The Art of John Coltrane

Who's afraid of John Col-trane? Well, I was for sure. For quite some time, he seemed synonymous with all that was scary about avant-garde jazz: all that furious cacophony was too much for my tender ears. Never mind that my best friend at school had been listening to JC for several years. Well, legend has it that he was reading André Gide at 14, so I had a few laps to go before I caught him up.

I steered well clear during my year off, when I had a golden opportunity for research – on my bed at the end of each working day in a minor stately home, listening to records on my new stereo while smoking a restorative menthol cigarette. Cool as a mountain stream.

At 'uni', I seemed to fritter quite a lot of time, somewhat under the influence, listening to Carlos Santana's version of Coltrane's beautiful 'Welcome' in a smoke-filled room with fellow 'heads'. But still I resisted the call of the wild. And it wasn't till I'd moved to Brighton – to fritter still more time while supposedly furthering my academic studies – that finally I succumbed.

In the otherwise musically impoverished municipal library, I found a copy of The Art of John Coltrane, a double album that came out in 1973, six years after the Great Man's death, and compiled from the seven records that Coltrane made for the Atlantic label. The surfaces of the vinyl looked like they had been skated on by Torvill and Dean, but the content kept me going till I found a copy of my own to love and cherish and protect in its pristine state.

The albums were made just after his long tenure with Miles Davis during the second half of the 1950s that would culminate in the immortal Kind of Blue. During his Atlantic years, Coltrane was still quite tame. He was striving for something – he was always searching and striving – but his feet, so to speak, were still just about rooted on solid ground.

Reputedly Miles, before he 'got' Coltrane, was irritated by his new saxophonist's volubility and asked him why he had to go on for so long. Coltrane replied that it took that long to get it all in. Maybe he knew even then that his life was destined to be so short and so intense. Towards the end of his life, after the break-up of the classic quartet that kept him grounded for so comparatively long, his yearning to 'get it all in' sent him boldly off into the kind of unchartered astral planes that must have been as hard for his sidemen as it was for his audience.

I remember, many years after discovering The Art of John Coltrane and going with him as far as the wonderful, spiritual A Love Supreme, stopping off in Paris en route for some 'assignment' somewhere and spending the night in the apartment of our artist friend, Olivier, who would take infrequent quality time-out in the Corrèze with his French bulldog, Jojo, walking and fly-fishing.

Also destined to live a short and intense life, Olivier had just bought himself a double CD full of Coltrane's late, late stuff – and was disappointed by the contents. Where was any trace of melody, for example? He offered it to me, but I turned him down. You know you're in trouble when the search for the unknowable involves duets (or duels?) between a saxophonist and a drummer.

There are no such terrors in the Atlantic compilation. Apart from the ominously entitled 'The Invisible', which came from the less-than-convincing The Avant-Garde with the committed squawking trumpeter, Don Cherry (father of Neneh and Eagle Eye), it's stylistically all quite domesticated. The great jazz critic, Nat Hentoff, considered that the Atlantic material converted a lot of people who had previously found Coltrane difficult.

'My Shining Hour' for example, one of those popular songs that Coltrane loved to improvise around, could have sat quite easily with his previous body of work for Prestige and the one classic album he recorded for Blue Note, Blue Train. The tone is still as bright as a bell; he was only just experiencing some of the severe dental problems following his former heroin habit that forced him to redevelop his embouchure. It was at this stage of his career that we would first hear the kind of ruptured split tones that would characterise much of his later wilder tenor playing, when notes seemed to burst like seeds from some overripe vessel.

It was also at this stage that we would first hear the soprano sax – on tracks like the beautiful contemplative 'Central Park West' (where my school friend now contemplates his own life) – that also became a Coltrane trademark. In this compilation, the soprano also features on 'Mr. Knight'; a meditative modal version of the tune generally considered to be Coleman Hawkins' signature, 'Body and Soul'; and one of several numbers still rooted firmly in the blues, 'Blues to Bechet'. Otherwise, the tenor still rules the royal roost.

Three of his most brilliant jewels make The Art of John Coltrane an essential primer for the uninitiated. There is the classic enduring version of his yearning ballad, 'Naima', written for his wife of the time and recorded with the line up (minus Miles) that contributed 'Freddie Freeloader' to Kind of Blue: Wynton Kelly on piano, Paul Chambers (immortalised by Coltrane as 'Mr. PC') on double bass and Jimmy Cobb on drums.

