Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Black Pearls: Recovered Memories

2004; Saint Louis University; Volume: 38; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/1512292

1945-6182

Sascha Feinstein,

Poetry Analysis and Criticism

first listening, the liner notes warned, might think that Coltrane's music was an example of Dionysian spirit untamed by the guiding hand of Apollo. On the cover: Coltrane photographed from below so that his whole torso rises magisterially, the saxophone angled from his mouth and plunging (so it seems) through the frame of the LP. His hair's shaved tight to the skull and his neck bulges from the white collar; with a spotlight from the front, colored theater floods from the side, and solid black background, his head looks like it might explode. Black Pearls. Or, more accurately, BLACK PEARLS [logo] JOHN COLTRANE. I've never felt more intimidated by an album's packaging--unnaturally so. What had induced such anxiety? Why did the image alone make me recoil? The music itself was taped on May 23, 1958, a year to the month before Coltrane's watershed recording of Giant Steps. Ranked against previous recording dates from 58 or 57--LPs such as Coltrane, Lush Life, Traneing In, Soultrane, or the magnificent Blue Train--it seems pleasant, if not unremarkable. Listening to the music now, or any time in the last ten or fifteen years, I am overwhelmed by the lack of ferociousness that I used to associate with the album. There's plenty of energy, but it's not raw Dionysian spirit. The title cut lasts for roughly thirteen minutes, and it lopes along without any enormous rhythmic or tonal surprises. Coltrane's opening solo tumbles forward, but with nowhere near the melodic force that he'd embody in less than a year. Donald Byrd takes a couple of fine but fairly reserved trumpet choruses, and then Red Garland plays Red Garland. Paul Chambers follows with a solid but under-recorded bass solo; he trades fours with Art Taylor, who then offers a tight, restrained drum solo. And then the band replays the bouncy melody. The second and last tune on Side A, the standard Lover Come Back to Me, has no more edge, harmonically, but the tempo's breathtaking--so much so that Taylor seems to struggle to maintain the heat. Sweet Sapphire Blues, an eighteen-minute cut that comprises all of Side B, opens with about six minutes of Garland before Coltrane enters. Trane solos for four minutes, but his statement is not a radical departure from the choruses on the other two tunes. Black Pearls is a transitional recording, one that allowed him to create the astonishing sessions for Atlantic from '59 to '61. Why, then, did I fear the LP? I knew it had nothing to do with the abstracted warnings in the liner notes. (Even as a teenager, I never blindly accepted the critics' voice.) Nor could the cover--which now just looks like a fine, somewhat overdramatized portrait of a heroic figure in my life--have generated such an extreme response. Could I place the LP in my memory the way we re-shelve records or CDs and locate that history? I kept playing the recording, hoping that music, as it so often does, would recover lost memory. Then I stared at the album until my eyes unfocused the way Coltrane's saxophone does on the cover, refracted light off the keys blurring to circles, the bell shadowed into the background, until I could see an old woman in a chair placed close to my mother's bedside, and she gave me the answer. This woman's name was Edna, and she was one of a great many visitors during my mother's battle with cancer. Most of the people who came to our house were close friends, mainly artists whom I knew quite well. Some did not visit often and, when they did, didn't stay long; others, in a selfishness that often accompanies such visitations, prolonged their visits until they had thoroughly exhausted my mother. I'm not sure if anyone can master the art of spending time with a terminally ill friend, but some did much better than others. And then there were the people who I knew at best by name and who seemed like minor characters in a foreign film. Some had known me as a baby, and I had all the conversations that teenagers never want to have. …