Titre Chi Coltrane

 

 

animation LP

 

 

Non official site

2014/07/01 updated!

Under permanent construction

 

 

Animation singles

 

 

Biography

 

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John Lentz's recent Interview for Blurt magazine

 

Chi on stage

Chi Coltrane on stage

Sources:http://blurtonline.com/feature/thunder-and-lightning-reclaimed-chi-coltrane-2/

 

fleche A recent Interview With Chi by John Lentz for Blurt magazine in the United States is now available at http://blurt-online.com/ or directly at http://blurtonline.com/feature/thunder-and-lightning-reclaimed-chi-coltrane-2/.

 

 

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promotion

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When Chi Coltrane's first single, "Thunder and Lightning" made the US top 20 in 1972, it seemed like the auspicious start of a long and distinguished career.

The timing was right, and the performer appeared to have everything going for her - she was a prodigious pianist, a skilled composer, a fine vocalist, and distinctly photogenic.

Furthermore, her style - a sort of ultra-sophisticated take on Carole King and Elton John - was perfect for the times. But, for various reasons (an aversion to self-promotion, in particular), she never consolidated her initial success, and settled instead for a small, but loyal cult following, both in North America and Europe.

 

 

People from Racine

 

 

People from Racine

 

 

People from Racine

 

Chi (pronounced "shy") Coltrane (born Nov 16, 1948 Racine, Wisconsin) was one of seven children born to a Canadian mother, and a German violinist father. She studied a number of instruments as a child, and gave her first piano recital at 12. In 1970, she formed Chicago Coltrane, playing blues, funk and gospel in local clubs and bars.

She was signed to Columbia in 1972, on the strength of a six-song demo tape, and her first album, the entirely self-written Chi Coltrane appeared that year.

 

 

Chi Coltrane same

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In November 1972, her first single "Thunder and Lightning" reached number 17. Chi Coltrane was well-received critically, and spent three months in the lower reaches of the top 200. This song hit #17 on the U.S. charts and also did quite well in Europe. It helped propel her self-titled debut to a 3 month stay on the U.S. charts.

 

 

Single vinyle Chi Coltrane
Chi Coltrane single
Single vinyle Chi Coltrane

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Singles

 

 

It's clear from the opening moments of Chi Coltrane's self-titled debut that she's a singer/songwriter a few musical cuts above the rest. Primarily, this is down to her piano-playing. Where even the most respected artists of the genre could only play basic block chords or arpeggios (Laura Nyro and Joni Mitchell, respectively), Coltrane is a player's player, and an equal of any session musician.

The eleven songs on Chi Coltrane give her ample opportunity to show off. "Thunder and Lightning" (an absolute white soul gem) was her first single, and a top 20 hit, but it tells only a fraction of the story.

 

 

 

Go like Elijah TV

 

 

Go like Elijah TV

 

NL TV snapshots

 

 

The rest of the album displays a complete mastery and understanding of gospel ("Go Like Elijah"), as well music of both the Classical and Romantic periods ("The Wheel of Life"), and in addition, she comes up with a few hybrids of her own ("You Were My Friend").

Her vocals, alternatively tender, spirited, angry, and with a wonderful "on-the-verge-of-tears" quality, are at odds with the dreamy inertia of most mid-70s performers. They invest every cut with a compelling sense of drama and anxiety.

Coltrane may not be a top-drawer wordsmith (although she's certainly quite good), but her lyrics are clear-headed, unpretentious and direct.

For subject matter, she draws mainly on love, friendship, religion (tentatively), and philosophy.

 

 

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Although much press attention focussed on her glacial, blonde good looks (think a less scary, pre-heroin Nico), this album was a triumph of style and substance in equal measure.

In 1973 Coltrane attended the Salter School of Music in Los Angeles, and made another album ("Let It Ride"), which was greeted with similar acclaim to her first, but which failed to find an audience.

 

 

LP vinyle Chi Coltrane

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"Let it Ride" was recorded at London's Trident Studios. The sound isn't vastly different, although there is more backing vocal support (from vastly talented stalwart Merry Clayton).

Her songwriting was taking new and interesting turns. The debut had shown a gift for pastiche, but "Let it Ride" frees her skills to run a little wilder.

"Flyaway Bluebird" creates an aural playground out of only a piano and a handful of vocalists, and is her finest moment. The title track opens as a rather routine ballad, only to transmogrify into an untamed, anguished masterpiece, remeniscent of Laura Nyro's best work.

