This post was written with a different purpose, but it’s up here for now. It’s Trane’s birth aniversary and inkeeping with last year, here is the tribute. It’s similar to what I wrote previously.

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“I would like to bring people something like happiness. I would want to discover a method so that if I want it to rain, it will start right away to rain. If one of my friends is ill, I’d like to play a certain song and he will be cured…”
-John William Coltrane

Coltrane did all that and much more.

Not many think of Coltrane as a freedom fighter, like one does of Martin Luther King or Gandhi, though he was perhaps the most melodious proponent of the freedom movement. As the civil rights movement reached its peak in the sixties, Coltrane expressed it through his music which critics often called “angry”. His solos were long, relentless and at tempos at which often the musicians and the audience failed to keep up. It was as if he was playing for a different purpose all together. Like if he broke free from the traditional chord changes and scales of modal jazz, his improvisations would simultaneously make the world free. And perhaps he did.

Coltrane’s upbringing was typically southern and religious, as he was born to a family of ministers in Hamlet, North Carolina. Not surprisingly, he grew up a victim of racial segregation. In 1943 he moved to Philadelphia and played blues and jazz standards for the Navy Band. One of the main influences on Coltrane was Charlie Parker and he later went on to play with Monk, Gillespie and Ellington.

While Coltrane played with many “cats” as a side man, his first big break came when Sonny Rollins, a tenor player and close friend, refused to join Miles Davis’ Quintet perhaps just to give Coltrane the break. During this period both Davis and Coltrane experimented with free jazz, and jazz critic Gitler called Coltrane’s style “sheets of sound”; to describe the short, fast-paced solos which felt more like cascades. In 1959 Coltrane recorded Kind of Blue with Davis , perhaps the most lyrical jazz album ever written, and Coltrane came to be recognized as a leader in free jazz. Soon he left Davis and led his own extraordinary quartet with McCoy Tyner, Elvin Jones and Jimmy Garrison in 1961.

Ellington, with whom Coltrane recorded in 1962, often dismissed the concept of modern jazz. He felt there were two kinds of players; the individualists and the hundreds who follow the music shaped by one man. Coltrane was perhaps one of the most influential individualists jazz has seen. Giant Steps and Mr. PC have so many chord changes and progressions played at unimaginable tempos that it forever changed the way jazz was written.

No one worked as hard as Coltrane to find a new and fresh sound. So hard, that his playing was often dubbed loquacious and redundant by many. It is now folklore that Trane, as he was affectionately called, would be so impatient to play that he would leave the bandstand after completing a solo and continue to play in the men’s room allowing other members to complete their solos and return to play without a break. However, a favourite with Davis , who once said “I didn’t understand this talk of Coltrane being difficult to understand. What he does is to play five notes of a chord and then keep changing it around, trying to see how many different ways it can sound. It’s like explaining something five different ways”.

Coltrane’s adaptation of the famous Sound of Music track, My Favourite Things in 1961 is far superior to the original slow waltz sound. In Afro Blues Impression Live version of My Favourite Things one can hear joy, anger, impatience, rain, freedom, calm and melancholy, achieving exactly what he set out to do. But his most insurmountable work came in 1964 with A Love Supreme which was an expression of his discovery of spirituality and his devotion to God. With its four parts, Acknowledgement, Resolution, Pursuance and Psalm, music and religion became one. With this one expression, Coltrane wanted to “speak to their souls”.

September 23rd is like any other autumn day except; he Sun is at one of the two points on the celestial sphere where the celestial equator and the ecliptic intersect and astronomically the autumnal equinox makes the day and night equal; and one of the greatest jazz musicians was born eighty one years ago.

While the equinox is about equilibrium, everything about Coltrane was excessive. He had to play every chord and note known. He overdosed on sugar, alcohol, heroin and eventually LSD. Even spirituality was excessively experimented as he tried to embrace all religions like Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and the Kabbalah and even took up yoga, vegetarianism, astrology and philosophy.

Yet through his composition Equinox he leaves his listeners with joy, calm and a sense of freedom; and all that he sought in his own torrid musical journey.

Today I deflowered my jogging/walking shoes. I bought them a few weeks ago and they have just been sitting in closet for decoration and guilt inducing purposes. I did take them out once, because they were comfortable for driving also, but that’s about it. So due to an interesting turn of events I decided to go for a jog. And hence deflowered my shoes. Don’t worry I was gentle.

Now that’s a big deal. For those of you that don’t know me/haven’t seen me; I am the laziest person I know. I can give Garfield some serious competition (though Garfield has the unfair advantage of having nine lives and I have only one to devote completely to sloth….…but this post isn’t about fair competition, we shall discuss that another day) in being lazy. My usual cardio is trotting down a flight of stairs from my library to the parking and hopping into my car and driving.

