Welcome, intrepid reader, to the first in what will be an ongoing editorial series highlighting albums and artists well outside the realm of heavy metal that might still make the seasoned headbanger pause their recently-unearthed bootleg of Euronymous eating a slice of watermelon and say, “Whoa, now that’s intense.” Intense is different than heavy, of course, so part of the goal in this series will be to illustrate the ways in which artists from a wide range of musical traditions carry forward the all-important flame of artistic intensity. More than anything, though, these selections are meant to invite dialogue. What is it about extreme metal that makes it extreme? Is ‘intense’ just about sound, or can it also include lyrics, aesthetics, emotional impact, stylistic influence, and singularity of vision? Jump in the ring, jump in the fire, and open up your ears to the new (old) intensity.
JOHN COLTRANE – ASCENSION
So you think you’re hard, right? You’ve blasted Ildjarn’s Forest Poetry on your parents’ stereo system with the treble cranked well north of the Arctic Circle, and you’ve retrofitted your Honda Civic to pump out so much bass that a leisurely drive through the neighborhood blasting Boris’s Amplifier Worship becomes an earthquake-inviting drag race. Like a mountaineer after tackling the toughest faces of Everest and K2, how dull must life be now that you’ve conquered all the peaks of extremity?
Well, let me tell you something, friend – you ain’t shit until you can hang with John Coltrane’s Ascension. None of your metal is as metal as this record; none of your extreme is as extreme. We’re talking tough as nails, uncompromising, pure avant-garde jazz noise that launches an all-out assault on your senses, safety, and sanity. Bold talk aside for the moment, Ascension is an absolute landmark recording in the history of avant-garde music. More important than that, though, is that this son of a bitch is perhaps the densest sonic experience ever put to tape. If you pick up the CD version of this album, you’re treated to two full versions of the piece; that means two LP-length excursions (forty minutes each) into the headiest heights and most visceral, bodily depths of musical exploration. Ascension is the sound of a group of musicians at the absolute top of their game getting together, waiting for the word ‘Go!’, then playing the living shit out of their instruments. Simultaneously. For an entire record.
Coltrane’s long-form collective improvisation wasn’t completely unprecedented; Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz from five years prior was the first real shake at this kind of project. Similarly dense and skronky, Coleman’s set is intriguing because he recorded two completely different quartets and then played each one through its own stereo channel. Even with this unique set-up, however, Free Jazz is a much more measured sort of avant-garde, with the quartets rarely playing fully over one another.
Coltrane’s set, however, allows no such symmetry, and almost no chance to get one’s bearings. This is all hands on deck, all the time. Three tenors (Coltrane being one of them), two altos, two trumpets, one pianist, one drummer, two bassists, and a metric shit-ton of mind-expanding interplay. Lest you get the impression that Ascension is simply about noise for noise’s sake, it should be said that what makes this piece so endlessly fascinating more than forty-five years after its initial release is the ebb and flow of improvisation.
Yes, the record features eleven musicians jamming all at once, but if you settle in and live with this album, you begin to appreciate the raw structural beauty of those moments where a few improvisatory lines come together into a brief unison or harmony before falling away into chaos again. The album sounds at once like circular breathing, an unbroken line of intensity, but also like a life-giving rhythm of inhaling and exhaling, rising and falling tension. Lines and shapes and colors surge up out of the pure density and flash brightly for a few brief moments, then fall back into the formless void of sound.
A Love Supreme will always be Coltrane’s crowning achievement, and rightly so, but for the adventurous metalhead, jazz has never been heavier than Ascension, so sit back, crank it up, and glimpse the entropic demise of the universe through pure sonic intensity.
