TT 365: Elvin Jones on John Coltrane’s “India”

The Deep Beat

John Coltrane’s landmark LP Impressions opens with “India,” and the first thing we hear is Elvin Jones playing unaccompanied drums.

Elvin Jones is beloved by all jazz musicians, and rightly so. The whole drum performance on “India” is one long fabulous sweep. It’s right in a pocket between medium and fast, and is just so damn swinging.

There are plenty of antecedents to Elvin Jones’s churn, including Art Blakey for the African attitude and Max Roach for the technical and melodic perspective. Still, the complete Elvin Jones package was strikingly innovative and wildly influential. It’s hard to imagine what these first drum phrases would have sounded like to the uninitiated at the time of release in the early 1960s.

Coltrane’s life was one long search. He studied and practiced all day, every day. He also recorded like a demon, releasing many records a year, and therefore left posterity a pretty good road map of his journey. In 1961, Coltrane was thinking about what was later called “world music.” Olé and Africa/Brass were recorded in May studio sessions, “India” in November at the Village Vanguard.

For my own taste, it’s all a bit on the nose. Trane, are you really calling your compositions “Olé,” “Africa,” and “India?”

Frankly, I don’t think he could have done it without Elvin Jones. Jazz melodies called “Olé, “Africa” and “India” would be corny with a lesser drummer.

While the drumming on “India” is basically what we call “swinging jazz,” everything around the drums has shifted drastically away from swinging jazz of the 1950’s. Two bassists (Garrison and Workman) begin by droning on open strings: The piano (Tyner) is playing bare octaves and slow countermelodies: The soprano sax (Trane) is wailing like a shaman: the bass clarinet (Dolphy) conjures European experimentalism. Formerly, jazz harmony moved through diverse key centers, and that process has now been replaced by an extended and convoluted discourse on G dominant. (By mid-point of the track, the two bassists are frequently playing completely against the key and even against the tempo.)

Along with his bandmates, Elvin Jones was certainly a fellow revolutionary, but in one crucial way Jones was absolutely unaffected by all these new-fangled musical techniques. Mr. Jones sits on his throne radiating swing. The core of the emotion is the same as Miles Davis, of Charlie Parker, of the big bands, of Kansas City, of New Orleans. While impossible to describe in technical terms, the feeling is nonetheless completely correct. Unimpeachable. The truth.

Coltrane’s simple modal melody is unforgettable. It’s also 12-bars, like a blues, and essentially follows the ancient 12-bar blues melodic grouping of call (4 bars), similar or same call (4 bars), and response (4 bars).

(If you wanted to harmonize this piece like a bebop blues, going to C7 at bar 5 and Am7 at bar 9, it would be easy enough to do so.)

That’s another way to describe Elvin Jones, of course. Despite his virtuoso technique, mastery of complex polyrhythms, and fluid over-the-bar phrasing, Elvin Jones remained a traditional blues musician.