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!