[eerwrq]

This guy doesn't know what he's talking about.

- Jazz didn't begin to die on Kind of Blue. That was a popular, well selling jazz record. Rather than setting Jazz on a path to irrelevance, Kind of Blue reinvigorated the genre and inspired an abundance of accessible and innovative material in the years following its release.

- Alice Coltrane is not the "Yoko Ono" of Jazz. She made a lot of good records. And Yoko Ono isn't bad for that matter. I like her solo music better than John's.

- Many people besides music critics and academics enjoy Coltrane's late period. Some of us like abrasive, chaotic music.

[Finnucane]

> Alice Coltrane is not the "Yoko Ono" of Jazz

Yeah, that was uncalled for. Journey in Satchidananda and Ptah the El Daoud are excellent albums.

[mtalantikite]

Yeah he lost me with that comment. Journey in Satchidananda is my favorite record, period. It was one of many records that changed my life as a young teenager, and of all of those albums it’s still the one that surprises me most every time I listen to it 18 years later.

[chalkandpaste]

Yes, he sure doesn't know a dn thing about jazz...

Alice and Joe Henderson were doing great stuff in the 70's together too.

Beyond the chaos of the late 60's era in jazz, there are a lot of new directions jazz has taken since then. Jazz doesn't stand still, and I think that is core to it's nature. If this guy was looking to continue second wave bop for all eternity, he should just throw on some Branford/Wynton Marsalis and pretend like the 60's never happened.

[Finnucane]

I think the thing you could say about Coltrane was the he was the last musician who could change the shape of the whole genre, the way Armstrong and Parker did. After Coltrane it was fractured, and it was Coltrane who did the fracturing.

[UncleMeat]

That's crazy. People weren't exclusively playing bebop before Trane and he certainly wasn't the only person who influenced the growth of free and free-ish jazz. Likely not even the most influential.

We also wouldn't expect any genre to stay in stasis forever. Fracturing isn't even a bad thing.

[emodendroket]

> We also wouldn't expect any genre to stay in stasis forever. Fracturing isn't even a bad thing.

This is a good point. Country music is the most popular radio format in the country. Yet Carrie Underwood doesn't sound much like Loretta Lynn and one could easily like one but not the other. Yet the "real country is dead" narrative gets little airing compared to the way the analogous complaint about jazz does.

If this author wants to say "free jazz is not to my taste" or even "free jazz is too dissonant," you know, he's well within his rights to say so. But "John Coltrane singlehandedly killed jazz with A Love Supreme" seems like a thesis impossible to justify.

[golemotron]

Agreed. I did a double-take to see if Wynton Marsalis wrote the article.

[emodendroket]

My sense is he's a curmudgeon who wants to carp about anything modern. In that sense, of course, the Ken Burns/Wynton Marsalis narrative is perfect.

[throwaway8879]

Definitely agree about the Alice Coltrane part. She's great. Now I'm not into Yoko's material but one could argue that her work has artistic merit other than just musical ones...