Coltrane in Vain

By Jason Hunter

The Clash: Give' Em Enough Rope / London Calling / Combat Rock

It's hard to talk about what The Clash means to me without embarrassing myself by issuing ultimatums such as "If you love music you must listen to the Clash" or "The Clash is TRUTH!". Some wonk at their label promoted them as "The only band that matters" so I'll leave it at that. I received copies of "Give 'Em Enough Rope", "London Calling", and "Combat Rock" from a friend in high school and was immediately surprised by how sonically subdued everything sounded compared to the metal and hard rock that I was listening to at the time. I thought "This is punk?" Yet, the directness of the lyrics and the intensity of how they were delivered was shocking. This is one of the first experiences I had with music that illustrated the importance of substance over style, and one of the few bands that I loved in high school that I'm not embarrassed to name.

John Coltrane: The Classic Quartet – The Complete Impulse! Recordings

When this was released in 1998 I no longer wanted just albums. When an artist got my attention I wanted everything there was. This was the first time I sat down and paid attention to not only Coltrane, but jazz as a genre. However, going from rock to jazz was a strange transition for me. Rock has lyrics, or at least hooks, that my attention span can easily grasp. Jazz has what? Tone? Melody? I was about to find out. This box set was a rollercoaster of an introduction. The collection started out with few surprises - the first two discs were what I expected from "jazz." Discs 3, 4, and 5, got more interesting but by the end (disc 8) Coltrane became a fire-breathing dragon of sound. For the next 5 years I gravitated to the 'sheets of sounds' that ruled over the latter discs, possibly because I could ignore it for many minutes and not miss much. In the last five years though I've swung back to the earlier, more traditional sounds on the first two discs. I've since learned that sometimes a sound so complex, so technical can be simple at first blush.