David Liebman Ensemble:
John Coltrane's Meditations
Liner notes by Nat Hentoff

I have known many musicians, in and out of jazz, but none have been as consumed by the search for more and more meaning in music than John Coltrane. It wasn't only his constant practicing during the day but more challengingly, he never stopped searching during his live appearances and his recordings.

In night clubs, I'd become immersed too in those Coltrane sets that could last an hour and a half or more. Unlike some jazz musicians who depend on familiar "licks" to keep a solo going, Coltrane continually surprised himself - and the rest of us.

His wife, Alice, told me that "when John left for work, he'd often take five instruments with him, He wanted to be ready for whatever came." "You just keep going," Coltrane said to me once. "You keep trying to get right down to the crux." Dizzy Gillespie once pointed out "that there is so much music out there, you can only get a part of it." But Coltrane, digging for the crux, wanted more and more of what was out there, and he kept learning about himself in the course of the search.

At home, he would sometimes practice silently, just running his fingers over the keys and then meditate. And then listen to recordings of Indian music and the music of South African pygmies. David Liebman, whose remarkably perceptive — and indeed spiritual — live performance of John Coltrane's Meditations - notes that "Trane's late music has been by and large ignored by the audience and musicians alike... But I felt that musically, this period should be more studied and analyzed by musicians."

And it should also be performed by musicians - as in this recording - who have reached inside music and become a part of it.

Hearing Trane's music was at first a shock, a visceral astonishment. I had felt that way, years before, when I first heard Beethoven's Late Quartets. There was no way to safely place this music in the background. It seized and opened you. I remember that in night clubs, there were no conversations during Trane's music and waitresses often stopped serving. It was a total experience. The music would stay in your mind long after the set and the night were over.

Coltrane believed that music could transform both the listener and the player into a consciousness of the unity of all being. That's why he was interested in Eastern religions.

He knew that as long as he lived, he would never achieve total communion with what he called "the pure state" of being. But he believed that as we "keep on cleaning the mirror," we would reach higher states of consciousness and unity.

It was sometimes a lonely odyssey because each new state opened up further challenges with no clear path to further destinations. In a conversation we once had, Trane said, "I'm still looking into certain sounds, certain scales. Not that I'm sure of what I'm looking for, except it'll be something that hasn't been played before. I don't know what it is. I know I'll have that feeling when I get it."

"And in the process of looking, continual looking, any given performance can be long or short. I never know. It's always one thing leading into another. It keeps evolving, and sometimes it's longer than I actually thought it was while I was playing. When things are constantly happening, the piece doesn't feel that long."

In this continually reverberating performance by David Liebman and his self-challenging associates, ordinary time stops and you enter Coltrane time through this transcription by Caris Visentin from the original Coltrane recording.

The value of the time and intensity that David Liebman and his colleagues have put into this endeavor is manifold. First, of course, is the continuation in performance, of the Coltrane Legacy. Also, however, the transcription and the extensive analysis of the music by Liebman will add greatly to an understanding — as well as appreciation — of Trane's music.

David Baker, a conductor, composer and professor of music at the University of Indiana, has transcribed some of Coltrane's solos for his students.

"I think," Baker told me, "all musicians should study Coltrane the way we now study the etudes of Bach and Brahms."

Coltrane, a true believer in removing barriers between people and their forms of expression, would, I think, enjoy his music being part of study along with the works of Beethoven and Brahms. He would probably demur at first, saying that his work was still unfinished, but it was the constant search for — and finding of — possibilities that is the essence of his music.

He often surprised me in his conversation as well as in his music. Like the time, one afternoon, he said, "Sometimes, I wish I could walk up to my music as if for the first time, as if I had never heard it before. Being so inescapably a part of it, I'll never know what the listener gets, what the listener feels, and that's too bad." But the listener, on listening again and again to Coltrane's music, will never exactly experience the same feelings each time. That's the mark of deep music. I've listened to Bartok pieces again and again, and I discover something new each time. So it is with Coltrane's music. A few months after Coltrane died, I was lecturing at a black college in Delaware. It was the only college that year where students asked me about jazz. They wanted to know more about Charlie Parker and Ornette Coleman - and especially about John Coltrane.

"You know," one of them said, "when Trane died, it was like a great big hole had been left. And it's still there."

It is indeed, but the extraordinarily penetrating music he conceived and played has not disappeared into that hole. It is powerfully, passionately alive, as you can hear in this recording.

— Nat Hentoff for Arkadia Records