 

 

Capture d'écran Musikladen

Musikladen (1973) —

— TV screen snapshot — German TV broadcast —

 

 

Coltrane reaches back to her classical training for "Forget Love" - an icily sophisticated composition with a clever, almost Germanic piano accompaniment.

The only criticism it's possible to level at Let It Ride is Coltrane's tendency to eat up musical genres and spit out instant, bite-size, expert examples of them.

"Shortnin' Bread" sounds like an exercise from a "How To Play the Blues" textbook, and is the only time Coltrane's undoubted expertise is potentially tiresome.

But when the only fault you can find with an artist is her own virtuosity, there's little point in finding it.

 

 

LP vinyle Chi Coltrane

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Coltrane sought solace and inspiration in religion (she was allegedly fiercely committed to bible study, and Jesus, but disinclined to follow organized religion), and put her recording career on hold for a few years.

 

Chi Coltrane Road To Tomorrow

 

Following the release of Road To Tomorrow in 1977, Coltrane moved to Europe and signed with Teldec, releasing three albums during the 80s, each with more of a new-wave, Euro-rock flavour than her early records.

 

 

LP vinyle Chi Coltrane

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"Silk and Steel" in 1981 .

 

 

LP vinyle Chi Coltrane

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"Ready To Roll" in 1982 .

 

LP vinyle Chi Coltrane

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"live" in 1982.

 

LP vinyle Chi Coltrane

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Chi Message

 

 

Chi Message

 

 

Chi Message

 

 

"The Message", in 1986.

Since the last of these (1986's The Message), her profile has been extremely low.

 

Single vinyle Chi Coltrane
Goodbye Schimmi

I Just Want To Rule My Own Life Without You

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"Bis zum Hals im Dreck" - TV "Tatort" soundtrack (1991)

"Tatort"or "Schimanski" a German equivalence of "Colombo"

 

Apart from some soundtrack work in Germany, and a collaboration with Tangerine Dream in 1991, there has been little activity from her, although material from her first two albums appeared on CD during the 90s. ~ Charles Donovan, All Music Guide

 

 

CD Chi Coltrane

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Sony's (Special Products Label) Chi Coltrane's Golden Classics, was released in 1990.

 

 

Chi Coltrane LP

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This Chi Coltrane's Golden Classics was a reedition of her first "Best of Chi Coltrane" with two more additionnal cuts.

 

 

El Dorado CBS WWF

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In 1990, Her "Shot To Despair" could be heard on the Rain Forest Project "El Dorado" CD.

 

yesterdaytoday&forever

"Yesterday, Today & Forever"

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Chi Coltrane's "Yesterday, Today & Forever", was released in 2008.

 

Main awards:

A "Gold Hammer" and a "Silver Hammer" as "Best Female Artist".

18th Annual Music Industry (02/21/1999 in Los Angeles)

 

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Note:

Chi's birthday is quoted "11/16" according to the US standard which becomes "16/11" according to the French one.

 

Bar

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Chi Portrait

 

 

http://www.locoloboevents.com/loco_classicrock.shtml

Chi Coltrane’s interest in music began early and by the time she was twelve, she was playing eight instruments— her favorite being the piano. As a teen, she began performing in some of Chicago’s hippest clubs. The word spread that a young, vibrant talent had emerged. Soon after, Chi made her stunning overseas debut when she starred as guest star of the USA at the International Rock Festival before 50,000 people in Rio de Janiero. She ‘tore the house down’ with her electrifying vocals and introspective songs. She returned to the States and immediately signed with Columbia Records.

Her premier release simply entitled “Chi Coltrane” quickly climbed up the charts on the strength of the monster hit single “Thunder and Lightning”. By summer’s end, the track had reached the Top Ten worldwide, selling millions of copies. Following an extensive tour schedule, Chi returned to the studio and 1 1/2 years later released her next album “Let It Ride”. The reviews were extraordinary! With her exceptional songwriting, powerful piano playing and unmistakable voice, when was touted the “Queen of Rock”, the female Elton John and natural successor to Janis Joplin. Rolling Stone Magazine described Chi as a “rip-snorting female vocalist/composer/producer whose performances are nothing less than searing.” The San Francisco Chronicle said that being a singer, songwriter and musician was not exactly lunhearad of, “but she is also very good at all three and has two things going for her beyond talent; an engrossing urgency in her voice and a distinctive presence and beauty.” Chi began making guest appearances on numerous Network TV specials, including NBC’s “The Tonight Show”.

Chi sur scène

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Chi toured extensively in the USA developing a loyal core of dedicated fans. This success soon translated itself overseas. Abroad, the impact of her music was overwhelming with sold out performances and multiple Top Ten hits. In Germany, Switzerland, Austria and the Netherlands, she was voted Top Female Artist for two consecutive years.