The track appeared on the first of the Atlantic albums, Giant Steps. The title track is the second of my jewels in the Coltrane crown. Fortunately, it comes in at a little under five minutes. Any longer and the listener might suffer some lasting cardiac condition. His tenor tackles the melody at such a breathless lick that, even with circular breathing, you think it's beyond the bounds of human capacity. One of the most flabbergasting things about it is that, for all the pyrotechnics, the melody keeps its shape throughout: ascending and ever ascending until you think it must surely fracture into a thousand pieces.

But it doesn't. Coltrane said, 'I'm not sure of what I'm looking for except that it'll be something that hasn't been played before'. By the time he came to record the third, most glittering jewel, he had settled on one of the three players to help him play the not-yet-playable: McCoy Tyner on piano. A little later, Elvin Jones on drums and, later still, Jimmy Garrison on bass would make up Coltrane's classic quartet of the 1960s.

No one to the best of my knowledge had yet taken a pretty but fairly insubstantial song from a popular musical and transformed it over nearly 14 minutes into some kind of transcendent musical epic. As a far-too-cool 12-year old, I had been dragged kicking and screaming to see The Sound of Music at the Grand Opera House, Belfast. 'My Favourite Things' seemed to encapsulate everything that so insulted my pubescent sensibility.

Long before I learned to love the musical, and the song, vicariously via my daughter's youthful delight, Coltrane transformed it into a thing of surprising beauty. His second wife, Alice, said that her husband 'never stopped surprising himself'. Nor his listeners, one might add. And I suppose it's this capacity for change and surprise that helps to make an artist truly great.

It's basically a development of the modal experimentation heard on Kind of Blue. Guided onwards by Art Taylor's cymbal work and Paul Chambers' bass, as metronomic as a giant beating heart, first Coltrane and then, exquisitely, Tyner and finally, triumphantly, Coltrane again solo along the way to the last statement of theme before the heartbeat fades and the music lurches to a halt.

'My Favourite Things' was – and probably still is – the track that helped me understand my instinctive affinity for jazz. That spellbinding combination of rhythm, melody, improvisation and transformation. Coltrane would play and re-play the song, sometimes going off into the stratosphere for an hour or more, but never would he manage quite as cogently to 'get it all in'. Certainly not for the listener, anyway.

Much as I love certain individual albums, like Blue Train, Ballads and the record he made, surprisingly, with Duke Ellington, I keep coming back to this undoubted best of his typically brief but packed spell with the Ertegun brothers' Atlantic label. JC lives!

Mary Wells' Greatest Hits

It's high time – but isn't it always? – for more Motown, and it was a toss-up between this one and The Temptations Sing Smokey. I've had them for about the same length of time: ever since Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder helped me to grow out of my prog-rock teenage antipathy for the soppy stuff that came out of the Motor City.

Effectively, Mary Wells' greatest hits were penned by one William 'Smokey' Robinson. She and the Temptations both interpret his 'What Love Has Joined Together' and the sublime 'You Beat Me to the Punch'. It's even sometimes quite hard to tell them apart when Eddie Kendricks' high-pitched falsetto takes the lead. So, which one to choose? Mary's 'My Guy' is just about the equal of the Temptations' 'My Girl', even if the latter's 'The Way You Do the Things You Do' knocks spots off Mary's up-tempo best, Holland-Dozier-Holland's 'You Lost the Sweetest Boy'. Heads or tails, jury?

Well, since my inner emotional self is fuelled by injustice, the case of Mary Wells gives me more to get my molars into. After all, everyone knows about the Temps. The quintet that kept going through key personnel changes for about as long as any one vocal group could have surely envisaged: through doo-wop, through their first Motown phase as purveyors of love songs and snappy, happy dance numbers, through their second Motown phase on Norman Whitfield's socially-conscious psychedelic 'Cloud Nine', to the post-disco dance band that knew how to 'Treat Her Like a Lady'.

Mary Wells, on the other hand, started off as the hit-making Queen of Motown until Diana Ross and the Supremes usurped the throne. Such was Berry Gordy's infatuation for the anorexic chantoosse with a beehive and a figure-hugging dress that he effectively lost interest in Mary Wells almost overnight. Recognising this, Mary left the company in 1964, the same year that 'My Guy' gave her her biggest hit. Despite opening for The Beatles on a tour of the UK as their favourite American singer, her post-Motown career was nothing much to speak of and only at the end of her short life was she awarded the proper royalties she was due from her three or four years in the Detroit sun.

