Biography
Ravi Coltrane is the son of saxophonist John Coltrane and jazz pianist Alice Coltrane. He is also cousin to experimental music producer Steven Ellison aka Flying Lotus. He was raised in Los Angeles, California, and was named after sitar player Ravi Shankar.
Ravi was two years old in 1967 when his father John Coltrane died. Ravi is a 1983 graduate of El Camino Real High School in Woodland Hills, California.In 1986, he studied music, focusing on the saxophone at the California Institute of the Arts. Ravi has worked extensively with M-Base guru Steve Coleman, a significant influence on Ravi's own musical conception. Coltrane has played with Geri Allen, Kenny Barron, McCoy Tyner, Pharoah Sanders, Herbie Hancock, Carlos Santana, Stanley Clarke, Branford Marsalis and others.
In 1997, after performing on over thirty recordings as a sideman, Ravi entered the studio to record his first album as leader Moving Pictures, working with drummer Jeff "Tain" Watts, bassist Lonnie Plaxico and pianist Michael Cain. This led to extensive touring with his working featuring Andy Milne on piano, drummer Steve Hass, and bassist Lonnie Plaxico. His second disc, From the Round Box (2000), finds Coltrane in the company of pianist Geri Allen, trumpeter Ralph Alessi, bassist James Genus, and drummer Eric Harland. Followed by Mad 6 (2002) his first release for Sony music, featuring drummer Steve Hass, pianist George Colligan, and bassist James Genus and In Flux (2005) he has been working with bassist Drew Gress, pianist Luis Perdomo, and drummer E.J. Strickland.
In January 2005, Ravi Coltrane performed in India for the first time, as part of a delegation of American jazz musicians sent on a State Department tour to promote HIV/AIDS awareness. Also participating in the tour were vocalist Al Jarreau, guitarist Earl Klugh, and pianist George Duke. Performances included a January 16 concert in Mumbai (Bombay), a tribute to Martin Luther King Jr. in Delhi on January 17, and a music festival in Delhi on January 18 organized by violinist L. Subramaniam. Also on January 18, Ravi Coltrane stopped to visit and perform at the Ravi Shankar Centre, where Coltrane met with the man he was named after. Then picking up a clarinet to engage in an unplanned jam session with a pair of shehnai players, Coltrane said, "I'm a little nervous with the master here."
The Coltrane Quartet played at the Monterey Jazz Festival in 2001, the Montreux Jazz Festival and the Newport Jazz Festival in 2004, and the Vienne Jazz Festival in 2005.
In 2008, Ravi became part of The Blue Note 7, a septet formed that year in honor of the 70th anniversary of Blue Note Records. The group recorded an album in 2008, entitled Mosaic, which was released in 2009 on Blue Note Records/EMI, and toured the United States in promotion of the album from January until April 2009. The group plays the music of Blue Note Records from various artists, with arrangements by members of the band and Renee Rosnes.
Read more about this topic: Ravi Coltrane
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“The best part of a writer’s biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)