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Time has revealed drummer Rashied Ali as one of the key figures during a seminal era of jazz, the period in the mid-to-late 1960s when modal jazz began its evolution toward “free.” Ali was presented — some might say strapped — with what seemed like the impossible task of replacing Elvin Jones in John Coltrane’s quintet. Jones and Tony Williams, with the Miles Davis Quintet, were by far the most important post bebop drummers in jazz — arguably, they are the two most important drummers in jazz history — and it may have seemed that Ali had stepped into shoes that were too big for him. Such wasn’t the case: Ali’s hiring was a crucial final step Trane needed to take to move away from horizontal rhythm, the trap of moving linearly from Point A to Point B.
With Rashied Ali, the music moved up and down instead of sideways, a transition that represented the most radical and important change in jazz since the introduction of modal playing a decade or so earlier. But, as happened with Pharaoh Sanders, another notable Coltrane alumnus, Ali gravitated toward a more traditional playing approached as time passed. At the Vision Festival finds him exploring… read more »