Anyway, now I shall stun you all with the fascinating insights that struck me today while I jogged for perhaps the first time.

Jogging isn’t the same as walking. Now before you say Duhh, let me qualify that.

I like to walk occasionally because it helps me think. It seems more purposeful than just standing or sitting and you can actually think through a lot of serious stuff. I was expecting something similar while jogging and have been studying Jurisprudence, so I thought the actual disagreement between positivists will become clear when I jog and I shall come back a better jurist. Wrong. There is a reason why people say jogging clears your mind. Your muscles are crying so loudly for help that they drown out every other sane voice in your head. Hence it seems like your mind is clear of all other thoughts. But in fact all I was trying was to continue running without listening to my muscles.

The far more serious difference between walking and jogging is the music. I usually listen to some nice jazz when I walk. Because I am simultaneously working out positivism in my mind, it helps if the music is instrumental. So usually Coltrane, Davis, Montgomery, Parker, Brubeck and Ellington have fought for my time during that occasional walk. But jazz is not at all conducive for running. A lot of it a too slow and the rest is unstructured, in the sense of not having a constant rhythm, which I desperately need while jogging. Now that’s saying something because Coltrane was known for his very strong Rhythm Section in his quartets and I can only manage to jog to Mr PC, the rest is really slow and all over the place. (Please note these things are being said only with reference to jogging and not about the music itself. I would NEVER say Jazz is unstructured, lacks rhythm or is too slow.) The other thing is when your muscles are screaming for help, you need lyrics to sing along with for distraction, which is another reason why most jazz doesn’t work.

Now that finally brings me to the reason why I am writing this post. I have about 2500 songs on my iPod and I was really struggling today to find suitable music for jogging. (It was also my way of taking breaks under the pretext of changing music.) Some Zeppelin really works, if it has a strong base line. My Sherona worked even better because the drums are really the heart of the song. But otherwise I was stumped.

So I was wondering what you marathon runners listen to while jogging. And your reasons for the choice of music. I think I need something fast, with a strong base line, and something with lyrics that I can naturally sing along in my head. So please write in and help.

One more thing. I feel better when I walk. But I feel better about myself when I jog. I’m trying to pick which one is better. Help on this will also be appreciated.

UPDATE: I knew I had given up too soon and Coltrane would eventually come to my rescue. My favouritest (if such a word in fact existed I would use it only here) piece of music ever, by any artist, in any genre, is Coltrane’s version of My Favourite Things (not just any version but the 21 minute live take in Afro Blues Impressions-I). And I completely forgot about it yesterday because I do not associate that music with exercise (no surprise there!). But I just realised, after my morning jog, that it is the best jogging music. It has fantastic rhythm. It has one solid base line and a long kick ass piano solo by McCoy Tyner and of course Coltrane is at his spectacular best. It’s one of those few tracks for which I don’t need lyrics to grasp the music, I know it note for note. And it has more than one climax, making it perfect to punctuate your running which one normally does with trees or something in the park. So for all you runners, this is my strong recommendation for when you jog. Keep your recommendations coming, I would like to believe that eventually I can run more than the 21 minutes that this song lasts. Right now I can barely keep up with Coltrane.

“Considering the milk situation the cabinet has decided to ban export of milk products till September 30, 2007,” said Mr. Chidambaram.

We will never learn. Or so it seems.

(Link via Shrayana)

Most of you must be familiar with my love for jazz and near devotion to Miles Davis. I still believe Kind of Blue is perhaps one of the greatest contributions to music and the most lyrical jazz album.

I remember watching Ray and wondering why no movie had ever been made about the legend. Recently when I was getting roasted in Phoenix I managed to see documentary on him and heard stories about his dark side through various interviews of his wives and children. One of the most complex human beings and he almost bordered on maniacal. Be it his addictions, his music, his innovation, his lovers and wives or his experiences with racism; there was something about the man, the legend, that no one could fully grasp. While his dark side died with him, his music continues to bring nothing but joy.

The NY Times recently wrote about two movies in the offing about Davis. Definitely waiting for it but I still don’t know how they will manage to portray that kind of passion on screen.

Wonder why no movie has been made about Coltrane. And who could possibly essay him on screen? For those who haven’t yet read here’s my tribute to Coltrane.

I wrote a sort of tribute to John Coltrane on DI and it managed to touch more people than my usual posts about eminent domain and what not. Most of you are familiar with my general obsession with music especially Jazz. So, I am just reposting my old post for all the Dilliwallahs.