The album Coltrane’s Sound begins explosively. There’s a single-note saxophone pickup, and then bang, straight into the full band playing a big, bright latin tune. A few seconds in, the feel changes to swing, then back to latin. Sometimes the chords are pedaled, floating and modal; other times they seem like regular functional circle-of-fifths changes, though those don’t last long. The name of the tune suggests a pop song, not a Coltrane composition, but it’s much too artsy and hip to be a pop song. So what is this? Other than just, awesome?
At some point I tried looking up other versions of the tune and was very confused when the first page of Google results pointed me to Bobby Vee’s 1962 hit:
You may also have come across the Carpenters’ version:
I couldn’t hear any relationship between this tune and the one on Coltrane’s Sound. As it turns out, there is no relationship; Bobby Vee and the Carpenters are doing a completely different tune with the same title.
The actual song that Coltrane arranged is this one:
The song was written as the theme for a 1948 movie by the same name. The title phrase comes from a poem by Francis William Bourdillon:
The night has a thousand eyes,
And the day but one;
Yet the light of the bright world dies
With the dying sun.
The mind has a thousand eyes,
And the heart but one:
Yet the light of a whole life dies
When love is done.
“The Night Has a Thousand Eyes” is a minor jazz standard; Secondhand Songs lists 170 recordings. Among the straightahead versions, I like Petula Clark’s the best. She is certainly easier to compare to Coltrane than Bing Crosby with his gooey timekeeping.
Coltrane’s version is formally eccentric, and it took me a minute to figure it out. Listening to Bing Crosby and Petula Clark helped. The chart in the Colorado Cookbook is wildly, hilariously inaccurate. Eric Löhler’s chart is much better. Coltrane does the tune in G major—does any other saxophone player love sharp keys as much as he does? The tempo is a brisk 220 BPM. Coltrane switches the time feel between swing and latin in semi-irregular increments. The A sections are 8 bars of latin, 4 bars of swing, 4 bars of latin. The B section is 12 bars of swing and 8 bars of latin.
The form is AAB. First, here’s the A section from Petula Clark’s version, transposed into Coltrane’s key. The percent signs mean “repeat the previous measure.”
| Gmaj7 | % | D7sus4 | % |
| Gmaj7 | % | D7sus4 | % |
| Dm7 | G7 | Cmaj7 | F7 |
| Am7 | D7 | Gmaj7 | Am7 D7 |
Now here’s Coltrane’s version. He doesn’t make any profound alterations, he just adds the hypnotic D pedal.
| Gmaj7/D | % | D7sus4 | % |
| Gmaj7/D | % | D7sus4 | % |
| Dm7 | G7 | Cmaj7 | F7 |
| Gmaj7/D | % | D7sus4 | % |
Here’s the B section from Petula Clark’s version:
| Cm7 | F7 | Bbmaj7 | % |
| Bbm7 | Eb7 | Abmaj7 | % |
| Cm7 | F7 | Gmaj7 | % |
| Am7 | D7 | Gmaj7 | % |
This is a chain of ii-V-I progressions moving through different keys, the kind of thing that Coltrane loved to play in this era. The twist comes in measures 9 and 10, where you think you’re hearing ii-V in Bb but it’s actually a kind of backdoor ii-V in G.
Coltrane makes several noticeable alterations to the B section. Most conspicuously, he duplicates the last four bars, so the section is now five phrases long instead of the customary four.
| Cm7 | F7 | Dmaj7 F7 | Bbmaj7 |
| Bbm7 | Eb7 | Cmaj7 Eb7 | Abmaj7 |
| Cm(maj7)/D | % | Gmaj7 | % |
| D7sus4 | % | Gmaj7/D | % |
| D7sus4 | % | Gmaj7/D | % |
The end of this section is so similar to the beginning of the A section that it’s easy to get lost in the form, especially because McCoy Tyner’s fourths-based voicings make Gmaj7/D and D7sus4 sound like pretty much the same chord. I don’t know whether the formal ambiguity was intended or if it’s just what emerged out of the arrangement, but it keeps you on your toes while you’re listening.
The third and seventh bars of the B section include some brief gestures toward “Giant Steps” changes. The F7 resolves not to the Bbmaj7 you’re expecting, but to Dmaj7 instead, a major third higher. Then Coltrane does the expected F7 to Bbmaj7 resolution. In the next phrase, he does the same thing transposed down a whole step. I noticed that during the solos, McCoy Tyner skips the “Giant Steps” stuff and plays Petula Clark’s changes. Who could blame him? The tune is complicated enough.
