Give me 1 (one) reason why Coltrane isn't the greatest musician

>muh "innovation"
I could name 5 modern saxophonists that could play circles around him

>>75057861
By all means. The floor is yours.

>>75057937
Chris Potter
Mark Turner
Seamus Blake
Joshua Redman
Ralph Bowen

I've got 5 more whenever you're ready

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>>75057961
I really hope that's a joke

>>75057984
All five are FAR better saxophonists than Coltrane

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>>75057961
>>75057961
i was really hoping you'd have a good comeback, oh well

>>75058016
I was hoping the same actually

>>75058007
There were better players than Coltrane even in his prime, but not better musicians

>>75057984
>>75058016
Please name even ONE (1) aspect of Coltrane's playing that those players don't do better.

Pro-tip: if you respond with
>muh innovation
or
>muh emotion

I'm going to laugh my way on out of this thread

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>>75058083

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>>75057830
Because Herbie Hancock exists.

>>75058093
Sheets of sound, playing the tenor saxophone outside of the normal range?

>>75058183
You've never even heard more than one album (I doubt you've heard even that much) of any of the five saxophonists I listed have you? Any pro NY saxophonist can do the sheets of sound thing as good as or better than Coltrane, and most of the saxophonists I listed have ridiculous control and accuracy in their altissimo range.

>>75058093
How many of them can do this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D25y4Kuc6l8

And not just the technique. The harmony that he's implying, his fluency in playing free harmony which NONE of them are good at, Not one of those players you mentioned can play free in any capacity that would make them comparable to John Coltrane.

>>75058243
It's not just technique, it's conceptual. Their playing is tiny. None of it scales well.

>>75057961
>>75058093
>>75058230
jazz conservatory pleb spotted

>>75057961
you should understand that craft is not art and especially greatest is not best

I think Coltrane and Miles (and at least Ornette and Monk) will forever be among the greatest for changing the game

in these post-modern times it's often very difficult to understand how fucking formulaic even bebop-era jazz was - that whole movement of breaking out of old chord progressions to modal jazz and beyond was a major revolution that is easy to trivialize today

first trace the trends from playing "rhythm changes" to Miles' 'Tune Up' to Coltrane's 'Countdown' and you'll glimpse the greatness of Coltrane - there's a very cool track of a simple harmonic concept being expanded on, a journey more intricate and personal than anything you'll find in classical tradition

dude took some fundamental from European art music and made them intuitively work in a different context - classical musicians had much earlier taken the route of just breaking every rule as a means of going forward, Miles and Trane and Rollins went pretty deep on just exploring how far you could take functional harmony and all of that ii/V/I stuff.

then, in 1959-1960 jazz really exploded from being a complicated style of music based on a pretty narrow set of ideas to being essentially all it could be - instead of a complicated culture based on simple things, it became that same culture expanding to a wide variety of different bases globally

really worth noting here is that of the great musicians that lead this development, Coltrane was the one who took the old ii-V-I harmony that even bebop was mostly based on further than anyone - those "Coltrane changes" substitutions are really the original furthest that style of jazz wenr, Coltrane really was I think the ultimate thinker of bebop-tradition

after that jazz is fragmented - there are Trane, Miles and Ornette schools with some overlap, but it's harder to define anyone ahead when you can't compare

the thing is, literally anything I hear made by him is fucking great

>>75058243
They literally all can... they just do it with taste is all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uz0WChSKajM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7ztLwH4K2M

>>75058280
some jazz ideas on why:

- Coltrane was more theoretical than Miles, he proved that he had *mastery* when Miles was mostly coasting on trends
- compared to Ornette, Coltrane knew the theory and both went furthest in the old ii-V-I tradition while creating an entire new style and form with A Love Supreme - Ornette is great and all, but no one really knows what the fuck he meant with that harmolodic-business,you can summarize what Coltrane brought to the table, just claiming being influential from being different is not greater than that

>>75058275
>studying jazz is bad
wew

>>75058378
being a great jazz musicians is not about anything where someone decades onward being able to copy you becomes somehow greater through that technical skill

it's very sad that someone who knows some great contemporary music here on /mu/ apparently thinks that it is so

no matter what you do ART and CRAFT are very different, modern day sax players knowing styles is not ART yet, it is merely CRAFT

Because Sonny Rollins is 10x better but not as pretentious so hipsters don't like him.

