Today’s post comes from composer Kile Smith – I had to share this. I heard it on the radio this week and was really caught off guard by his words. His analysis helps to capture the difference between what is Art Music and what is not (“rock rolled over sophistication”).

The original post comes from the WRTI blog, “Arts Desk“. Here it is:

Two Englishmen, Guy Wood and Robert Mellin, slipped it into the Great American Songbook just before it closed, just as rock rolled over sophistication. It begins from below, a slowly twisting Roman candle of a tune, and explodes in the top range of the singer, as the eyes of onlookers reflect the glory of what songs once were.

Sinatra recorded “My One and Only Love” right away, in 1953, but ten years later John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman made it a landmark of an age.

Johnny Hartman sounds like a man who breaks his heart open, and yours.

Coltrane’s tenor saxophone sounds as if it’s made of something not of this world, and yet it is uncannily apt. Every note is a discovery, every phrase an experiment that comes out exactly right.

Johnny Hartman sings the way every man wishes to sing—an everyman standing up in a room suddenly silent—sounding like a man, but a man who breaks his heart open, and yours. And just when he sounds like anybody, that voice turns into one in ten million.

John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman spread their mystic charms, especially in the high ranges of their low instruments. In “My One and Only Love” they made a song for the ages. Remember what songs once were.

… think about all the Giant Steps you during the earth’s last rotation around the sun.

The lore surrounding saxophonist John Coltrane is wild, almost as wild as his playing. He managed to cram eighty years of living into forty years of life. Some people find his music impossible to listen to; they can’t tell whether it is overly complex or completely random (however you think it sounds, the truth is that everything he did was carefully crafted and practiced). His music is now over 50 years old – so if it sounds normal to you, well, you have Coltrane to thank for that. Art Music is always progressing towards new territory – some people just get there faster.