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Drummer's timing right for 'Love Supreme'
Detroit native Ali Jackson joins Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra on Sunday at Hill
Saturday, January 21, 2006
BY WILL STEWART
Ann Arbor News Special Writer
For Ali Jackson, performing "A Love Supreme'' with the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra hits home on so many levels, he sometimes wonders whether he was destined to play this particular piece with this particular band.
"I was born into playing music and I sometimes think that this was just meant to be,'' the 28-year-old Detroit native said during a telephone conversation between rehearsals for the big band's performance of John Coltrane's classic suite at Hill Auditorium on Sunday.
"I feel as if I've been groomed for this job.''
Indeed, Jackson's godfather was the late drummer and fellow Detroit native Elvin Jones, who along with bassist Jimmy Garrison and pianist McCoy Tyner anchored the quartet that Coltrane used to record "A Love Supreme'' in 1965.
"Later in Elvin's life, I spent as much time with him as I could,'' Jackson said of Jones, who died last year. "He taught me a lot about music, but he also taught me a lot about life, since to us music is life.''
Jackson moved to New York in 1993 after graduating from Cass Technological High School and attended the New School to study music. Soon, he was out on tour with first-tier jazz artists, including Dee Dee Bridgewater and Milt Hinton, and he did a stint with Wynton Marsalis, who also is the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra's director.
So when the drummer's seat opened up in the orchestra, Jackson - already feeling like he was groomed for the job - was eager to step in.
"It can be intimidating to play with such an incredible group of musicians,'' he said. "But you have to feel like you were selected because you are able to bring something and add something to the music.
"I'd known Wynton since I was a kid and he knew my playing and he felt like I was ready.''
For its rendition of "A Love Supreme,'' Marsalis - who will play trumpet during the orchestra's Ann Arbor appearance - arranged the quartet's spacious, languid original version with tight, layered charts that add a big-band feel without losing the essence of the original's deeply spiritual template.
"Wynton's arrangement has a lot of power,'' Jackson said. "When you hear the same voicings of the original being played through this big band, it can really take your breath away.''
Last year, before Jackson joined, Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra recorded its arrangement of the piece, which was released on Palmetto Records. The group's Hill Auditorium performance is one of only two it will perform of the piece this season, marking it as an "event'' in jazz circles and a coup for the University Musical Society, which is sponsoring the show.
"To say that you can never compare to the original is an understatement, but the whole ensemble is on the same page in interpreting the music and expanding on its themes,'' Jackson said. "Everyone really beings it home.''
"A Love Supreme'' entered the jazz canon immediately upon its release in 1965, after being recorded in a single night with the quartet the saxophonist had been working with the previous three years. Divided into four movements - Acknowledgement, Resolution, Pursuance and Psalm - it was Coltrane's meditative exploration of love and spirituality.
Forty years later, Jackson said, it's lost none of the power and beauty that marked it as an instant classic.
"It's so heavy that we have to rehearse it in sections,'' he said. "It really takes a spiritual calm to deal with a piece with such an emotional connection.
"But there's rehearsal and then there's playing,'' he said. "When we're playing, that's when you can feel the music and find your voice really let all that emotion out.''
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Our lives are the songs that sing the universe into existence.~David Zindell
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