>>75058419
the implication is that student's overvalue the fundamentals that they are being taught, they don't understand that they are mere students and the artistry and cultural relevance of any thing will be something different

it's often much like some zen-koan:
a student in their first years of study think they know everything
the master understand that he still has everything to learn

sounds corny, but there is some truth to that

>>75058280
I'm not denying any of this. Coltrane was almost certainly the greatest tenor player of his time and did contribute to some important innovations.

I'm just trying to prove a point to people like OP who insist on exaggerating and romanticizing these contributions.

>>75058449
You could make the exact same argument about Coltrane compared to Charlie Parker.

You'd be wrong, because any fool can see that even though Coltrane's playing was deeply rooted in Charlie Parker's language, that he took the art form quite a bit farther.

It's the same with these modern players and the comparison to Coltrane.

>>75058419
jazz conservatories are infamous for pumping out some of the most boring musicians ever. it's all the same bland, white-bread, post-bop music that conservatories elevate due to "muh technicality" while shunning innovation or any forward-thinking concepts. ask any jazz musician that's not signed to Criss Cross and they'll all tell you how awful jazz conservatories are.

>>75058511
I don't disagree with any of this necessarily. But I think the opposite is also true. People with no musical training tend to UNDERVALUE these things and romanticize what they've been told is the "greatest."

>>75058543
how are these new players innovating anything but being skilled?

>>75058496
once jtg posted some cool analysis from some old Downbeat or something on what Rollins brought to the table

I think it generally boiled down to Rollins being the father of playing solos that had an internally consistent story to tell, so not just noodling on a scale or playing licks but fitting your ideas to the form of the composition - thinking of all the ways contemporary jazz musicians are able to think in, this is a pretty goddamn fundamental idea.

But still, even if Rollins is the big chief who showed that you can and should think big, Coltrane was a fundamental force in breaking jazz out of bebop-patterns to an incredible variety of ideas instead of just variations on a limited set of themes.

>>75057961
lol can you tell me more i need to add these to my listen later list

>>75058560
>bland, white-bread, post-bop music
Lol I shouldn't even respond to a post with this level of musical illiteracy... but

Kind of like Wayne Shorter, Cecil Taylor, Dizzy Gillespie, Donald Byrd, and Herbie Hancock.

They all went to music school.

>>75058613
What exactly did Coltrane innovate other than being skilled?

Elvin Jones

>>75058737
He brought free jazz to another level, even if he didn't invent it.

>>75058543
hmh. I think I outlined a pretty fundamental difference between Bird and Trane there? Although you're correct in that that art/craft boundary is tough.

Parker was a creative god, but what we must understand is that the bebop forefathers like Parker and Dizzy were masters of improvising on existing concepts - no one has ever been greater than those cats in taking a composition and making it their own through sheer inventiveness.

Then there's also that longer arc thinking that Sonny Rollins later brought because Bird and Diz were still pretty lick-oriented, but that's not the point here...

But why Miles and 'Trane are so great is that THEY ACTUALLY CHANGED THE GAME - why the fuck improvise on the chords of Indiana when you could invent your own shit. Bird and Diz period was playing new ideas on old grounds, Miles and 'Trane could not only play solos on top of some chords, but brought along the idea of CHANGING THE GROUND, innovating on the chords first and soloing live on top. Huge paradigm shift.

>>75058781
you can't be serious...

All the players listed are currently bringing motivic development and interaction-based post-bop to another level, even if they didn't invent it.

>>75058696
>lists five musicians out of thousands that attend every year
>all of them from decades ago
good going Sherlock, not only did you prove that sometimes there are exceptions, like there always are, but also that you can't think of any modern exceptions. almost like jazz conservatories didn't used to be as awful as they are now.

