Customer Reviews

Ascension

5 star:		(28)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

Thelonious Monk gave the usual notions of atonality a skewed twist. Miles Davis used the idea of modes to break free of plain chord changes. Ornette Coleman took a leap and produced an album-length group improvisation based only on a loose chordal framework. And in 1965 John Coltrane one-upped them all, assembling an eleven-piece group from various schools of jazz and turning them all loose for 40 minutes with almost no planning whatsoever. The result is something often cacophonous, squealingly chaotic and impenetrably difficult, and this CD contains both complete takes totaling a whopping 78 minutes. Not for the faint-hearted, this.

The great Coltrane quartet is joined here by an extra bassist and six more sax/horn players. With this many instruments jostling for space it's inevitable that the mix is anarchic and very crowded. John wrote out an order for solos and told everyone he wanted a crescendo/decrescendo before and after each one; that's it. That's all. Otherwise everything that came out was off the top of the group's collective head. Everyone brings their own voice to the table, from the trademark white-hot Trane soloing to the hard bop of Freddie Hubbard to the far-out freeness of Pharaoh Sanders, and even though it all seems jumbled at first, the variety does help keep things interesting.

Opinions are divided to this day on whether Ascension is an incoherent skronking mess or an expression of some ineffable spiritual feeling (as JC intended). Everyone agrees that it's loose, disjointed and sometimes harshly atonal; the difference between the love and hate camps lies in how it's listened to and appreciated. I'm not even sure what I hear after a couple dozen spins. I just get the feeling that there's Something in there somewhere, which might make itself heard once I can listen without screaming (as some people in the studio supposedly were during the recording).

This disc can make a good first entry into the world of free jazz if you know what you're in for, although it can also be better appreciated after working through some of the more accessible stuff. If you're only curious, try Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz album or Coltrane's Meditations first. If you're already prepared for the most harsh kind of chaos.. it's still hard to guess whether Ascension will be a spiritual revelation or a pounding migraine. The only way to find out is to listen at least five or six times. When there's this much on the buffet, it takes a good few trips to get an idea of just what's on offer.

Is this extraordinary document an indigestible cacophony of anarchy in brass and bass, or the artistic culmination of a man's desire to explore the outer reaches of tonality and the inner limits of freedom? Is Ascension a transcendental event in jazz history or an anomalous experiment that perseveres in its periphery?

Certainly no one has attempted anything like this again. The only comparable experiment prior to Ascension had been Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz of 1960. But Free Jazz had deliberately placed two quartets side-by-side and ordered the solos into a formal, structured framework that seemed to belie the project's self-conscious aim to challenge rigidity altogether. Coltrane's Ascension subverted even the precedent that Free Jazz had established.

Coltrane had, in less than a decade, transformed the jazz world's expectations of the possibilities of the tenor, even of the role of the solo per se. Now this troubled, intense man turned his attention to the possibilities of a larger group than he normally played in or led.

Rather than creating a recognisable background for the musicians to express themselves, he de-contextualised and fragmented the orthodox syntactical elements of jazz, viz. tempo, rhythm and pulse, harmonic progressions and set "changes", keys and tonal centres, thus leaving the musicians to articulate their responses only to each other and not to the support that the syntax would have otherwise provided. There were certain rules, so to speak: built in to the work was a succession of solos, as well as a "juxtaposition of tonally centred ideas and atonal elements" (Archie Shepp's words in the liner notes). The solo opportunities were created to allow the musicians an unfettered dialogue with the ensemble.

The musicians were a mix of contemporary and established stars, such as Coltrane himself, Freddie Hubbard, Archie Shepp, McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones, and emerging voices such as Marion Brown and Pharoah Sanders. Coltrane's leadership on such an unusual, unprecedented project was crucial. He alone possessed the vision and charisma necessary to push these artists to break the dichotomy between backing and solo. Individual and collective voice became one.

What's the music like? Sound, sound, sound, a vast enveloping texture of brass. Look out for Sanders' solo - it's unlike anything you've ever heard (unless you've been deep in the jungle). It might be useful to follow the order of the soloists: Coltrane (tenor sax), Dewey Johnson (trumpet), Pharoah Sanders (tenor sax), Freddie Hubbard (trumpet), Archie Shepp (tenor sax), John Tchicai (alto sax), Marion Brown (alto sax).

