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John Coltrane’s Long Island ConnectionBY DAVE GIL DE RUBIO

dgilderubio@antonmediagroup.com

Herbie Hancock once said that the spirit of jazz is the spirit of openness and nowhere is that more evident than when you delve into the canon and life of the late John Coltrane. Despite dying at the age of 40 from liver cancer on July 17, 1967, his legacy and music has lived on to the point of in� uencing artists across a huge spectrum of artistic mediums. It’s a legacy director John Scheinfeld (� e U.S. vs. John Lennon; Who is Harry Nilsson [And Why is Everybody Talkin’ About Him]) certainly cap-tures in his latest � lm, Chasing Trane: � e John Coltrane Documentary. Clocking in at an hour-and-a-half, Chasing Trane traces the music giant’s life with Scheinfeld weaving in 48 of the North Carolina native’s songs, a treasure trove of photo-graphs (many previously unseen) and interviews with Coltrane’s family members and a wide array of talking heads including Wynton Marsalis, Jimmy Heath, Dr. Cornel West, Carlos Santana, Common, Sonny Rollins and Bill Clinton. In the roughly three years it took to make this project, Scheinfeld wanted to ensure that it wasn’t a boilerplate cinematic hagi-ography or some didactic analysis of Coltrane’s music.

“� is is not a music history class. We do stop from time to time for

some of his seminal pieces like ‘My Favorite � ings,’ ‘A Love Supreme,’ ‘Giant Steps’ and especially ‘Alabama,’ where we use it in a powerful and emotional sequence that shows Coltrane’s connection to the civil rights movement of the 1960s,” Scheinfeld explained. “I wanted to use the music as if the artist, in this case John Coltrane, is still alive and I went to him and asked him to score

the � lm. So we used those 48 record-ings to bring alive all the dramatic, poignant, emotional and humorous moments. In Coltrane’s extraordinary body of work, I found every mood, texture and color to use. We have a credit on the � lm that says, ‘Music by John Coltrane’ because it is wall-to-wall and it is all his music.”

Given the paucity of Coltrane performance or interview footage, the

director went to extraordinary lengths to make up for these challenges. He managed to wrangle clips of Coltrane on one television show the saxophonist appeared on with Miles Davis in the United States along with four European concerts. Scheinfeld’s greatest coup was footage shot by Art Davis, a deceased jazz sideman who

See COLTRANE on page 24A

Long Island plays a signi� cant role in the � lm. John Coltrane spent the last three years of his life living with his second wife, fellow jazz virtuoso Alice, and their children in Dix Hills. It was here where Coltrane composed his 1964 opus A Love Supreme in the home’s basement recording studio.

GARDEN CITY LIFE • MAY 24 - 30, 201724A GARDENCITY-LIFE.COM

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recorded with Coltrane and wound up capturing part of that session on a Super-8 video camera. � e clip is in the � lm and was found on home movies packed in boxes that wound up in the Van Nuys garage of the late bass player’s son.

“Art Davis’ son lives about 20 minutes from me in California, so my producer/colleague Dave Harding and I went out there and for three Saturdays, we went through all of them on a viewer. A lot of them were mom and dad, grandma and grand-pa-type home movies. But then, there it was—a seven-and-a-half color roll with no sound of Coltrane in the studio,” the director recalled. “And you see that in the � lm. It’s in the last 20 minutes of the � lm, where we’re talking about his avant-garde period.”

Scheinfeld also made up for the lack of Coltrane audio interviews by having Denzel Washington narrate quotes by the late jazz titan, ex-cerpted from print interviews he did throughout his short life and pep-pered throughout the � lm to re� ect what he may have been thinking or feeling. Washington was at the top of the director’s list of who he wanted to have do this and once the actor signed o� on it, Scheinfeld and an engineer � ew out to Pittsburgh, where Washington was � lming Fences. Su� ce it to say, he did not disappoint.

