007: John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman, ‘My One and Only Love’

Oh, am I excited!

A new CD was released last week by my favoritest ‘singer’ – “Dedicated to You: Kurt Elling Sings the Music of Coltrane and Hartman“. So I’m just popping with anticipation.
Kurt Elling is 42, from Chicago, and this is his 8^th CD in 14 years. It’s a re-recording (with a few tasteful additions) of the 1963 classic “John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman”. Mr. Elling is an artist of amazing versatility, not just a singer. But he’s also a great crooner, as this CD will undoubtedly prove–when I manage to get my hands on it, here in the wholly holey Holy Land. But in the meantime, let’s revisit the source.

John Coltrane is a monumental figure in modern jazz. He started out as an untried, technically limited tenor saxophonist in Miles Davis’ first quintet in the mid-50s. Eventually Miles had to throw him out of the band for drug abuse. Then he cut his chops for a while with Thelonious Monk and got himself off drugs. Then he rejoined Miles in the late 50s for the “Kind of Blue” period, then went solo. In 1961 he started moving towards spiritual, ‘free’ jazz, developing a commercially disastrous technique of “sheets of sound” and a lot of the most astounding music in jazz ever. To appease the record company, he recorded a couple of more palatable LPs, including an eponymous 1963 collaboration with balladeer Johnny Hartman.

Ballads are to Coltrane as political protest songs are to Dylan–they constitute the backbone of his popular reputation, while actually constituting a rather insignificant place in his corpus. In subsequent years, Trane’s playing became so intense and his development as an artist so rapid that enthusiasts track his growth by the month, even by the week. He died in 1967 at the age of 40.

Johnny Hartman had a respectable though not brilliant career as a crooner contemporaneously with and then beyond Coltrane. His voice is so smooth it makes Billy Eckstine sound like Mick Jagger, Nat Cole like Joe Cocker. He recorded sporadically, and his acknowledged masterpiece is their joint venture, “John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman”. Only 30 minutes long, it’s enough of a classic to warrant an homage by as fine an artist as Kurt Elling.

Of the six songs on the LP, each one a gem, I’ve chosen the lovely standard ‘My One and Only Love’. The performance here is the epitome of elegance and warmth, yet intelligent and musically substantial. So lower the lights, put on your smoking jacket, take a brandy glass in your hand, and enjoy.

Tags: Devoted to YouJohn ColtraneJohnny HartmanKurt Elling