Trane-ing days

In 1991, when jazz saxophonist Ravi Coltrane first performed in the Twin Cities with a group led by drummer Elvin Jones, his playing was circumspect and sparing. He was embarrassed to be there.

"When Elvin asked me to be in his band, I said no, because I wasn't ready. At that time, I literally had only been playing the saxophone improvisationally for about four years," said Coltrane, now 43, by phone from Iowa, where he was on tour with the quartet he's bringing to Minneapolis on Thursday in a double bill.

But of course it was more complicated than that. Elvin Jones will forever be remembered as the drummer for the John Coltrane Quartet, helmed by Ravi's father, who stands with Charlie Parker as one of the most influential saxophonists in jazz history and who died in 1967.

"I knew Elvin didn't need the distraction of someone with the last name of Coltrane around, especially someone still trying to figure out how to play," Ravi said. "But he said to me, 'I want to help get you ready.' I spent two years with him, moved to New York, did some tours. It was rough and it was liberating. It was an unbelievably beautiful and an unbelievable horrifying experience."

Armed with a realistically modest appraisal of himself, and deploying caution as a virtue, Coltrane did not reveal himself to be embarrassingly callow that night at the Dakota. He has advanced his career and identity with similar aplomb. Mindful that many will never be able to regard him outside the shadow of his father's legacy, he has forged ahead patiently, with a style featuring gusts of emotion more reminiscent of the abrupt wit and bite of Branford Marsalis than the impassioned spirituality of his father, while spooling out increasingly sophisticated phrases that draw comparison to tenor greats Joe Henderson and Sonny Rollins.

After his time with Elvin Jones, Coltrane fell in with a couple of other drummer/mentors, Rashied Ali (the last drummer in the John Coltrane Quartet) and Jack DeJohnette, whom he credits with "opening me up. There was a different energy that I got with Jack." Another key figure was alto saxophonist Steve Coleman, who showed Coltrane how jazz scholarship can lead to innovation.

"He goes deep and then he says, 'I am now going to personalize those things for my present-day situation.' He'd point things out to me -- say, 'I got this from a Chano Pozo record' -- and show how he borrowed this thing from that source, and it got me excited. I love the music of the '40s, '50s and '60s and the '70s, too, but I was worried about sounding like other people. Steve showed me how to study the methods; not just what they produced, but deeper -- how they got there. Emulate that, the process and the stuff underneath, and see where it takes you."

"Having longtime associations with a group brings the music to other places. I might be referencing a Sonny Rollins thing in my head that the band will interpret very differently, and then I'll hear the rhythm section react and now I'm moving the line this way or that way, making the contrast, throwing out ideas. You combine those strong individual performances with the unspoken communication and responses you get from playing years and years together, and you really move forward with your music."

'I feel like I'm on a path'

Ravi speaks about John Coltrane with a reverence typical of jazz musicians. In a mordant bit of irony, it was the death of his older brother, John Coltrane Jr., that eventually prompted him to plumb his father's music.

Ravi was a sophomore in high school dabbling with the clarinet when John Jr., a fledgling saxophonist, was killed in a car crash. For five years, he stopped playing music. One of the ways he came out of that grief was realizing that his friends knew more about his father's work than he did.

But the strongest family connection was with his mother, pianist and harp player Alice Coltrane. Ravi abandons his circumspection and infuses his voice with love and enthusiasm when the subject turns from himself toward the record he produced for his mother, "Translinear Light," three years before she died in January 2007.