And what's the experience like? Played loud, it'll do something for you that might approximate what it was like for the musicians. In the words of Marion Brown, "wildly exciting."

When you look at Coltrane's recording career as a whole (only 13 years), he was constantly progressing (or maybe regressing), but to be sure Coltrane in '55 didn't sound anything like Coltrane in '59 which didn't sound anything like Coltrane in '63 which didn't anything like Coltrane in '65. He moved from bop to modal to free. So you don't like skronking and squealing sax freakouts. Great. You don't have to. But don't say its good the man died and couldn't brutally abuse the horn anymore and that it sounds like a bunch of little children. Don't get angry that he betrayed you for degenerating into deliriousness. And don't get angry at me and call me pretentious for liking something you strongly dislike. Its all subjective.

All that being said, I love this record. I think it is intense. It starts off at the peak and gradually each horn soloist brings it down before McCoy's solo and the bass duet and then they do one more segment of free improvisation. The three tenor sax players really do dominate this record but Marion Brown has something to say as well. And when they launch into skronking and squealing, perhaps its not "musical" but that doesn't matter to me because I can feel it. I think the album was titled Ascension in a spiritual context, which is what Coltrane's music had become by this time, a deep spiritual search for some otherworldly communication that he never felt he quite grasped.

Multiple listens have revealed more and more each time. Bob Thiele's production is spectacular the way he sonically articulates each player. And after listening to the solos numerous times I have begun to pick out all of the individual voices in the screaming ensemble passages and it's interesting to hear how they work as an open forum for dialogue between players. Both takes differ significantly as well.

Overall its my favorite record of this era of Coltrane. I also like Ornette, Albert Ayler, Cecil Taylor and Sun Ra, so I guess I am a fan of free jazz. If you're not, that's fine. Or if you are, but you just don't like Ascension, that's fine too. It's all subjective.

John Coltrane's album-length composition "Ascension" is a landmark in Jazz music and one of his most musically challenging releases. Here, Coltrane abandons all concrete structured forms in favor of total spontaneoty and free-form interplay.
"Ascension" features a group of 11 musicians including Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders and Archie Shepp on tenor sax, John Tchicai and Marion Brown on alto sax, Freddie Hubbard and Dewey Johnson on trumpets, Art Davis and Jimmy Garrison on basses, McCoy Tyner on piano and Elvin Jones on drums. From the very first opening riff which gives way to a screaming cacophony of all the musicians blowing different phrases at once, you can be rest assured that this a different type of Coltrane. Each of the dense ensemble passages give way to each musician coming forward as a soloist. The loose structure is not too far different from what Ornette Coleman accomplished with his landmark "Free Jazz" album. Each soloist is free to perform whatever they wish without any barriers or boundaries which adds further effectiveness to the music.
The remastered CD of "Ascension" includes both complete takes of the piece. "Edition II" is the first take of the work was second one to be released and displays a more raw spontaneous feel. "Edition I" is the second take issued on the first LP pressing and is performed in a tighter manner probably due to the fact that the piece had already been recorded once. The order of the solos are different and played in a different manner as well. "Edition I" also features a brief drum solo whereas "Edition II" did not. Also, The length of each of the two takes vary (Edition II is 40 minutes, Edition I is two minutes shorter).
The CD booklet features informative liner-notes and a well-written essay on the making of "Ascension", its original liner-notes and a breakdown of the soloists in the order that they appear on each take.
All in all, John Coltrane's "Ascension" is an extremely powerful musical statement. It is definitely music that is not for the faint of heart and can easily be dismissed as a bunch of musicians screeching and banging around in the studio all at once. However, there is method to this madness. Coltrane set out exactly what he needed to accomplish with this work and the end result is a milestone of free-form jazz at its very best.

Prologue added:
Some of the reviewers have written that this music is somehow farcical or that it lacks substance. There was a time when I would have agreed. Fortunately, I found a way to approach this music. I was giving this some thought this morning while listening to Coltrane's Om and ruminating on how form eventually started to reveal itself in what originally sounded like a mess. It occurred to me that the later works are very much like those puzzle pictures we used to see back in the 90's. When you first looked, it was just a rectangle with a bunch of tiny random shapes and colors. Your friend kept telling you that there was a clipper ship in that picture. You strained to see it, got frustrated, put it down, picked it up, tried it again without success. And then you found that when you stopped trying to see that clipper ship and simply relaxed a 3D hologram emerged from the backdrop and yes, there really was a clipper ship hidden in that mess. That's what listening to Coltrane's later day works are like. The emperor is in fact wearing cloths, you just haven't relaxed, put away your preconceived notions for "looking" allowed yourself to see them.

