Tribute albums are iffy. Cover albums, where a favorite album is reinterpreted song by song, are downright dangerous. Cover albums of beloved classics, unless the intent is to deconstruct (see
Sonic Youth's much-mooted but never-released cover of
the Beatles' White Album) are pretty much suicidal. And yet, guitarist
Nels Cline and drummer
Gregg Bendian pull off this re-imagining of
John Coltrane's final album, the sax-drums duet suite
Interstellar Space. Wisely,
Cline and
Bendian don't try to replicate the original album, or to transcribe
Coltrane and
Rashied Ali's parts. Instead, they use the restless, exploratory spirit of the original as a jumping-off point, and use the structures of the tunes as the basis for their own ideas. Even at his most shredding, sheets-of-sound noisiest,
Coltrane's search was for beauty;
Cline's tastes run more towards the Stratocaster-in-a-garbage-disposal line, which means that a lot of
Coltrane fans will run in terror from displays like the near-atonal freakout at the heart of "Leo." And yet, careful listening shows that at heart,
Interstellar Space Revisited (The Music of John Coltrane) isn't that far removed from the revered original at all. At best, this is a curio, but it's an interesting one for
Cline and
Coltrane fans alike. ~ Stewart Mason