very much on an informal, non-public
level?
RC: Of course! I'm involved in some teaching in New
York, doing some workshops with Ralph Alessi. I have a rehearsal studio
in Williamsburg, and my thing is let's play. You got some music? Let's
work on it. You got some ideas, let's sit down and talk about them.
There is that point when you can't get together with anybody, because
you're hustling. You call a guy and say let's get together and he says,
when's the gig, will the rehearsal be paid for? But at this point I
can see the value of just getting into some musical situations that
aren't all about the gig and money.
|
The
New Coltrane on the Block
TC:
The fact that this is your regular touring band makes me happy, because
the trend in the modern business is to make a record with as many famous
guest stars as you possibly can or to create a band out of famous musicians
who will help sell the record but wouldn't necessarily ever work together
in real life.
TC: One thing that I've really been enjoying about the new
record is the sense of time. Obviously it's the tune where it's quite
free, tempo wise, but there's also songs where's it's swinging or grooving,
but the pulse mutates and is somewhat ambiguous.