The ninth and tenth bars use the chord version of a scale called D Dorian b2, the second mode of C harmonic minor: D, E-flat, F, G, A, B, C. Eric Löhler writes the chord as D13sus4(b9), which is like a parody of a jazz chord symbol. Once I figured out that you could think of it as Cm(maj7)/D, it made more sense to me. I will be damned if I can find any good way to play this chord on the guitar. The best I can suggest is an Eb augmented triad over the open D string.
How about the melody? It’s often implying a different key than the chords underneath. The first two bars outline a D major triad over the Gmaj7 chord. Then there’s a long E over the D7sus4 chord, an unstable ninth. The melody in the third phrase sounds like it’s outlining G major, but the key in that part is C major. The B section melody isn’t quite so deceptive, but it doesn’t clearly outline the chords either. It’s so cool! Especially without the goofy lyrics distracting you.
Ryan Pate has an essay about this album in which he draws your attention to a note that Coltrane plays in his solo.
But then, at the 2nd section of his 2nd Chorus — This high Bb note against a D7(sus4). It is an ear bending moment. What is THAT note? (2:06). It’s beautifully “wrong” with all intention behind it. (The following is written without much investigation, but, who else was playing a #5 on a sus chord with that much intention in 1960?) It’s followed by phrases on a string of connected harmonic superimpositions over the D pedal point. (Heard until 2:20). It creates a beautiful dissonance—a shifting, colorful figure vs. ground. The figure is expanding and the ground is, well, more grounded.
I want to point to a phrase earlier in the solo, at 1:35. This doubletime line scampers across the barlines in sixteenth notes and triplets until it lands on a distorted multiphonic splat. We can talk about Coltrane’s note choices in that line—they outline the chords perfectly—but the main thing is just the sound. I have heard a lot of sax players who can shred, but I rarely hear anything like Coltrane’s authoritative tone matched with those uninhibited honks. Unlike many subsequent shredders, Coltrane only uses his technical virtuosity in the service of strong ideas. I enjoy listening to his solos at half speed because you can follow the melodic logic more easily, and there is always plenty of melodic logic to follow.
Ryan Pate also gives some valuable insight into the dodgy circumstances of the album’s release. Atlantic put Coltrane’s Sound out in 1964, but it was recorded in 1960, during three sessions on October 21st, 24th and 26th. I don’t know what was in the air, but the recordings that Coltrane’s quartet made on those three days eventually got released across six different albums, the first four of which are breathtakingly great and the last two merely excellent. (In order of release, they are Coltrane Jazz, My Favorite Things, Coltrane Plays the Blues, Coltrane’s Sound, The Coltrane Legacy and Alternate Takes.) The first session on October 21st was the first documented instance of Elvin Jones and McCoy Tyner playing together. That is wild!
The important thing to know is that Coltrane was not involved in the track selection or sequencing of the album. Atlantic released it after he had left the label, without his input or permission. I learned from Lewis Porter that Coltrane hated the cover and found it disturbing, and rightly so. And yet, as Ryan Pate says:
Coltrane’s Sound feels different than the ordinary record label opportunist cash grab. It feels like an actual album. Maybe Atlantic Records got lucky in choosing a cohesive set of songs. More likely, Coltrane’s greatness itself was the cohesion.
I started listening to this album long before any of the background information was available to me, and I never would have suspected that it was an opportunist cash grab. It really speaks to the Coltrane Quartet that their music shines through, regardless of the indifferent and ethically questionable packaging.
My kids do not like jazz, at all, and I don’t really know what to do about it. Maybe it’s an age thing, though I liked jazz fine when I was younger than them. I also have some friends and students who are curious about jazz or feel like it’s a thing they’re supposed to be into, but they don’t know how to get started. One theory student last semester compared it a vast ocean. Let’s say someone like me recommends Coltrane’s Sound as an entry point. How are you supposed to make sense of his abstraction of an obscure song from the 1940s without knowing the song first? And how are you supposed to have heard the song when its already miniscule cultural footprint was subsequently obliterated by Bobby Vee and the Carpenters?
I mean, maybe you don’t need the context. I didn’t have any when I started listening to Coltrane. All I knew was that Jerry Garcia kept talking reverently about him in interviews. The first time I heard Coltrane’s Sound, I knew there was more going on beneath the music’s surface than I could make sense of, but the surface had more than enough appeal to keep me interested. I listened to “The Night Has a Thousand Eyes” about a thousand times before I even tried looking up where it came from, and another thousand times before I succeeded in figuring it out. I feel deeper appreciation now that I’ve heard Bing Crosby and Petula Clark, but the feeling was right there on my first hearing.