Title: Ravi Coltrane Performs Live and Previews Coltrane Festival

[music]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. The Smoke Jazz Club at 2751 Broadway will host its 12th annual Coltrane Festival, and it kicks off tomorrow. The festival is a multi-week celebration of the life and music of John Coltrane in which musicians are invited to perform and engage with Coltrane's work on stage. A fitting artist to kick off this year's festival, Ravi Coltrane, an accomplished saxophonist and composer, and he's the son of John and Alice Coltrane.

Ravi Coltrane and his trio will perform at Smoke Jazz Club from December 11th through December 15th. I'm excited to say they are in studio with me right now. Nice to meet you, Robby.

Ravi Coltrane: Nice meeting you, Allison. How are you?

Alison Stewart: I'm doing well. I'm going to get to hear you play some music, and we're all going to hear you play music. What are you going to play first?

Ravi Coltrane: Unless they change the station.

Alison Stewart: Don't do that.

Ravi Coltrane: They can find us later somewhere online maybe, but don't turn that dial.

Alison Stewart: What are you going to play for us?

Ravi Coltrane: We're going to play some John Coltrane music, given that's the theme, I suppose. It's also music that I love to play.

Alison Stewart: Good.

Ravi Coltrane: We have the fabulous Gadi Lehavi here on piano. We'll be doing some duets of this music, and I think we'll start with something from the grand old year of 1959 from a record called Giant Steps. Now I feel like the DJ.

Alison Stewart: I know I'm relaxing. I'm like, "Go ahead and tell me, Robby, what are we going to hear today?"

Ravi Coltrane: This is on a record called Giant Steps. My father recorded this in 1959 right here in the beautiful city of New York. New York City, it's called. The tune's called Countdown.

Alison Stewart: Let's hear it.

[MUSIC - John Coltrane: Countdown]

Alison Stewart: That's Ravi Coltrane. He's here to perform for us live ahead of his residency at the Smoke Jazz Club starting tomorrow night through December 15th. The sets are part of Smoke's 12th annual Coltrane Festival, happening December 11th through January 5th. You're going to start tomorrow. You're going to start the Coltrane Festival tomorrow. Do you have any sense of what you're going to play or do you decide on the spot?

Ravi Coltrane: Never.

Alison Stewart: Never.

Ravi Coltrane: Never a sense, no. That takes the fun out of it. Of course, we'll pick a bunch of tunes that feel appropriate for the space, for the players. I like to work things out the day of the performance really. It helps that surprise element.

Alison Stewart: Sure.

Ravi Coltrane: If it's there for the band, it's definitely going to be there for the audience.

Alison Stewart: Let's play in the go-back machine. You start out playing the clarinet.

Ravi Coltrane: I did. That was my first instrument. I started in junior high, however old you are when you're in junior high, 11, 12, something like that.

Alison Stewart: Yes, sure.

Ravi Coltrane: I played that through junior high and through high school. I was in the marching band, and then I switched to saxophone shortly after high school.

Alison Stewart: What made you switch to sax?

Ravi Coltrane: You can get more girls with a saxophone. At least that's what they told me. Maybe I should have stuck to the clarinet. The saxophone is a beautiful, beautiful instrument. I started listening to jazz music more seriously after high school. It seemed to resonate with me in a way I hadn't connected with it when I was younger. I always appreciated the music, but later in my life, it really started to have a lot of meaning for me. I wanted to be a part of that meaning.

Alison Stewart: When you started studying your father's music, what did you appreciate about it?

Ravi Coltrane: It's uniqueness. It's absolute uniqueness. I think that's the real beauty of the jazz. Any great creative artist, they have such a personal voice. There's a tendency to want to just do that, just to copy that, "Let me just sound like this other guy who sounded like no one else." That just seems to not be the principle by how they formed their styles. I think it was a real imperative, a must, that each player had embraced their own uniqueness in music and their own personal approach to improvisation and playing.

I appreciated that as much as, again, everything that he contributed to music was so selfless and just very, very grand, but he did it in his own way with a lot of courage and not afraid of being himself.

Alison Stewart: We don't want to forget Mom, either.

Ravi Coltrane: No, can't do that.

Alison Stewart: She was a renowned musician herself. What are your memories of her as a musician, or was it just Mom?

Ravi Coltrane: It's a whole lot of Mom.

Alison Stewart: A whole lot of Mom. Right?

Ravi Coltrane: Yes. She raised me.

Alison Stewart: Do you need to take a sip of water? Go ahead. You were about to.

Ravi Coltrane: Here we go.

Alison Stewart: There we go.

Ravi Coltrane: Thank you.

Alison Stewart: Sure. Of course.

Ravi Coltrane: It's not like it's a sauna in here or anything.

Alison Stewart: Talking about Mom.

Ravi Coltrane: My mother was Alice Coltrane. Again, another very unique person in music, but also in life. Very unconventional, very kind, and a real seeker. I think that was the same person she was her whole life. She was a beautiful mother.

Alison Stewart: What kind of-- Oh, I'm sorry.

Ravi Coltrane: No, no, no, it's all right.

Alison Stewart: I'm curious what music, when you were young, did she play around the house?

Ravi Coltrane: She was often at the piano or the organ playing these spiritual hymns. Very quiet pieces. Songs of praise. Things that she'd learned as a young girl playing in the Baptist church. She was the organist for her church in Detroit. Since she was a very young girl, she was playing organ. She got into bebop music later. Her brother was a bassist named Ernest Farrow, who got my Ma' into jazz. The music she played at home, she would play my father's records. I would hear those records.

