Richard Brody’s New Yorker article Coltrane’s Free Jazz Wasn't Just A Lot of Noise descends into an attack on writer Geoff Dyer rather than concentrate on whether Coltrane’s late period was any good or not.

The article, like Dyer’s was prompted by the release of Offering: Live at Temple University reviewed here. Brody is basically defending Coltrane’s late period. He describes Coltrane’s playing on the album as “like a whirlwind with an eye of serenity.” What a great turn of phrase.

But he then lays into Dyer for writing that rather than the music possessing that serenity Brody so admires Coltrane’s style for instead at this period it is full of “shrieking, screaming, and wildness” and that late-Coltrane is “catastrophic.”

Obviously there is a difference of opinion here but then Brody attacks Dyer for false intimacy in the way he writes about Coltrane’s band. The article continues: ‘Dyer calls Jones “Elvin,” calls Coltrane “Trane”; this sense of false intimacy is significant. Dyer is the author of “But Beautiful,” from 1991, a fictional gaze at classic-era jazz greats, in which he writes about “Lester,” “Bud,” “Chet,” “Ben,” and, for that matter, “Hawk” and “Trane.” He writes like a club patron who insinuates himself into the company of the musicians between sets, extracts their confidences, observes scenes of intimate horror, and then passes them along—using first names and nicknames—as if to flaunt his faux-insider status. But, when the musicians are back on the bandstand, he never lets them forget that they’re there to entertain him.’

Ouch. Who’s making the most noise, precisely? It might not be Coltrane!

Stephen Graham