A small, stupid part of me has always insisted that, if music needs to be explained to me, it can’t really be that good. But this passes off ignorance as honesty. I didn’t immediately like Coltrane in the way that I immediately liked Johnny Hodges and Chet Baker and Miles Davis. But there was always something fascinating in the what I didn’t quite get about Coltrane. So I read Ben Raitliff’s book and it did what a book of appreciation is supposed to do: it gave me context, it guided my listening (I still have a lot to do), and it also traced what might be called the corollaries of Coltrane’s sound, finding his influence in unexpected places:
[The Byrds] had been listening to Coltrane on [their] tour bus for a year. . . .“Eight Miles High” . . . intimated Coltrane’s modalism–both in its introduction, a short twelve-string guitar solo over a drone, and its frenetic middle-section solo.
As soon as I read this, I thought, yes, of course. But Ratliff's observation never would have occurred to me.
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