John Coltrane: Interstellar Space : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

These four duets between John Coltrane and drummer Rashied Ali are Coltrane's final recordings (made five months before his death in 1967), and they are plainly astounding. What more exhilarating image can we have of the master than to envision him blowing flat-footed into the booming martial roar of Ali's drumming like thunder and lightning having a final go during the last storm of the summer?

All four pieces hook into planetary themes and imagery. On all tracks Coltrane plays tenor and punctuates Ali's solo percussion displays with shimmering chains of bells. The first, "Mars," is appropriately warlike, with Coltrane screaming up and down his drummer's tough and dark rhythmic terrain, wailing in minor keys, playing programmatic themes which set the boundaries for the rest of the set. The jagged but beautiful "Mars" will be as far out as Coltrane, in his last months a music astronaut of the highest order, will go in this set.

"Venus" is more gentle, with a melodious song as a major theme. Though the sensibility here is pure Coltrane, he quotes thoughts from Debussy and Ravel and even what seems to be a passage from Pierre Dubois's alto saxophone concerto. The whole effect is mellow, trance inducing.

Rashied Ali is also featured in the two long meditations on the second side, "Jupiter" and "Saturn." If Elvin Jones was the perfectly inventive percussionist for the intricacies of the great Coltrane quartet of the Sixties, Ali is the perfect partner for the one-on-one spiritual games of these duet tapes. He outlandishly returns the unrelenting outpour of energy spewing from Trane, and the result is a two-man vulcanism in which Ali provides the subterranean rumblings through which the tenor explodes in showers of notes.

There has been some grumbling about Coltrane's posthumously released recordings, but I think most of the carping is unjustified. In his last months Coltrane had changed everything about his music. Ali had replaced Jones, Alice Coltrane replaced McCoy Tyner, Pharaoh Sanders had been brought in for extra bleat power. The music was becoming completely modally organized, as shown in the posthumously released live albums from Seattle and Japan, the latter of which is a sort of prelude to Interstellar Space. Only Impulse's Leo is unworthy of Coltrane; Alice monkeyed with it and added lugubrious string tracks that brought the whole jerry-rig down. After the happy shock of these new duets, it might be great to hear the raw studio tracks of Leo before the mush was added. In any case it's great to have these glorious last musings from Brother John.