cover image Spirit Catcher: The Life and Art of John Coltrane

Spirit Catcher: The Life and Art of John Coltrane

John Fraim. Greathouse Company, $14.95 (216pp) ISBN 978-0-9645561-0-2

Until a definitive biography is published, Coltrane fans will have to weather the continuous flow of such cut-and-paste affairs as this ""spiritual"" rendering of the saxophone giant. As usual, fresh biography and serious musicology are nowhere to be found among the borrowed quotes and familiar chronologies. The author's maladroit prose depicts its subjects as effectively as the liner notes of any second-rate outtakes album, unless it concerns heroin's grip on Coltrane. Then the style is simply preachy. When Fraim attempts to wax philosophical, his theories lack authority to the point of insulting the average reader--""Central to [Coltrane's] findings about African music, he came to realize that rhythm played the dominant role."" A player with Coltrane's omnivorous musical appetite wouldn't have waited until drummer Elvin Jones joined his band before turning to the modes and rhythms of Africa. The saxophonist's tenure with Miles Davis years earlier would have led him back to Africa, if indeed the thought didn't cross his mind even sooner than that. Too much of Fraim's portrait relies on skewed speculation and quick glosses of key events that introduce sidemen and contemporaries with textbook portraits. Unlike Coltrane, who worried that his hour-plus solos weren't ""getting it all in,"" Spirit Catcher has a few bungled silences and wrong notes to spare. Discography. (Mar.)