review of concert on 08/03/02
Taken from Varsity, 10/05/2002
Coltrane Comeback—Kate Harrison checks out a crazy ISIS idea
At the end of last term, ISIS, the Twentieth Century Music Society, continued its now established record of staging innovative and unusual concerts.
The publicity for Coltrane @ 75: Two Serenades promised an intriguing combination of Mozart and the jazz legend Jahn Coltrane. It lived up to this, although it was a disappointment that the two genres were kept resolutely separate. Fortunately this did not detract from some extremely good performances by two very different student ensembles.
A lively rendition of Mozart’s Divertimenti in D (K. 136) and F (K. 138) by the Cambridge Mozart Players, under the direction of Robin Ticciati, comprised the first half of the concert. Although the Divertimento in F was certainly the more assured of the two, both pieces succeeded in maintaining impressive clarity and lightness of touch.
The second half was a rather more ambitious undertaking: a new arrangement by student David Gange of saxophonist John Coltrane’s acclaimed suite, A Love Supreme. The piece was first recorded in 1964 as a quartet for saxophone, piano, drums and bass, but arranged here for an eight-piece jazz ensemble. The challenges of arranging a work as personal as A Love Supreme, celebrating Celtrane’s 1957 spiritual conwersion and triumph over the alcohol and drug addiction which had blighted his career so far, are immense. Nevertheless, this arrangement succeeded in capturing much of the intensity of the original and providid a showcase for excellent improvisation by some of Cambridge’s finest student jazz musicians, of whom Katie Eagleton on baritone saxophone and Vincent Rusquet on percussion were particularly impressive.
I can’t help suspecting that, in this case, the decision to throw together Mozort and Coltrane was motivated less by artistic design than by the need to fill a complete concert programme. However, this unorthodox combination resulted in a successful and thought provoking concert which, it is rumoured, ISIS plan to rerun.