Mar 10, 2011 - Sale 2239

Sale 2239 - Lot 399

Price Realized: $ 2,400
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 3,500 - $ 5,000
ORIGINAL MSS BY COLTRANE (MUSIC.) COLTRANE, JOHN. "Nothing Beats a Trial but a Failure." Original holograph music manuscript; ten lines of music (approximately 64 bars), for the second tenor saxophone part, written on Coltrane's own Jowcol Music paper. Np, 1950s-1960s
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rare original music manuscript for a piece originally written by jazz giant John Coltrane (1926-1967) for the Jimmy Heath big band. Lewis Porter, in his "John Coltrane, his Life and his Music," discusses Coltrane's use of modal scales built around certain minor chords, and the suspended 7th chord, and tells a story of a particular piece: "Jimmy Heath was writing, John wrote a thing, Ray Bryant--we all tried our hand at it. I remember John did a thing for Jimmy's big band called 'Nothing beats a trial but a Failure.' We tried it, and played it (at rehearsal) and it wasn't perfect, but it wasn't bad. He (Coltrane) collected the music and we were walking home, as we always did, and he got to the corner and he took the whole arrangement, and threw it in the gutter. It disappeared down below the grates. I said 'why'd you do that? He said 'Sometimes you win 'em, sometimes you lose 'em.' I said, 'all that work, copying the parts' and suddenly he threw 'em down the gutter. The title 'Nothing beats a trial but a Failure' is an expression, a maxim or whatever. And he said, 'Well, it was a failure.' "
Working in the be-bop and hard bop idioms early in his career, Coltrane helped pioneer the use of modal scales in jazz and later was at the forefront of free jazz. He was astonishingly prolific, making about fifty recordings as a leader during his recording career, and appearing as a side-man on numerous other albums, notably with Miles Davis, and Thelonius Monk. As his career progressed, Coltrane's music took on an increasingly spiritual dimension.