Down Beat, 5. May, 1966, S. 25 – B.M. ist Bill Mathieu
Spotlight Review – Avante-Garde Summit
* * * * *This is possibly the most powerful human sound ever recorded. Coltrane has collected 10 other soloists, each a distinctive voice in contemporary jazz. All hold in common the ability to scream loud and long. If the music coheres, it does so because everyone is screaming about the same thing. The album is a recording of a single work which lasts more than 35 minutes.
In the liner notes, Shepp speaks of the music this way:
„It achieves a certain kind of unity; it starts at a high level of intensity with the horns playing high and the other pieces playing low. This gets a quality of like male and female voices. It builds in intensity through all the solo passages, brass and reeds, until it gets to the final section where the rhythm section takes over and brings it back down to the level where it started at… The ensemble passages were based on chords, but these chords were optional. What Trane did was to relate or juxtapose tonally centered ideas and atonal elements, along with melodic and nonmelodic elements. In those descending chords there is a definite tonal center, like a B-flat minor. But there are different roads to that center.“
In the notes, Brown says that the music has „that kind of thing that makes people scream. The people who were in the studio *were* screaming…. You could use this record to heat up the apartment on those cold winter days.“
There are two things to consider here. The first is the actual experience these musicians shared in the recording studio on June 23, 1965. The other is this phonograph record of the event.
Ordinarily we can accept these two things as one. The differences, though important, are not crucial. True, one had to „be there“ when Horowitz returned to the concert stage last year in Carnegie Hall. But the recording of that concert captures enough for us to re-create the event through the music. In fact, the music transcends the event. The event has meaning through focused concentration on the quality of the music.
This is not so in the case of Ascension. The vitality of this music is not separable from „being there.“ The music does not transcend the event. In fact, the music *is* the event, and since there is no way of reproducing (i.e., reliving) the event except by doing it again, the music is in essence nonrecordable.
This brings us to a difficult subject involving not only this music but also much other contemporary art.
In our growing esthetic, „the moment“ emerges as sacred. The „now“ is the reality from which a new esthetic of the religious is flowing. Perishable sculpture points this out to the observer. Musicians like John Cage offer variations on this theme.
Present time has always been most crucial to jazz. Yet nowadays, as a revolution crystallizes, what was once merely crucial is now the thing itself.
This revolution, the black one, has a vested interest in „now“ as *opposed* to „then.“ The forces that spawned it are wasting no love on old things. The old order was „then.“ It passeth to „now.“ No one alive today can remember a more concerted cry for a new social being.
Ascension is (among other things) at the center of this cry. The spiritual commitment to present time vibrates around Earth; the vibration is focused and intensified in music like this. To offer it on a „recording“ is in some sense *against* the thing itself. Ascension is a recording not of an event, but of the sounds made during an event, and these sounds by themselves do not give us the essence of the event.
If the listener is informed enough to be able to imagine what it was really like when this event took place, then the record may have meaning. But it would seem that a listener so informed would not especially need or want a reminder of another „then.“
It is my feeling that gradually there will come a music informed by the freedom and power of Ascension, but which has more artistic commitment beyond the moment of recording. Such music is already forming (although with less muscle – no music matches Ascension for sheer strength and volume.) The few moments when Tchicai is soloing constitute one of several places where this more subtle light shines through strongest. Distinctions are close; everything seems *about* to happen.
Meanwhile, it is useful to regard this album as a documentation of a particular space of history. As such, it is wonderful – because the history is. If you want immersion in the sounds of these men, if you want their cries to pierce you, if you want a record of the enormity and truth of their strength, here it is.
(B.M.)
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