“He had really prepared and knew how he wanted to interpret Coltrane and I think that’s a key point. It’s [Denzel’s] interpretation as if he’d been hired to play Coltrane in a scripted � lm,” Scheinfeld explained. “� e reason he was number one on

my list, besides the fact that he’s a superb actor and one of the biggest movie stars in the business, is that if you think about the characters he’s played on the screen, most of them are men of quiet strength. All the people that I interviewed that knew Coltrane described him in those terms. So what you hear in the � lm is Denzel Washington’s interpretation of John Coltrane as a man of quiet strength and I just think he nailed it. I think it really elevated the overall � lm greatly and I’m so pleased that he decided to participate.”

Long Island plays a signi� cant role in the � lm. John Coltrane spent the last three years of his life living with his second wife/ fellow jazz virtuoso Alice and their children in Dix Hills. It was here where Coltrane composed his 1964 opus A Love Supreme in the home’s basement recording studio. It has also been in the process of being renovated as a national historic site, museum, learning archives and cul-tural center ever since it was weeks away from being demolished to clear

the way for a trio of McMansions back in 2003. Currently being run as a nonpro� t called � e Coltrane Home in Dix Hills, roughly $2.5 million is needed to complete the capital campaign in order to have it fully open to the public by 2019. Scheinfeld shot some of his � lm on the site of Coltrane’s last house, so the director is happy to help shine a light on it with his documentary.

“I think what struck me, was that the house had been allowed to deteriorate for quite some time and that was very clear to us when we were there,” he said. “It was such a shame and that’s why what [nonpro� t president] Ron Stein and his colleagues are doing there is so admirable and worthy and we hope that people will help them achieve their goal of restoring this house and making it into a museum and tribute to John and Alice Coltrane.”

Visit www.thecoltranehome.org to � nd out more about � e Coltrane Home in Dix Hills.

John Coltrane (right) received the Edison Award for Giant Steps in The Netherlands in November 1961.

COLTRANE from page 1A

‘‘What you hear in the � lm is Denzel Washington’s interpretation of John Coltrane as a man of quiet strength and I just think he nailed it. I think it really elevated the overall � lm greatly and I’m so pleased that he decided to participate.’’

— Chasing Trane director John Scheinfeld

Chasing The John Coltrane CanonBY DAVE GIL DE RUBIO

dgilderubio@antonmediagroup.com

John Coltrane considerable legacy that went far beyond his being a mere jazz icon. His solo cannon easily stands on it own, although his role as a sideman (Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue) and a collaborator with the number of equally totemic jazz titans including � elonious Monk (� elonious Monk with John Coltrane), Duke Ellington (Duke Ellington & John Coltrane), Cannonball Adderley (Cannonball and Coltrane) and Milt Jackson (Bags & Trane) should also be explored. Here are some major highlights of Trane’s deep and far-reaching solo catalog.

Blue Trane (Blue Note) - � e original � ve tracks on Coltrane’s only recording for Blue Note as a band leader � nds him and sidemen Lee Morgan, Curtis Fuller, Kenny Drew, Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones delivering a crisp 1957 hard bop session featuring a stellar reading of the standard “I’m Old Fashioned.”

Giant Steps (Atlantic) - � is 1960 session was the � rst of all-Coltrane compositions and a seismic shift in jazz where compositions were centered on solos and his frenetic style of playing was dubbed “sheets of sound” by jazz critic Ira Gitler. � e title track and “Naima” were standards spawned by these sessions.

My Favorite � ings (Atlantic) - Coltrane’s � rst album to feature him playing soprano saxophone also proved to be a major crossover success for him in 1961 thanks to this unorthodox approach to the Great American Songbook that found him and McCoy Tyner, Steve Davis and Elvin Jones taking on Rodgers and Hammerstein, � e Gershwins and Cole Porter.

A Love Supreme (Impulse!) - Considered to be one of the greatest albums of all time, Coltrane’s 1965 piece de resistance is a four-part suite entirely composed in his Dix Hills home and anchored by Jimmy Garrison, Elvin Jones and McCoy Tyner that clocks in at a brisk 33 minutes. Essential.

Ascension (Impulse!) - Recorded a year before Coltrane’s 1967 passing, this collection he referred to as a “big band thing,” augmented his base quartet (McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, Art Davis, Elvin Jones) with two altos, three tenors and two

trumpeters. Ground zero for the free jazz movement, Coltrane’s avant-garde proclivities are in full bloom here and makes for quite the challenging listening experience.