>>75058784
>But why Miles and 'Trane are so great is that THEY ACTUALLY CHANGED THE GAME - why the fuck improvise on the chords of Indiana when you could invent your own shit. Bird and Diz period was playing new ideas on old grounds, Miles and 'Trane could not only play solos on top of some chords, but brought along the idea of CHANGING THE GROUND, innovating on the chords first and soloing live on top. Huge paradigm shift.
They were absolutely not the first people to do this though... they've just become the most celebrated for it in hindsight. Along with Monk who was doing that stuff way before anybody knew Davis's or Miles's names

>>75058841
except that there are five modern exceptions listed in the third post of the thread. and that's just for one specific instrument!
>>75057961

Try to keep up my man

>>75058737
the Coltrane substitution stuff was as far as the beboppy stuff based on functional harmony and ii-V-I progressions went

there is no controversy here - Coltrane on Giant Steps took a very fundamental bebop-thing of functional harmony and ii-V-I all over the place and took it so far that it was generally accepted that that particular game was done, it was time to move on to free and modal jazz

really, it's a real thing that the tunes Giant Steps and Countdown on Coltrane's Giant Steps took a key bebop-era concept so far that pretty much everyone decided to look for new ideas elsewhere

on the album Giant Steps John Coltrane won functional harmony bebop playing shit that forced other great musicians to look for innovation elsewhere - of course you could phrase that as the functional harmony -well being pretty dry so Coltrane was the only one stupid enough to mine for gold there while Miles went for modes and Brubeck for rhythm and Sonny for there being some greater art than stupid theory games

>>75058907
so you're still not talking about innovation... you're talking about taking old ideas and taking them through to their conclusion

It's almost as though true "innovation" is a myth propagated by those who want to romanticize history, and what people call "innovation" actually happens collaboratively and gradually over time with the most popular and heroic figures usually receiving exaggerated credit for their contributions to the "innovation."

>>75058868
the tech world has adopted the words invention and innovation just because of how important the distinction of who demonstrably does something first compared to who makes it a popular thing is

in jazz, like in any culture, it's really, really uninteresting who did some shit first compared to who MADE IT A THING

it's exceedingly rare that any lick, tune or chord progression or a way of making a new sound out of an instrument will ever be credited to the person who really did it first, but that's 100% OK

it's really only important who popularizes a thing

I'm not opposed to the original inventors getting their fair share of the pie, but in cultural things it really is the really important thing who was there to popularize things

>>75059007
I agree with your post except for this
>in jazz, like in any culture, it's really, really uninteresting who did some shit first compared to who MADE IT A THING

Frankly I don't care much about either one. I care about who did it well and with creativity.

even his wife was better

>>75057961
Don't brother this board loves rockist jazz

>>75059001
I'm not sure who you are, but understand the difference between innovation and invention

innovation includes making something popular and bringing it to use, it is a much larger thing than invention which is just coming up with something novel (keep in mind that ideas are not unique, innovation is not necessarily building on someone else's invention - it is really an important bit that the word innovation implies that it was not only a new idea, but that it was actually taken to use - most inventions are not feasible to bring to market, an "innovation" has always been brought to some market)

so - invention is always something new, but not necessarily interesting, an innovation has been brought to some market - it is both new and interesting (but there might be similar previous invention that never was mature for market)!

>>75059102
see
>>75059046

I appreciate the difference but don't care much. Both innovation and invention can result in great success or a deplorable disaster. The end result is what's important.

>>75059145
the implication is that for every *innovation* there are a very large number of moments of *invention* where someone actually feels like they're doing a novel thing

those words are words just because everyone thinks that "the end result is important" from their point of view and for almost every new idea in the world for almost everyone the people responsible for bringing the novel idea (a jazz form) to the customer (a jazz listening audience) are not the first people in the world to do a similar thing - you care about the end result or "you learning of this", means that you care about the innovator, it's highly irrelevant if some weird dude did a very similar thing in his hovel in the New Orleans region marshes that never went anywhere.


The whole idea is trying to separate between people who really introduce influential concepts to the wide masses who have their own ideas that don't go anywhere.


It just is really important to be the guy who makes something popular, it is really a minor thing if there were a thousand guys with similar ideas before none of which took off.

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>>75057830
*blocks your path*

>>75057961
Okay. Where are you going with this? I'm the one who originally asked you.

>>75058385
Ornette Coleman did play hard bop. I don't doubt he knew theory very well one bit.