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
Listening to
hide composersAscension | 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