11. “The Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost/Compassion,” John Coltrane, from Meditations (1965)

In January of 1966, drummer Elvin Jones quit John Coltrane’s group. For five years, across more than 25 albums, both Jones and pianist McCoy Tyner had brought explosive, virtuosic technique and incredible volume to ground Coltrane’s increasingly untethered sounds. Yet by the end of his tenure, the hard-driving timekeeper just wasn’t able to play loud enough: “At times I couldn’t hear what I was doing,” he remarked in an interview a few months after his departure. “Matter of fact, I couldn’t hear what anybody was doing. All I could hear was a lot of noise.”
 
No doubt the “noise” came from the extra musicians Coltrane kept adding to his band. For Ascension, he had created a free jazz big band; for Meditations, he added a second drummer named Rashied Ali. Six years Jones’s junior, Ali abandoned recognizable beats in favor of shifting, amorphous clouds of percussive texture. On this recording, Ali is in the left channel; Jones is in the right, and for the first movement, both drummers essentially adopt Ali’s all-color-no-timekeeping strategy. For “Compassion,” Ali lays out as Jones plays a damaged-sounding waltz.
 
The other new musician on this session is tenor sax player Pharoah Sanders, who creates high-pitched stuttering echolalia alongside Coltrane during parts of the first movement and adds footbells and tambourine to the percussive soup in the second. The 20-minute journey closes with an extended chromatic breakdown by Tyner—who would leave the group just before Jones, having reached similar conclusions. “I didn’t see myself making any contribution to that music,” he later explained. “I didn't have any feeling for the music, and when I don't have feelings, I don't play.” With Meditations, Coltrane introduced Tyner and Jones to future members of his final group and previewed the sound it would pursue; both men took the hint.