Imagine John Coltrane

I liked it. They did interview McCoy, didn't they? There was plenty of stuff I didn't know, such as he was an LSD freak.

They had McCoy? Sorry, I had my head stuck up my bottom bracket.

I did notice though that when they were showing ostensible footage of 'My Favourite Things', they were trying to sync John playing a tenor in time with the music.

I thought the avante garde was reasonably well represented given the level of condensation (eg there was no reference to Giant Steps, not only more popular but arguably a more genuinely revolutionary record than Ascension, because the avante garde would have happened with or without Coltrane, but the compositional and technical innovations in Giant Steps probably would not have. You might have struggled to realise that Alice was a musician from this - it would have been easy to miss that the woman referred to as his wife and the woman in the band footage shown later were the same person. You'd certainly have known that she'd had a significant solo career.

But fair enough, it was aimed at a non-specialist audience so you expect the orthodox view and not critical dissent. My main beef was that Yentob never came across as any kind of enthusiast for the music. At one time he even suggested that My Favourite Things was untypical of Coltrane in being an easy accessible tune - what happened to Summertime, Every Time We Say Goodbye, Greensleeves, Chim Chim Cheree, yadda, yadda. In short there must be an almost unlimited amount of people better qualified to do this than Yentob.

duh, I obviously meant you'd certainly *not* have known she had a significant solo career........

in a way, i think it was better than yentob didnt come across fanboyish, his impartial approach was probably better. he never came across completely ignorant at least.

Is this a new documentary? I saw something on tv years ago with some of the same footage (playing outside presumably with Rashid et al, I think he was wearing a polo shirt).

I mentioned this on the Miles thread, I got this book by Art Taylor (drummer on Giant Steps) containing lots of his own interviews with and pictures of musicians. There's one pic that I just love of J.C. sleeping on a couch with his horn. He could do with a little more humanizaton of that sort.

Yeah, it's a new 40-min documentary, made for the BBC by Alan Yentob (one of the most prominent big-wigs of British broadcasting, former Controller of BBC1 I think, now Head of Drama and Entertainment). He's made a series of programmes exploring the arts under the title Imagine, I think it's his mission to give the arts a higher profile. Am I right in thinking there's some sort of vague spiritual bent to the series?

I wasn't looking for fanboyish, dick, I just got the impression that he'd realised there was an anniversary and thought hmmm, that's an idea for a documentary. You never felt that his knowledge was any deeper than anyone could have managed with a couple of days skim-reading. I don't think the BBC would have allowed someone with that level of knowledge or awareness to do a documentary on James Joyce, or Rembrandt or Benjamin Britten. But Yentob is a TV bigwig, and jazz musicians are not serious artists, so it's ok.

x-post and coincidental use of bigwig!!

probably OTM about docus on joyce, britten, etc.

i thought jazz was generally afforded half decent respect by the beeb and those sectors of the music establishment.

I've been to the church -- here is a column I wrote about it a few years ago.

I thought Yentob was good, he looked suitably bewildered and gobsmacked. I would like to go to the church.

I enjoyed reading that article.

I liked it too, Mark.

To change directions slightly, does anyone know of a CD version of "My Favorite Things" that comes close to the performance featured in the video The World According to John Coltrane? Or that performance, if it was released. I saw this a few months ago, the video (VHS and DVD) is about an hour long, interviews with contemporaries and some performances, and seems widely available, but the narrator just says it's in Europe (it seems to be outdoors, but the projected video I saw kind of reduced everything to an impressionistic blur). I have the Live in Japan set but don't like that version as much, it gets away from the hard-core modal skronk of the one I saw.

I've not seen the video but vaguely recall that he play MFT at a concert with Eric Dolphy in Stockholm early 60s?

Thanks re that piece -- my favorite version of My Favorite Things is on Afro-Blue Impressions, which was recorded live in Europe in '63. It's not a "hard" version, though. Not sure if you can get a harder than Live in Japan, actually. Maybe Live at the Village Vanguard Again?

Going back to the original post...2 of the questions...I think the focus on _Love Supreme_ was partly 'cos it's the 40th anniversary or something like that & at least some of the live footage isn't available, 'cos they said it the programme it was recently discovered & hadn't been shown before. The spirituality angle would figure too, 'cos all the pre-publicity for the programme concentrated on the church aspect.

Good programme.