John Coltrane
Meditations

«There is never an end. There are always new sounds to imagine, new feelings to experience. And there is a need to continually purify these feelings, these sounds, to imagine in their purest form what we have discovered. So that we can see more clearly what we are. Only then can we give those who listen to us the essence, the best of what we are.»
(Quoted by Nat Hentoff in the liner notes written for the album 'Meditations')

1960: Ornette Coleman invents free jazz. The genre is not appreciated by the general public nor by jazz musicians themselves.

1964: 'A Love Supreme', the first free jazz album by John Coltrane, surpasses 'Kind Of Blue' to become the best-selling jazz album in the world.

1965: John Coltrane records 'Meditations'.

Free jazz is an extreme form of Jazz. Starting with street jazz, then clean and refined by Gershwin, followed by Miller's benign band jazz, which was countered by New York's angry black Bebop and Charlie Parker, until the “white” response with Cool Jazz led by Davis and Baker.

Free jazz represents a genre that evolves from a simple form of entertainment to becoming mature and intellectual. No longer packaged, limited to schemes. No longer extensively commercialized because it is intimate and individual. Forget themes and choruses. It is something real, that lives and breathes. It becomes the very concept of communication, translated into music. Sometimes it is rebellion, but it is mostly meditation.

Usually, an artist tends to enjoy success after crafting the masterpiece of their life. But great artists are never satisfied. “Meditations” was recorded by John in a year and follows that religious “enlightenment” that characterized 'A Love Supreme': a free and atonal, dissonant music, without a secure base, where instruments are pushed to the extreme in pure improvisation. It summarizes all the logic (or perhaps non-logic!) of free jazz discovered in the previous record, which is considered the true cornerstone of the artist.

Forget elegant and crystal-clear jazz. Here we are faced with the raw and pure sound, bombarded into our ears without law or rule. Right from the opening “The Father, The Son & The Holy Ghost”, it feels like plunging into a tribal dance where musicians are possessed by an indomitable force. It's total delirium, a chaos of religious inspiration, tainted by unrestrained voodoo psychedelia. Then it moves to the more relaxed “Compassion”. The divine light, as the title suggests, remains, but it is no longer blinding (and hallucinatory...) as in the previous “piece”; the instruments no longer overlap, and thus the pandemonium is surpassed by a breathtaking solo by John.

“Love” aims to be a curious bass interlude between the first and second parts. Love is not tangible, you cannot choose it, it cannot be explained rationally: this is profane love, and so it is even more so with divine love. Therefore, it is a music that speaks to you when it wants to, its sound almost “scratches” your mind unobtrusively and without precise logic. The passion returns in “Conseguences” (perhaps the consequences of love?) where the verses and scales chase each other endlessly. It’s a crescendo that grows and dies reaching its peak, when it encounters the final track, “Serenity”, which is indeed total relaxation, and you feel suspended in the void.

The common listener struggles to listen to it because it is limited to the limit, to the scheme and concreteness, as indeed the nature of all humans is limited; and in fact, even I do not listen to it lightly. The music in question is supernatural, it goes beyond human standards. The sensations it left me are extraordinary, yet I cannot understand it, nor truly explain it in my own words; but I recommend it to anyone who wants, even just for a moment, to discover music as a sound medium and nothing else, as a complete escape from every standard.