A Closer Look At Mama

For John Coltrane, 1965 was a rather prolific year in terms of how often he recorded; just the sheer volume of recordings alone reveals a musician at the top of his game. Of course, Impulse!, his label for a few years running, couldn't release every session which he decided to record as if he had nothing to lose. No surprise, then, that he left a motherlode of unreleased material which was for the most part issued posthumously (& certainly not inferior either). In the case of his 1967 album, Kulu Se Mama, however, this was a whole other story; Trane himself selected the original album's three tracks prior to his death & believe me, it's all good, given the range & intensity which his output for 1965 too readily illustrates.

Again, Kulu Se Mama is the same relentless searching which was part & parcel of Trane's career; & in light of the material recorded prior & afterwards (A Love Supreme in December 1964, Ascension midway through 1965; then Meditations a few months later) Kulu Se Mama stands out in more ways than one: augmented instrumentation, freer compositional structures...in essence, everything which defined the late-Coltrane era in a nutshell.

The 19-minute long title track, with additional percussionists & reed players, is an epiphany of all things African, all things swinging...a colorful fabric of sound which is the supersonic equivalent of storytelling. On the other hand, the album's remaining two tracks (done on June 10 & June 16), "Vigil" & "Welcome," are everything one has come to expect from the John Coltrane Quartet: "Vigil" is a drum-tenor sax duet which delivers nothing but raw energy, out-for-blood aggression, power & passion which always marked the best of Trane's performances & foreshadowed a drastically different set of duo recordings which he and Elvin Jones' successor, Rashied Ali would do in the winter of 1967 (Interstellar Space).

By contrast, "Welcome" is just that: a peaceful, serene ballad which deserves to be heard after constant battling & struggling, absolutely up there with the Classic Quartet's slower stuff & what a way to wrap up an album which is diverse as much as it is a fresh look at John Coltrane in his musical pursuit during 1965.

To be honest, the 2000 release of Kulu Se Mama is a snapshot of late-period Trane unlike any other we've seen/heard before (& still all good, BTW); it also reveals the Classic Quartet (with additional special guests) running the end of their course as a group but on the verge of going out with a bang in doing so.