She played music from India. She loved Hindi music and but mainly it was her-- I'd come home from school and she'd be sitting at the organ playing these hymns and just singing quietly to herself. I was a bit too young again to appreciate the depth and the beauty of her commitment at that time. I would just jump off my bike, race to the front door, say, "Hi, Mom," and go right to the television like your average 12 or 13-year-old. Alice was very, very special. Very special.

Alison Stewart: It's interesting. You said you were too young to understand. Most kids are like that. When did you understand?

Ravi Coltrane: I'm still working on it. It's definitely a process. I think the longer you live and the more that you experience and the more that you go through the world and connect with others, you start to recognize where the real values are in life and friendships and this collective spirit of love and humanity combined with creativity and art and music can be a very, very powerful thing.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Ravi Coltrane. They're going to have at Smoke Jazz Club-- They're going to be starting tomorrow night. He's going to be playing part of their 12th annual Coltrane Festival. You're going to play a little bit more for us now. What are we going to hear?

Ravi Coltrane: Yes, we're going to play something. Another John Coltrane piece. This was actually the last thing that my father recorded.

Alison Stewart: Oh, wow.

Ravi Coltrane: His recording career spans about 13 years, really. His professional recording career. There's recordings of him playing in the early 1950s, but really, it's around 1955 when he starts to record with Miles, and 12 years later, '67 is when he passes away. He was able to accomplish so much in such a very short span of time. His later music is often-- It's not as appreciated as the music that he made in the first part of his career, but the last two years of his music, the music expanded and got very expressive. Very, very expressive. We're actually going to play a piece from his last recording session. The album was called Expression, and the piece is called Expression.

Alison Stewart: This is Robbie Coltrane.

[MUSIC - John Coltrane: Expression]

Alison Stewart: That was Ravi Coltrane performing. He'll be performing at the Smoke Jazz Club starting tomorrow night through December 15th. The sets are part of the Smoke's 12th annual Coltrane Festival happening December 11th through January 5th. I forgot Gadi's last name.

Gadi Lehavi: Lehavi.

Alison Stewart: Lehavi. Gadi Lehavi on piano. You're preparing to go to Europe this spring.

Ravi Coltrane: Oh, really?

Alison Stewart: Yes?

Ravi Coltrane: No one's told me.

Alison Stewart: Oh, nobody's told you? Moving on. Let's talk about that.

Ravi Coltrane: Yes, I am going to do something in Europe this spring with-- It's a Wayne Shorter tribute with Daniil Oprez and John Patitucci and Brian Blade.

Alison Stewart: How do you prepare for a tour in Europe, to spend time in Europe? Do you record? Do you practice? Do you just--

Ravi Coltrane: You pack.

Alison Stewart: You pack?

Ravi Coltrane: Yes.

Alison Stewart: That's all you do, is you just go.

Ravi Coltrane: Head to the airport on time, which I tend to have an issue with. A tour like this, it's a great, great honor to be with these musicians who spent so long, 20-plus years performing with Wayne Shorter. They asked me to be a part of this tour, and I was absolutely honored and thrilled. Wayne is one of the last great, great musical visionaries, in my thought and feeling in regard to this improvised music that we do. He was such another unconventional thinker and creator, and all of his music is priceless, and it's a real honor to be a part of that project.

Alison Stewart: When you're talking to young musicians who want to be in your position one day, what advice do you give them?

Ravi Coltrane: Don't do it.

Alison Stewart: You can you do anything if you can do anything else?

Ravi Coltrane: It's a real virtue and an honor to be a musician, to be able to play and express your creative thoughts and all of your inner intuitions and impressions and feelings, to be able to put that all out through music and have that affect all those that hear it and hopefully uplift them and inspire them. It is a great, great virtue. I always encourage musicians to, again, follow their heart, really go after the music that they want to make and play. They don't always have to feel compelled to conform to whatever the expectation of the moment is.

They'll have more fun if they follow their intuitions and their musical desires and it will help them to hopefully achieve something more personal, something that's really, truly coming from them as artists.

Alison Stewart: Where do you go to find inspiration?

Ravi Coltrane: My two sons inspire me. They're fantastic artists and musicians, William and Aaron. I try to stay around really fantastic young players like Gadi Lehavi, who I've been playing with for a very, very long time. Our drummer is Ele Howell, another incredible young musician. Jason Clotter is going to be playing bass with us. Being around young players keeps you young.

Alison Stewart: What other creative pursuits do you have rather than music? For most people, music is their creative pursuit.

Ravi Coltrane: Cooking.

Alison Stewart: Cooking?

Ravi Coltrane: Yes. The pandemic inspired that. Every restaurant being closed and the supermarkets being not very stocked, I got really into cooking. I love it.

Alison Stewart: What do you make? I got to hear what you make.

Ravi Coltrane: I like to get in there and burn. I like to get the cast iron going really hot. I love to make steaks and chicken and fish.

Alison Stewart: Want to remind people that Ravi Coltrane, he will be at Smoke Jazz Club at 2751 Broadway starting tomorrow night through December 15th. The sets are part of Smoke's 12th annual Coltrane Festival, happening December 11th through January 5th. Thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate your time today.

Ravi Coltrane: It was our pleasure. Thank you so much.

Alison Stewart: There's more All Of It on the way