aus Black World/Negro Digest, March 1966, p. 36:
There must have come a time in the recording of their newest Impulse! album when John Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, Elvin Jones and Jimmy Garrison stared drunkenly at one another and shouted: „Mad! Mad!“ The album, The John Coltrane Quartet Plays Chim Chim Cheree, Song of Praise, Nature Boy, Brazilia, makes use of not more than a dozen bars, at best, of „conventional“ meter. Its harmonies are of the sort not yet classified by music. In the ballad „Nature Boy,“ the group uses two basses (fiddler Art Davis joins Garrison), both of them bowed and in different chords, and in the middle of „Chim Chim Cheree,“ from Walt Disney’s Mary Poppins, Coltrane, using the soprano sax, lets loose with a cry so wild and bedazed it would have embarrased Stravinsky himself. Such boldness and exotism often sounds capricious and absurd. But Coltrane never fails to carry it off — and with flying colors. Even at his most obscure, there is that constant undercurrent of joy that is the substance of jazz. In his weirdest harmony, his least expected phrase, the listener can detect a means to an end, not mere sensationalism. And here, I believe, is the secret of Coltrane. For reasons of temperament as well as talent, he is the best thing that could have happened to the avant-garde, bringing warmth and maturity to an area so often left to technicians and quacks. What he is seeking nobody knows. But his fabulous quest, in its jolting electricity, has surely become the most refreshing musical experience since Charlie Parker. –H.B.
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