Chasing Trane
Director:
John Scheinfeld
Year: 2016
Rating: 6.5
I am not a jazz aficionado by any means but there are a few jazz artists
who I really love to listen to and I have collected a lot of their albums.
Ellington, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Sinatra, Armstrong, Miles and
Coltrane. Coltrane's music just feels so smart and so warm to me. My favorite
albums that he did with his own band (thus not the ones he did with Miles)
are Giant Steps, My Favorite Things, Ballads and A Love Supreme. Great stuff.
But I knew next to nothing about his life and this 90 minute documentary
filled in a lot of gaps and placed his music in perspective to his life.
He started playing music as a young boy, moved up north with his mother when
his father passed away, joined local bands and got a gig playing with Dizzy
Gillespie. He also acquired a heroin habit and Dizzy fired him. Not much
later he joined Miles Davis but his habit got him fired again. So he went
cold turkey and shook his addiction and went on to make his greatest music.
He was a great innovator and composer. He died from liver cancer at 40.
The documentary obviously has a lot of his music and there is commentary
from different people. Some might not appreciate Bill Clinton being one of
them but as I saw before on the Elvis Costello show, he knows a hell of a
lot about music.