Original Review:
There is so much I want to write about Ascension that I'll probably update this review from time-to-time. First, Robert Rub III and his "Emporer's New Clothes" review. Robert, I know exactly where you are coming from and I've written much the same sort of review about other "post-modern" works. I'm afraid I can't agree in this case though, for one thing, Coltrane has an incredible pedigree of a career. The man KNEW exactly what he was doing. That pedigree legitimizes this work. I fear you have sold yourself short in this instance. You have to get beyond your comfort zone in order to discover what is happening here. Anyway, enough of that.

Ascension is a wild roller-coaster ride with twists and turns and free-falls that take our breath away. And when the first 40 minute ride is complete we get to say "Let's do it again!" and listen to the 38 minute Ascension I (which was really take 2 in the studio).

Ascension is Coltrane as Shiva (the Hindu destroyer & creator), this session is truly the continental divide of Coltrane's solo career and yeah, he destroys what he built up, but he also creates something very new, so new in fact that we have to step away from our assumptions about what music should be in order to glimpse what he has discovered.

Ascension is so much like life. We are all improvisers. We go through life with our own framework (values) but whether we admit it or not, we are wingin' and making up our lives as we move along. We encounter others, it changes us. We oscillate from chaos to order then back to chaos. Ascension is very much like that oscillation from chaos to a kind of improvised order.

People who call this noise are not REALLY listening to what is happening. When the horns play together, the players are communicating to one another, call and response, shouts, hollers. It's incredibly powerful stuff. Then we get the lone voice of a soloist, telling his story. Freddie Hubbard stands out in particular, what an amazing player. Is it any accident that he ended up on some of the most important "new jazz" works such as Out to Lunch, Ole, Point of Departure?

If there is one single flaw with Ascension, it might be that Hubbard's mic is too hot and at times his playing obscures the other players (during the ensemble passages).

Ascension is an awe-inspiring work. It isn't easy to listen to this music. Your ear has been trained to what is called "natural cadence", resolving the V7 to the I chord. Coltrane, in his role as Shiva, offers no such rest for you. You have to be willing to go with him, destroy what you know and then listen. This is the key to listening to every Coltrane work from Ascension onward (like Meditations for instance). That's it, that's all I'm gonna write. Yeah, I like the pretty stuff, like Trane's earlier work, or the Miles Davis Quintets. But I can dig Ascension too! Let go and let it wash over you.

I came late to enjoying Coltrane's music, having tried it off and on throughout my twenties. I came from liking the noisier kinds of rock, the more modernist kinds of 'classical' music (i.e. Schoenberg/Webern/Berg) and bebop's bracing mixture of the familiar and the abstract. Coltrane tended to seem either too simple or too complex. But my ears must have adjusted, because when I finally sat down and listened to 'Ascension' I loved it.

It's not really 'atonal', no music is; that's like saying that James Joyce is 'averbal'. Some scholar has tentatively identified a handful of harmonic regions that the music churns around in. Within those regions, the players solo more or less 'outside', but they all start on the same riff and they all end on the same riff. The result is quite simply one of the most colossal blowing sessions ever assembled. Coltrane wanted to give a bit of exposure to some of the newer kids on the block (Archie Shepp, John Tchicai) and he put this one-off ensemble together and had them tear the roof off for forty minutes. Twice. The only thing I've ever heard that compares to this is the Peter Br?tzmann Octet's mighty 'Machine Gun' session from 1968, which is at an even higher level of intensity but in a harsher, less transcendent, more European vein. And the Octet doesn't keep up it for as long at a time.

After hearing this I went back to the rest of Coltrane's music and it all made a great deal more sense. Others will champion 'A Love Supreme', but this is my favourite Coltrane album. Having said that, I only wish I had more times in the day when I had forty minutes to spare to listen to it.

