auf wikipedia verweisen sie ja auch auf die Gedanken von Steve Reich, Wegbereiter der Minimal Music, zu Africa/Brass hier… die erklären mE ganz gut, warum das Album für damalige, bop-geschulte Ohren vielleicht gewöhnungsbedürftiger war als für uns heute…
Anybody with a pair of ears should listen to Coltrane. I highly recommend an album called Africa / Brass. Not necessarily the most famous, but for musicians in terms of an extreme form. It’s about half and hour long and it’s got a very big band and Eric Dolphy did the arrangements. I think there are French horns playing like elephants coming through the jungle. But what’s interesting is that the whole 30 minutes are in E. You know how jazz men talk about the changes? “What’s the change?” “E.” “No, no, no, what’s the changes?” “E!” E for half an hour. “Wait a minute, come on, E for half an hour?” Well, it’s built on the low E of the double bass, played by Jimmy Garrison. You’d say, “No, it’s stupid. That’s too boring.” But it’s not. It’s definitely not boring. Why? What’s going on to compensate for the lack of harmonic movement? Now of course, you live in a time when we’ve had a lot of water under the bridge. But I’m talking 1963, ’64, ’65. There’s incredible melodic invention, sometimes Coltrane’s playing gorgeous melodies, sometimes he’s screaming noise through the horn. Sometimes these elephant glissandos going on, which are basically French horns playing glissandos, scored by Eric Dolphy, who was a great musician and one of the great alto sax players and a very schooled musician as well. And two drummers, Elvin Jones being one of the most inventive jazz drummers who ever lived. And I think Rashied Ali was the other drummer. So you’ve got an incredible amount of rhythmic complexity, temporal variety and melodic invention. And they more than compensate for the harmonic consistency. As a matter of fact, there’s a tension because it doesn’t change.
(die zwei Drummer sind natürlich blödsinn, nehme an er meint die zwei Bassisten und vermischt was)
--
.