hier ist die ganze Rezension, Downbeat vom 18. Januar 1962
Certainly no one could question Coltrane’s particular skill as a tenor saxophonist. Nor that his ear for harmony, his knowledge of it, and his use of it, can fascinate. Nor do I question that his playing is honestly emotional, if, to me, somewhat diffusely so. What I do question is whether here this exposition of skills adds up to anything more than a dazzling and passionate array of scales and arpeggios, if one looks for melodic development or even for some sort of technical order or logic, he may find none here. In these pieces, Coltrane has done on record what he has done so often in person lately, make everything into a handful of chords, frequently only two or three, and run them in every conceivable way, offering what is, in effect, an extended cadenza to a piece that never gets played, a prolonged montuna interlude surrounded by no rhumba or son, or a very long vamp ’til ready. Africa is African by the suggestion of its rhythms. It has some brass figures that, for me, get a bit too monotonous to add variety and which are also in general too much in the background to add much of their own. I must say that Workman and Davis, particularly when they work together, fascinated me, and that Tyner plays a good solo. These three also manage to swing, and they provide one of the few instances of real swing in this recital. Greensleeves is converted into a 6/8 Gospel-like meter, but once you have the hang of that, after a chorus or two, you have the hang of that. On Blues Minor, which seems to me uncomfortably close to Bags’ Groove, Coltrane again begins a kind of ingenious workout on a couple of repeated chords after a chorus or so. The point is not that it is impossible to make high art out of very simple materials. Many a blues player can make fascinating music on three chords, two chords, one chord—even no chords really. Nor that it is impossible to make fine jazz solos out of arpeggios: Jimmy Noone did it, Coleman Hawkins does it, Coltrane has done it. Perhaps my remark in the beginning about emotion does hold an answer. After all, Noone and Hawkins both have a directness and organization of feeling within each piece and a variety of feeling from one piece to the next.
Martin Williams hatte in dem Heft übrigens nur eine weitere Rezension, Soft Vibes, Soaring Strings von Lionel Hampton, da gab er *.
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