Poor Mary. She had a tough childhood growing up in a poor part of Detroit. Two divorces (including Bobby Womack's brother Cecil, who would go on to become one half of Womack & Womack), legal wrangles, career frustrations, a heroin habit, and a cancer of the larynx which ruined her singing voice, wiped out her hard-won financial resources and claimed her life at just 49.

There's little hint of what would come when you listen to these Motown hits. Interestingly, the album begins with her final hit, 'My Guy', the song that will probably one day take her to the Hall of Fame, and concludes with the song that she took to Berry Gordy in 1960 as a prospective singer-songwriter. Although intended for Jackie Wilson, Gordy had her record 'Bye Bye Baby'. The reputed 22 takes probably explain why she sounds more like Lulu belting out 'Shout' than the golden-voiced purveyor of Smokey Robinson's melodies.

Mary and Smokey – as Berry Gordy surmised – made a perfect team. With seven out of eight tracks written by the man Gordy described as a 'composer and lyricist of the first order', Side 1 clearly demonstrates this. The odd song out is 'You Lost the Sweetest Boy', a typically fine Holland-Dozier-Holland number that would have sounded that more convincing had it been given to the incomparable Martha Reeves & the Vandellas.

Mary Wells was patently more suited to the mid tempos and sweet sentiments of a Smokey song. Listening to so many of them at a single sitting made me think of the Cathy & Claire page of my sister's old Jackie magazines. Smokey writes of the emotions and frustrations of young love equally well from the perspective of both the earnest young souls who would write in with their problems and the wise old agony aunt who would dispense all the cool-headed advice. But he does it with such grace and playfulness.

Quite apart from his facility with a lovely, soaring melody – and he's one of those melody-makers like, say, Brian Wilson and Paul McCartney whose tunes all have that readily identifiable personal stamp – Smokey had the most deceptively simple but carefully polished way with a lyric. 'No muscle-bound man could take my hand from my guy./No handsome face could ever take the place of my guy.' It might be Jackie, Jim, but not as we know it.

Take, too, the effortless line that feeds the punch line of 'You Beat Me to the Punch' – 'But I found out beyond a doubt/One day, boy, you were a playboy' – which determines our Mary this time to walk away from her two-timin' man and beat him to the punch for once. Which in turn, perhaps, prompted Gene Chandler (of 'Duke of Earl' and 'Get Down') fame to record one of those answer songs that were popular at the time, 'You Threw a Lucky Punch'.

'Two Lovers' throws another curved-ball punch line when Mary/Smokey reveals that the sweet and kind first lover and the other lover who treats her bad and makes her sad and makes her cry even though she can't deny that she loves him are actually... two facets of one and the same person. Freudin' to a go-go!

In 'Operator', we feel the frustrations of the girl on the phone who's desperate to talk to her long gone lover, but can't hear what he tells her because of all the static on the telephone line. As he runs out of dimes, she pleads with the operator to reverse the charges to her, but... but... it's all too darn late. And in 'Laughing Boy', Mary this time is the wise old ex-girlfriend who sees that her former man is not really happy with a new squeeze who's obviously treating him bad: 'When I look at you now, I know somehow/That the smile you are wearing is untrue'.

Ah, great stuff. They don't write 'em like that anymore. Nor, in all honesty, on Side 2 – which contains a less than Simone-ish version of 'My Baby Just Cares for Me' and some of the lesser singles that prompted Berry to deliver her into Smokey's care. 'Oh Little Boy', for example, written by Eddie Holland with Mickey Stevenson, is an overblown sub-Spector affair that's rather river shallow, mountain low.

The two stand-out tracks are, of course, from the top of old Smokey. 'Your Old Stand-by' is our Mary in the role of her man's perennial substitute – but this time his old stand-by is gonna play the part from the depths of the heart, because she knows the part so well that he'll hardly tell that she's left him in misery. Covered by the Temptations on their Smokey album, 'What Love Has Joined Together' is a notch above, with a beautiful melody and lyrics full of the kinds of metaphors and comparisons that we know and love from 'The Way You Do The Things You Do'. 'It would be easier to change all the seasons of the year/Than for anyone to change the way I feel; I love you dear'.

But even if you're just a little too cynical for all that slush and nonsense, this record will win you round if only for the sheer exuberance of the Motown sound. (Hey! It rhymes. Perhaps I could have been a... No, alas no.) There was only one Smokey Robinson. If I can transpose Berry Gordy's words from the Temptations to Mary Wells, 'This album is a prime example of his ability as a song writer'. Add to that the bonus of being filtered (as Lee Ivory's liner notes suggest) through 'a voice that captures the hearts of all who hear her'.