In A.B. Spellman's excellent liner notes to the original lp release of this remarkable session he observed, "It is not intended that 'Ascension' will be background music for polite dinner conversation." The uninitiated listener who comes to "Ascension" should be forewarned by his words.

Above all, "Ascension" demands concentrated listening. Spellman further commented that the session begins at an extraordinarily high level of intensity, rather than building to a peak as most other jazz or rock recordings do. In fact, the record begins with a simple motif sketched by Coltrane, followed by an extended and sustained blast of sound from the six other horns, two basses, and drums. (Don't look for much from pianist McCoy Tyner -- except during the solos -- as he has little chance to be heard through the onslaught.)

The amazing thing about "Ascension," for me, is that during the stretches of seemingly unstructured, free playing so much drama is generated. To be sure, it is not the conventional drama of the classically constructed jazz solo, with its rise and fall of tension and perfectly created arc and climax. Rather, this is the drama parallel to that produced from the chaos and clamor of modern life. One of the mental pictures that emerged for me in my early listenings to the album was of the streets of a giant urban center, a jumble of sounds from which emerged recognizable human voices.

These vast aural canvases are also dotted with more conventional solos from Coltrane and the other musicians (notably Freddie Hubbard, Archie Shepp, John Tchicai, and Pharaoh Sanders), although all of these artists push the boundaries of sound in their solos as well. Each has marvelous moments, from Hubbard's soaring trumpet line to Sanders' eruptions in the upper register of his horn to Tchicai's lithe alto dancing against a figure by Tyner, to Coltrane's own powerful cry.

"Ascension" is a hard album to write about. It is best experienced as an immersion in sound. As Spellman said in speaking of each of the musicians, "Give them a hearing. Give them a few." Same can be said about the record itself.

Ascension is, along with Ornette Coleman's "Free Jazz" and Miles Davis' "Bitches Brew", one of the most controversial jazz albums of all time. Ascension marks the beginning of Coltrane's avant-garde period, when pure sound began to replace classic music theory as the basis for improvisation.

That said, I find "Ascension" infinitely more listenable than "Free Jazz", or even Coltrane's "Live in Seattle". Here, there is still a regular jazz beat, with a nice five note theme based on the "Love Supreme" riff. There is much less "Collective" improvisation than I expected - often a euphemism for pretentious quacking - and the piece is more of a series of short solos by the various people.

While the soloing tends towards free jazz, this is actually not nearly as far out as I expected. Coltrane's solo is very effective, and even Pharaoh Sanders' solo is less tooth-grinding than usual. Other soloists include Archie Shepp, the hard-bopper Freddie Hubbard, and the altoist John Tchicai. In a blast from the past, McCoy Tyner has a lengthy solo that is little different from his work in 1961!

I agree with those people who say that this album is much less hard on the ears than people often assume. Think of it as a gigantic jam session.

Of all the albums by John Coltrane, his 1965 "Ascension" is the one that probably divides listeners the most. Others appreciate it for its bald ambition, while others scoff at it as pretentious garbage. But as with all records that aim to challenge, "Ascension" needs to be heard at the right time and in the right mental space for it to be fully appreciated. This is probably not a wise choice of a purchase for the novice listener. And those with childlike attention spans are also discouraged. But listeners who are fond of free jazz or just want to have their senses rattled, then "Ascension" will be a nice addition to your collection. Here we have two versions of Coltrane's 40 minute journey with 10 other musicians who improvise with raw fury and aggression. The tempo shifts violently and unexpectedly, and horns shriek into extended solos without warning; at times, many solos come out all at once. By the 30 minute mark, I wanted to press my "Stop" button, but at the risk of recycling an old cliche, "Ascension" is the musical equivalent of a car wreck. Yes, the images may be harsh, but it's also fascinating and you can't take your eyes off it. The fainthearted and prudish should stay away.

This is my favorate Coltrane Record. The music starts off at an extreme level of intensity, and maintains this throught the 40 minute piece. Tyner and Jones propel this music at a runaway train pace. (No pun intended.)

But it is the soloing that makes Ascention such a white hot listen. The music is so on fire that the solos start where most solos climax. It is gut wrenching, in the best musical way.

I just want to add: Do not buy this if you want a repeat of Ornette Coleman's "Free Jazz" album. That record works on a similar concept, but where that record is a campfire, this is an inferno.

BUY IT