Like so many Urban Bush Women performances, “Walking With ’Trane” is about the soul. “Coltrane’s music is almost like trying to describe God,” says one Urban Bush Woman during a particular segment. And another: “It was free, his music was free!” These declarations aren’t just hyperbole. For the six women and one man on stage, John Coltrane is the jazz apostle they’ve come to follow, a man whose otherworldly gifts provide proof of a higher power.
The foundation for these dancing disciples is Coltrane’s backstory. Talent was never the jazz great’s problem; self-control, however, was. His exile from Miles Davis’s band in 1957 forced him to cut out the booze and drugs and to reacquaint himself with the Man (or Woman) upstairs. The result of that soul-searching was A Love Supreme, the 50-year-old album that has forever come to define his career and the work that has since given Urban Bush Women its own means of divine inspiration in “Walking With ’Trane,” choreographed by artistic director Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and company member Samantha Speis, during the company’s 30th anniversary year.
Few things are more gratifying to an audience than resurrection and Urban Bush Women strives to channel Coltrane’s artistic re-birth by giving its members the freedom to strut their stuff in two parts: “Side A”—a generous use of free-wheeling motifs, beep-bops and stamping feet, against the up-and-down arpeggios and thumping punctuations of jazz instruments—and “Side B”—a much more developed, choreographed transition that features live accompaniment by the pianist George Caldwell, who plays themes based on Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. Meanwhile, digital projections shift from piano keys, train tracks, darkly lit cityscapes and billowing plumes of smoke to give the impression that we’ve just stepped into a jazz club or a recording studio straight from the ’50s.
At issue is whether this holy communion of song and dance can match each other step-by-step, note-for-note. “Side A” is a gradual, enchanting first half of individual highlights, as when company member Tendayi Kuumba sings, scats and flows in the same mesmerizing fashion as an improvised sax riff, alluding briefly to the drug abuse that Coltrane famously battled during his career. “Side B” can’t compete, if only because Caldwell plays so well and because his composition overshadows what should be the primary focus.
And here is where I found myself conflicted between what I was watching and what I was hearing. Boiled down to it: Embodying the dance equivalent of an improvised jazz riff, at least in this case, is like forcing a square peg into a round hole.
But maybe you’ll have different experience, and that’s why you should see “Walking With ’Trane” while it’s at the Dance Center. Urban Bush Women's identity has always been unique, whether it’s challenging racial indignities, gender bias or stereotypes through the lens of contemporary history, or striving for a way to memorialize an artist like Coltrane. No matter what you end up thinking, you’ll never doubt that the company’s approach is done with careful, insightful intentions.
Urban Bush Women performs “Walking With ’Trane” through Saturday at the Dance Center of Columbia College.