Rather like that wonderful evergreen fade out to 'My Guy', Mary's greatest hits are finger-snappin' good!

The Rhythm of the Saints

They're dropping like flies. Now Nana Vasconcelos, the great Brazilian percussionist, is no more. Dead from lung cancer at the tender age of 71 – which would have made him about 45 when The Good Wife and I went to see him at The Leadmill, Sheffield.

Apparently a converted flour mill, The Leadmill is, by popular vote, one of the UK's favourite independent live-music venues. It always struck me as a rather seedy spit-and-sawdust type of place in a rather seedy part of the city centre down by the railway station. This was in the late '80s or early '90s, in the days before coffee bars appeared in the station precinct and the creation of an arts cinema just opposite the ill-conceived and short-lived Museum of Pop Music lent the area some respectability.

I'm not sure that I'd even heard of Nana Vasconcelos nor his band of the time, The Bushdancers. Brazilian music still meant mainly Stan Getz and Astrud Gilberto and gentle strum-along bossa nova. But being curious, we went to see him. Probably on our own, since it might have been not too long after we moved oop to the grim north from Brighton: a time when we would have worn our Paddington Bear-style labels on our duffel coats saying PLEEZE BE OUR FRIENDS.

Before The Daughter came along and made us think twice about evenings out, it was a brief but rich era for music concerts. Artists like Hugh Masekela, Gil Scott-Heron, Hilton Ruiz, Pharoah Sanders and the fabulous Bundhu Boys appeared at The Leadmill or the University or what was then still the Poly. Oh, and a band that spun-off Kajagoogoo – but that wasn't our doing: a visiting friend from Manchester persuaded us to go along, much against our better judgement, you understand.

And Senõr Vasconcelos, the dark-skinned native of Recife, with his gourds and bells and shakers, his bird calls, yodels, drums and the one-string berimbau, was particularly memorable. If you half-closed your eyes that evening, you could imagine that the gloomy Leadmill had been magically transformed into a tiny clearing somewhere deep in the Brazilian rainforest.

And it's Nana V's myriad percussion effects that help to turn Paul Simon's The Rhythm of the Saints of 1990 into a masterpiece of modern world music. Only the best for the diminutive New York minstrel. Vasconcelos had already picked up countless critics' awards and worked with the likes of Pat Metheny, Don Cherry, Gato Barbieri, Brian Eno and Talking Heads when Simon recruited him for his follow-up to Graceland.

Some – including the Queen Mum – would probably argue that Graceland was the better album, but I've only got it on cassette, so it doesn't count. Besides, I believe that Rhythm builds on its predecessor by shifting the whole operation to Rio de Janeiro. While preserving that beautiful singing, ringing guitar sound associated with central and southern Africa, Simon adds to the mix the element of Brazilian percussion – in the form of Nana Vasconcelos and his crop of gourds and the arsenal of home-made instruments (such as a glass rather than the customary wooden marimba) used by the percussion group, Uakti – to create something even more extraordinary.

The quality of the song-writing throughout is as one would expect from a master craftsman like Paul Simon. As a callow youth at university, I secretly sneered at my friend Jacqui's love of his early solo albums – thinking they were every bit as soppy as the Simon & Garfunkel song book – but I came to realise that she was right all along. These days, I'm so liberal and enlightened that I can listen to 'Mrs. Robinson' et al without the slightest sneer, while positively relishing There Goes Rhymin' Simon and all his later mature work.

But it's the guitar arrangements and the percussion effects throughout that take his songs to a new dimension. Consider the glorious, mysterious second track, for example, 'Can't Run But'. There's a fantastic image – 'A winding river/Gets wound around a heart. Pull it/Tighter and tighter/Until the muddy waters part' – that captures for me the way the crystal guitar sound and the ceaseless pattering percussion interweave to suggest something seductively liquid.

Yes, that's it. The Rhythm of the Saints is one mighty Afro-Brazilian river. An Orinoco of percussion. A Niger of guitars. A Limpopo of limpid native sounds. An Amazon of astounding musicianship. Right from 'The Obvious Child', in which the thundering sound of the massed samba drums of the Grupo Cultural Olodum suggest the falls at its source, the album seems to flow effortlessly but relentlessly like an imagined river.

Taking the whole journey and listening to the record from start to finish rather than cherry-picking individual tracks has an effect like some benign and mildly hallucinogenic drug that gently turns your world inside out for 45 minutes. Although he's not there on every track, Nana's there – with the likes of Hugh Masekela, the Brecker Brothers and the great Congolese guitarist, Ringo Star – on the exceptionally beautiful 'Further to Fly', with its 'days falling backward into velvet night...'

