Spirit Catcher: The Life and Art of John Coltrane by John Fraim
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"Like many members of my generation I gauge the climate of the times by the music created. Once the music meant something but now that time is past. Now it seems forced on us solely for the profit of record companies."

I belong to the generation for whose members music indeed meant something. My youth happened in the 1960s and music - rock, jazz, or avant-garde - meant everything to me: it captured the zeitgeist and embodied the spirit of rebellion, the feeling of the great social and cultural change about to happen. Even now the music that I love (works by J.S. Bach, John Coltrane, and many others) is one of the most important aspects of my self-identity. To my 20-year-old students in 2018 the sole function of music is to provide entertainment and when asked what music they like they will likely answer "whatever they play on the radio." I am not being judgmental: it's simply that the times they are a'changing.

John Fraim's Spirit Catcher. The Life and Art of John Coltrane (1996) is the fifth biography of John Coltrane that I am reviewing here on Goodreads (the links to my four previous reviews are listed at the bottom). Alas it is not one of the better ones, although it does have good points other than the wonderful quote shown above about what music means to different generations. There is the intriguing story of the mysterious "drone sound" that Coltrane heard in his dream when he was kicking his heroin habit in 1957:

"[...] the search for the mysterious sound began. It was a search that would continue throughout his life and would cause him to create some of his most intense and emotional music."

The reader will find a very interesting passage about chaos vs. order:

"For those two great forces in jazz and life, order and chaos, now waged their greatest battle [...] inside the spirit of John Coltrane."

Readers more fluent in the analysis of music than this reviewer may be interested in the author's claim that the first signs of the 'Coltrane sound' may be heard on Kind of Blue, the famous album recorded by Miles Davis group with John Coltrane. Perhaps the most interesting is the author's suggestion that the interplay between John Coltrane and Elvin Jones (the drummer in the classic Coltrane quartet) on My Favorite Things is a harbinger of Coltrane's future interest in free jazz - a suggestion which on the face of it seems farthest from reality in such a melodic work as My Favorite Things.

The author is unusually fond of metaphors which tend to obfuscate rather than emphasize the points he makes. For instance, on one page we read "punches out at the listener in one of the strongest jolts of musical electricity that Coltrane would ever record," and then "pounds away at the listener like the surf of some great ocean." But the elaborate phrase on page 173 wins the Most Pretentious Metaphor contest:

"What remains is a sparse, wintry sound which stands against nature's forces like a stately old Victorian mansion along the treeless Mendocino coast of northern California."

I also found a factual error in the book: Eric Dolphy did not die of "coronary problems" but of diabetic condition. And the correct name of the Jefferson Airplane singer (misspelled on page 180) is Grace Slick. I recommend the book, alas with little enthusiasm.

Three stars.

Ascension by Eric Nisenson: a great, great book!
John Coltrane by Bill Cole: not worth the effort.
Coltrane. The Story of a Sound by Ben Ratliff: good book!
John Coltrane. His Life and Music by Lewis Porter: a definitive biography by a Coltrane scholar.



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