I played the Coltrane DVD for the first time. It is from December 1963 (ie just after the death of JFK and Aldous Huxley) and the 4tet have been touring a lot. Trane feels as if he wants to bring new material into the repertoire. In fact one of the songs, Alabama has just been composed and this is the first recording. It is written in memory of 4 black children killed in a fire bombing and according to one source the line is written on the basis of speech patterns from an oration given by Martin Luther King.

The set opens with Afro Blue which was a tune we played in Wild Oats with 2 sopranos and it closes with Impressions which is taken from a line which Trane improvises on the 1959 film of So What made between the two recording sessions which created Kind of Blue. This DVD is the only filming of the Trane 4tet done in North America. Some more TV was done in Germany at about the same time which I have got on video � but the tape is wearing out. I would think that has to come out on DVD soon.

I have been listening to the remastered first Doors CD - like the Smiths (P and S), the Experience � and indeed like Wild Oats � this is music in the rock idiom which reflects the impact of the Trane 4tet. The Doors album was recorded right at the start of 1967. About four months later another trio without a bass also recorded a Trane influenced piece � in this case it was John Cale, Terry Jennings and Angus Maclise in Ludlow St NYC and the tune is called Terry�s Cha Cha Cha. Jennings plays soprano and Cale plays organ.

I spent some time comparing the organ timbres between the Doors recording and the Ludlow St. The Doors Farfisa is rather toppier and its interesting how the SG chords sometimes lock in under the organ figures. Krieger�s bends serve to push the music into strange territory. The set is amazing � seven brilliant tunes one after another � Break on Through, Soul Kitchen, Crystal Ship, 20thC Fox, Alabama Song, Light My Fire, Back Door Man. There are a couple of lesser tunes but on top of those you get The End and the End of the Night.

Anyway I now have 16 minutes of pretty atonal CZ101 with bends, Farfisa tones, synthetic bass and microtonal effects and I have been looking at the possibility of using certain themes of the period against it � Time of No Reply and Hard Rain are the first candidates. I matched the Dhorn against Trane�s soprano tone on Afro Blue and the oboe setting gets closest. The rather bold aspiration is to find some contemporary expression which unifies elements of all these post Trane experiments from the days of my youth. Some it sounds a bit like the Ipcress File.