13. “Leo,” John Coltrane, from Interstellar Space (posthumous release; recorded 1967)

On February 22, 1967, two months before his final live gig, John Coltrane walked into Rudy van Gelder’s New Jersey studio with only his drummer in tow. The roughly 50 minutes of music those two men recorded together would not be released until 1974, seven years after Coltrane’s death—and would be regarded by critics as either a bold, clear statement of unrealized possibilities or evidence of disintegration and madness.
 
The structure of each of these tracks is actually quite clear: A percussive churn begins; Coltrane states a melodic theme; the idea is twisted, overblown, and destroyed over many minutes as Ali fills the room with sound; the theme is restated, and the track concludes. Unlike Ascension, Coltrane’s free jazz big band recording from two years prior, there are only two voices for the listener to follow here, and both are speaking clearly. So why do many regard this album as challenging?
 
The issue is perhaps not so much atonality, or even the ferocity of Coltrane and drummer Rashied Ali’s sonic battles—album opener “Mars” kicks off with both playing at peak intensity and not letting up for eight of the track’s ten-and-a-half minutes—but the strange, drifting sense of time throughout. On each track, Ali sounds as though he’s playing one long drum solo without marking the beginning or end of each passing bar; bass drum stabs and clusters of hi-hat accents appear seemingly at random, punctuating nothing.
 
Coltrane claimed Ali was capable of “laying down multi-directional rhythms,” which gave him total freedom from the tyranny of the beat. “I feel like I can play at whatever tempo I want to play against what he is doing,” he explained in an interview with critic Nat Hentoff. “I can really choose just about any direction at just about any time with the confidence that it will be compatible with what he’s doing.”
 
Ali’s own claims about his approach to time were less radical. He maintained that a traditional jazz pulse was still present—just not necessarily acknowledged on the drum kit. “I’m hearing the beat and I’m feeling the beat,” he explains in the album liner notes, “but I’m not playing it. It’s there, but it’s not there.”
 
Ken Burns’s Jazz documentary series affirms rhythm as the main recognizable feature of the music: “Above all,” narrator Keith David intones in the very first episode, “it [jazz] swings!” Yet Interstellar Space dispenses with not only the traditional swing pulse but also the idea that performers should lock in and find any kind of shared groove whatsoever. Saxophonist David S. Ware identifies this as the bridge many listeners will never cross. “You can get almost as avant-garde as you want to be, as long as you keep that steady pulse, right?” he says in Ashley Kahn’s 2006 book, The House That Trane Built. “But once you break pulse, I guarantee you, you’re going to lose half your people.”