John Coltrane’s centennial birthday year is coming to an end (His 100th birthday was September 26). But no one has done more to celebrate that birthday than Joe Lovano.
In the March issue of Jersey Jazz Magazine, we previewed Coltrane tributes at Princeton’s McCarter Theatre and Newark’s New Jersey Performing Arts Center, part of the Coltrane 100 Tour, performing across the United States and Europe throughout the year. Lovano was the tour’s Artistic Director. He told Jersey Jazz that Coltrane’s 1965 Impulse album, A Blowin’ Session, “was a big record for me growing up,” with Coltrane, Johnny Griffin, Hank Mobley, and Lee Morgan “playing off of each other, giving each other inspiration as they played. Hearing those personalities, those things were ingrained in my development.”
More recently, Lovano was Artist-in-Residence at September’s Detroit Jazz Festival and paid tribute to Coltrane with a quintet that included fellow tenor saxophonist Melissa Aldana, pianist Nduduzo Makathini, bassist Linda May Han Oh, and drummer Jeff “Tain” Watts. Reviewing that performance in the Oakland Press, Gary Graff and Charlie Hunt singled out the quintet’s interpretation of “Acknowledgement”. the opening movement of “A Love Supreme.” Lovano and Aldana, they wrote, intertwined their parts, “culminating in a Watts solo that segued the troupe into McCoy Tyner’s ‘You Taught My Heart to Sing.’ There was more to follow, but that segment was nevertheless a case study in ensemble brilliance and a perfect way to end the festival.”
PHOTO BY TONY GRAVES