Steve Kuhn

from The Great Jazz Pianists: Speaking of Their Lives and Music, page 233:

What do you mean by playing "without harmony"? Using a pedal tone, which Coltrane got into after a period of very dense harmonic playing. He would use one or two harmonic references throughout a song, as he did on "So What" [from Miles Davis's Kind of Blue, on Columbia]. It was basically D for sixteen bars, E flat for eight bars, and then back to D. Ultimately, he worked with only one harmonic reference point, and then in "Ascension" [from Best of John Coltrane: His Greatest Years, on Impulse] there was nothing harmonically.
cite as

Len Lyons, The Great Jazz Pianists: Speaking of Their Lives and Music (New York, ), p. 233. https://led.kmi.open.ac.uk/entity/lexp/1431335026178 accessed: 12 December, 2024

Listeners

Steve Kuhn
Pianist

Listening to

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Ascension performed by John Coltrane
So What performed by John Coltrane

Experience Information

Medium playback
Listening Environment indoors

Originally submitted by Gill on Mon, 11 May 2015 10:03:46 +0100
Approved on Sat, 26 Sep 2015 14:34:54 +0100