Ravi Coltrane on composition, imagination and defeating the jazz fascists

Caught between a master class and a sound check, Ravi Coltrane was busy dodging Jersey Valley speed traps when he answered his cell phone. The son of Alice and John Coltrane, Ravi has built up a catalogue independent of his impressive parentage, but reflects their work in all the right ways—independent, adventurous and uniquely creative.

Nurtured early in his professional life by drummer Elvin Jones and saxophonist Steve Coleman after a stint at CalArts, Coltrane’s compositional voice reflects their obsession with layered rhythmic structure while touching on the harmonic innovations of other saxophone masters like Joe Henderson and Sonny Fortune.

“Steve was the first person who really opened my ears up to other rhythmic possibilities,” says Coltrane. “He’s interested in rhythm and the complexities of it. He has this concept of not just playing with a single pulse, but with many happening simultaneously. That gives you the freedom to play within an atmosphere rather than playing eighths over a stream of quarter notes.”

While acknowledging the complexities of piecing together a multi-metered composition, Coltrane believes the woodshedding required is essential to creative growth.

“Playing with Coleman, his music was so challenging,” says Coltrane, “but once you got it, it would stay in your playing forever. It takes a while for it to feel natural, but once you are there, and used to playing [in multiple pulses] it molds and shapes the way that you improvise. I felt stretched rhythmically, more free, more elastic. Your whole style is changed.

“It’s like what happened with my father and ‘Giant Steps,’” he continues, referencing the elder Coltrane’s groundbreaking 1960 release. “Before that song, players approached harmony from a blues approach or playing through iii-vi-ii-V-I [the circle of fifths]. But ‘Giant Steps’ was a tune that was so different from what people were used to playing. It put a shape on the way that you improvised after you played it. That’s what I’m trying to do with composition—write a song that will trip you out, that will shape your improvisations.”

Joined by long-time collaborators pianist Luis Perdomo and drummer EJ Strickland, as well as Massimo Biolcati on bass for his appearance at the Kuumbwa, Coltrane is an advocate for a stable working group to ground his ambitious repertoire.

“One of the benefits of having a consistent group of players is that you can work on developing more challenging pieces of music,” says Coltrane. “Some tunes need to be played and rehearsed and worked on for a while for them to feel natural and to get them to a place where you can really create.”

Often labeled a perfectionist (a trait also assigned to his father), Coltrane has recently started allowing naturalness into his quiver of musical techniques.

“2004 was a really intense year, and a great year for me,” says Coltrane. “The amount of time that I spent with my mother working on her Translinear Light CD really energized the work I did on my own [In Flux]. She was not interested in being in the studio eight hours a day, she was really conscious of letting things happen on their own time. She’d come into the studio in the afternoon and work for a few hours, then leave. That really changed how I made my record. You give the music the attention that it deserves. That was a very productive and enlightening experience.”

The progeny of two of jazz’s leading practitioners and an avid scholar of their work, the younger Coltrane is not hung up on being a revival act. When he consciously quotes his parents’ songs, it’s done so with restraint—and in a new musical context that adds to the original rather than echoing its greatness in facsimile.

It’s all part of Coltrane’s well-developed theory on keeping jazz alive by reengineering what the music actually is. “Treating the music from a historical standpoint is important,” says Coltrane, “but at some point, we should acknowledge that this is a living art. It doesn’t exist only in the past, and the tradition that you study has to be balanced with trying to be as personal as possible. Whenever I teach, I stress that you have to take chances, you can’t manufacture a style, you have to let things happen organically.”

{ic_cal}Monday, July 23rd at 7 p.m., Kuumbwa, 320-2 Cedar St., Santa Cruz.{/ic_cal}

{ic_info}Call 427-2227 or visit kuumbwajazz.org .{/ic_info}

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