The Mattson 2 pay tribute to jazz icon John Coltrane

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      They say that you can’t remake a masterpiece, but don’t tell novelist Jane Smiley, whose A Thousand Acres, loosely based on William Shakespeare’s King Lear, won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Don’t tell Jeff Wall, whose The Destroyed Room—a photo-conceptualist interpretation of Eugène Delacroix’s 1827 painting The Death of Sardanapalus—helped launch his international career (and was used as the cover image for the Sonic Youth album of the same name). And don’t tell the Mattson 2, whose new duo take on John Coltrane’s magnum opus A Love Supreme makes a good case for the ongoing relevance of a work originally issued in 1965.

      Twin brothers Jared and Jonathan Mattson don’t claim to have eclipsed the original. Drummer Jonathan—reached on the road in the American Midwest, with his guitar- and bass-playing brother at the wheel—notes that while they’re happy to have climbed what he calls “the Mount Everest” of jazz, only musical deities can make musical mountains. It was important to the duo’s development, however, that after creating six albums of their own instrumental music, which fuses surf, film-soundtrack, and indie-rock elements, they showed the world where they were really coming from.

      “Our concept has a jazz background; that’s where we got all our musical technique and training,” Jonathan says, referring to the California-raised brothers’ master’s degrees in music. “But after all of our education we wanted to utilize what we’d learned and create our own music with it. So we created a type of jazz that is definitely our own brand—and that maybe some people don’t consider jazz. Releasing this Coltrane album was a way to contextualize our past and what brought us to where we are today, techniquewise.

      “And A Love Supreme,” he adds, “is by far our favourite jazz record ever made.”

      There’s more going on here than simple idol-worshipping, however. By replacing Coltrane’s band of saxophone, piano, acoustic bass, and drums with electric instruments, the Mattsons have shown exactly how much impact the jazz pioneer’s music had on rock. In this new, amplified format, the links between Coltrane’s expansive sound and the psychedelic movement are easy to trace—and Jared Mattson’s elegant use of looping, often to play ostinato bass lines extracted from Jimmy Garrison’s original parts, shows the debt that much sample-based music owes to the ecstatic jazz of the 1960s.

      Then there’s the intent behind it all. Coltrane’s masterpiece was about love and unity and exploration; revisiting it in this time of hate and divisiveness and retrenchment must be making some kind of political statement, right?

      “Well, I’ve always felt the need to express the message of A Love Supreme even before all the craziness that’s happening in the world,” Jonathan says, “but it wasn’t completely tied to any sociopolitical endeavour, for us. It was more the musical side, but we also can’t ignore the amazing positivity of Coltrane’s work!”

      The Mattson 2 play John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme at the WISE Hall on Sunday (September 23).

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