One of the highlights of the new Temple University concert is Coltrane’s late composition Offering. The only other version of this fascinating meditation on harmonic cells is on Coltrane’s final official record Expression. Since the piece so seamlessly weaves together composition and improvisation, a second recording tell us something about which parts of the piece were fixed and which were open. However, because Alice is almost completely inaudible when John is playing, the Temple recording is like The Magnificent Ambersons or Smile: an artwork that has only partially survived. We have to try and infer what the totality was from the fragments we have.
Here is my transcription of Offering (11/11/66). The chords written above the staff are based on the fragments I can hear of Alice between Coltrane’s phrases, which I compared to what Coltrane plays, as well as what Alice played on the studio recording a few months later.
The rhythms as written here are a humble attempt to notate the un-notatable. Morton Feldman said something like “Notation is a metaphor. It’s a question of finding the right metaphor.” That very much applies to this kind of transcription. Of course other people might come up with very different conclusions about how to show what they hear in a piece like this. That’s why I hesitate to share transcriptions at all: my ideas about Offering are just as much about me as Offering, and so will your transcription be in some ways about you, and that’s a great way to learn about yourself, while you think you’re learning about Coltrane.
In my next post I intend to compare the two versions of Offering.