Days continue to fall backwards on the next track, the equally beautiful 'She Moves On' – the delicate percussion this time swollen by a powerful bass line and a chorus of female African voices – and on down 'The Cool, Cool River' with all its haunting 'Spirit Voices' as far as the lazy hypnotic title track, where Uakti and Nana Vasconcelos appear together again to steer us through the delta and out into the endless ocean.

Time like the river marches on. Paul Simon keeps going for now and one day perhaps I'll get to see him live, preferably on a summer's day live in Central Park, New York. I suspect I've missed the boat and anyway it wouldn't be alas with Nana Vasconcelos, who teamed up so felicitously with the pint-sized songsmith, with his ear for exotic ethnic sounds and his way with evocative imagery, to create one of the great musical codas to the 20^th century.

Third World

Isn't it a-bout time, as Stephen Stills once sang, to re-appraise Third World's eponymous debut album? No? Well, I reckon it's high time. Time to give the album and the band some due.

The music critic, Dave Marsh, whose The Heart of Rock and Soul: The 1001 Greatest Singles ever Made is one of my bibles, poor sad soul that I clearly am, awarded the album a single star in his Rolling Stone review and dismissed Third World in a brief paragraph as purveyors of 'perfectly mediocre reggae... nothing but sinewy dance music, slick but devoid of deep emotion'.

Since his main musical interest seems to be soul music, his primary concern would, I suppose, be feeling. But, reading between the lines, I think his beef seems to be that Third World were a middle-class Jamaican band, signed up by the Jamaican entrepreneur, Chris Blackwell, for his Island label at a time when the re-packaged Wailers had set the international ball rolling. The suggestion being that there's something inauthentic about it – which begs a version of the whole Can white men sing the blues? question.

In any case, the 'inauthentic' newcomers teamed up with their authentic label-mates when Third World would toured the UK as support act to the Wailers in 1976, the year this album came out. They would later go on to tour the US extensively as reggae missionaries, bringing sinewy dance riddims to the heathens.

I bought a copy of the album in the year of its release, intrigued by its distinctive album art and attracted, no doubt, by Virgin Records' introductory special offer. Later, I would buy the more generally approved follow-up, 96^o In The Shade, but thereafter restricted my Third World purchases to the 7" format. Subsequently, however, I go back most consistently to the under-appreciated 'tentative' debut.

Mybee it's becorze I'm a Lundinner who loves to dance. With an extra percussionist in the six-piece line-up, there is indeed an emphasis on 'sinewy dance music'. And it's often very sinewy indeed. Third World – and less successfully, in my estimation, Inner Circle – were really the first Jamaican bands to blend reggae and disco/dance music.

Dave Marsh seems to object in particular to the kind of Santanic dance-oriented slant the band gave to two classic roots reggae songs: the Abyssinians' 'Sette Messgana' and Burning Spears' 'Slavery Days'. But I don't agree that, in so doing, Third World stripped the music of any emotion. It's maybe not the 'deep emotion' synonymous with the kind of southern soul that's a deeper shade of Doris Duke, the equivalent perhaps of roots reggae for purists, but their reinterpretations are atmospheric enough to give the originals a worthwhile new slant.

The two tracks dominate the first side. The LP's other numbers are mainly Third World originals. 'Brand New Beggar' and 'Sun Won't Shine', in particular, are fantastic, melodic songs that make you want to wind up your waist and suggest why they were reputedly such a popular live act. From here, it would only be another couple of albums before they cooked up something of the calibre of that perennial dance classic, 'Now That We've Found Love'.

This album is not a classic by that standard, but there's not a bum note on either side and I've been partial to it ever since my inaugural listen in the record store's headphones. And I think it illustrates an important point: even if the purity of the original music gets diluted in the process, music has to move on and assimilate new influences if it's to evolve and survive.

Just as those rolling middle-class white Stones from South London mixed a little rock 'n' roll with Chicago blues in their musical test tubes to blend a 'new' product for a hungry new audience, so these six sons of rather better-heeled Jamaican parents would fuse dance music with orthodox reggae and create, to quote one of their song titles, 'roots with quality'.

Third World didn't hail from Trenchtown, but their distinctive reggae lite would help to internationalise the music and take it to places like West Africa, Brazil and even, for Jah's sake, New Zealand. That's not something to be sniffed at. So excuse me a moment please: 'love's got me dancing on the floor...'