The most “intense” musical moment David Crosby ever experienced
It’s easy to think that some of the greatest music has already been made decades before. Even in the golden age of rock and roll, there were supposed music fans saying that everything those new guys like Chuck Berry were doing wasn’t all that different from the blues that had come before. David Crosby had been around to see many of the greatest artists of all time rise to prominence, but nothing can prepare anyone from experiencing John Coltrane for the first time.
As sophisticated as rock and roll was starting to get in the late 1960s, it still had absolutely nothing on jazz. Although the genre is known more today for the kind of light music that people put on at a cocktail party, the genre was home to the wildest musicians of all time in its prime, especially when looking at musicians of Coltrane’s generation.
After all, he had played with Miles Davis, who had already been known for reshaping what it meant to be a jazz musician in the late 1950s. Kind of Blue had already flipped the game in terms of what could be done with modal writing, and Bitches Brew in the 1960s went in the opposite direction by making everything sound like it was being fed through one of Jimi Hendrix’s wah-wah pedals.
That approach to music is wildly inspiring, but it also puts a fire in many musicians. Coltrane was no exception, and working on projects like A Love Supreme, he had already broken free from Davis and had started working on his own ventures, which weren’t always confined to just the stage.
When Crosby saw Coltrane play in a bar, he remembered getting so overwhelmed he had to go to the restroom to cool off, telling Spin, “I got my head against this tile. I’m saying, ‘You’re going to be okay’. BAM! Someone kicks the door open. It’s Coltrane, and he kicked the door open because he’s playing at the most intense level you can imagine in your life. He never stopped, and he’s burning in this bathroom. I’m thinking my brain’s going to rush out and pour on the floor. I never heard someone be more intense than that in my life.”
If you really think about it, the way that jazz players approached their instruments back in the day had a lot more in common with genres like punk than it did with traditional standards. More than anything, every player’s ability to play every note like it was their last while still annihilating scales felt like a combination of a prog-rock and punk-rock mindset with a different genre thrown on top of it.
That’s probably what led Crosby to follow rockstars who were well-versed in that kind of musical language, talking up everyone from Steely Dan to Joni Mitchell for how they used variations of traditional chords. Jazz might get a bad reputation for being nothing more than just elevator music for a lot of casual fans, but for those who give in and decide to get rocked by seeing people like Coltrane in his prime, the music world suddenly seemed a whole lot more exciting.