With the recent release of “Chi Coltrane’s Golden Classics” on the Sony label, Coltrane connects with music lovers everywhere.

Chi’s lifetime work has garnered many awards and accolades, both here in America and aborad, including the coveted European Gold Hammer and Silver Hammer for top Female Artist. She held the #1 position in the Musik Express Popularity Poll. In addition, Chi was recently voted one of the Top 50 Musicians of the Century. In 1999 Chi was honored by the 18th Annual Music Industry at their Annual Pre-Grammy Celebration in Los Angeles for her achievements in the field of music.

http://www.locoloboevents.com/loco_classicrock.shtml

 

 

Chi Coltrane Thunder and Lightning
Chi Coltrane Thunder and Lightning

NDR TV Youtube Screen captures

 

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Biography by Charles Donovan

When Chi Coltrane's first single, "Thunder and Lightning" made the US top 20 in 1972, it seemed like the auspicious start of a long and distinguished career.

The timing was right, and the performer appeared to have everything going for her - she was a prodigious pianist, a skilled composer, a fine vocalist, and distinctly photogenic. Furthermore, her style - a sort of ultra-sophisticated take on Carole King and Elton John - was perfect for the times. But, for various reasons (an aversion to self-promotion, in particular), she never consolidated her initial success, and settled instead for a small, but loyal cult following, both in North America and Europe.

Chi (pronounced "shy") Coltrane (b.Nov 16, 1942 - not 1948 as usually quoted - Racine, Wisconsin) was one of seven children born to a Canadian mother, and a German violinist father. She studied a number of instruments as a child, and gave her first piano recital at 12. In 1970, she formed Chicago Coltrane, playing blues, funk and gospel in local clubs and bars.

She was signed to Columbia in 1972, on the strength of a six-song demo tape, and her first album, the entirely self-written Chi Coltrane appeared that year. In November 1972, her first single "Thunder and Lightning" reached number 17.
Chi Coltrane was well-received critically, and spent three months in the lower reaches of the top 200.

In 1973 Coltrane attended the Salter School of Music in Los Angeles, and made another album (Let It Ride), which was greeted with similar acclaim to her first, but which failed to find an audience. Coltrane sought solace and inspiration in religion (she was allegedly fiercely committed to bible study, and Jesus, but disinclined to follow organised religion), and put her recording career on hold for a few years. Following the release of Road To Tomorrow in 1977, Coltrane moved to Europe and signed with Teldec, releasing three albums during the 80s, each with more of a new-wave, Euro-rock flavour than her early records. Since the last of these (1986's The Message), her profile has been extremely low. Apart from some soundtrack work in Germany, and a collaboration with Tangerine Dream in 1991, there has been little activity from her, although material from her first two albums appeared on CD during the 90s. (allmusic)

 

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Charm, naïveté and musicianship

http://echoesinthewind.blogspot.com/2007/04/charm-navet-and-musicianship.html

http://echoesinthewind.blogspot.com/2007_04_01_archive.html

...//...

And I decided to go ahead.

That’s because Chi Coltrane has a unique sound to it, one that places it securely in its time, and one that I think still holds some interest for those who were around then and would also interest those who’ve never heard it.

Chi Coltrane was a Wisconsin girl, born in 1948, says All Music Guide. After Columbia released Chi Coltrane, for which she wrote all eleven songs, AMG says that stardom seemed assured, given her style, which it called “a sort of ultra-sophisticated take on Carole King and Elton John,” and her song-writing, which it praised both musically and lyrically.

(Her debut album brought her some attention and a Top 40 hit. But Let It Ride, Coltrane’s 1973 release, failed to find an audience, says AMG, and she put her career on hold for a few years, eventually releasing Road To Tomorrow in 1977. After that, AMG says, she moved to Europe, where she released three albums in a new wave, euro-rock style during the Eighties. She did some soundtrack work and then collaborated with Tangerine Dream in 1990. There’s been nothing from her since.)

Musically, Chi Coltrane was very good, showing Coltrane with the vocal and instrumental ability – she played all the keyboard parts on the record – to handle a diverse number of styles, from the white soul of “Thunder And Lightning” and the gospel of “Go Like Elijah,” to the quiet confessionals of “Goodbye John” and “It’s Really Come To This.” In addition, Coltrane was secure in writing about her faith without sounding preachy. AMG says she was “allegedly fiercely committed to bible study, and Jesus, but disinclined to follow organised religion,” which would not have been uncommon at the time. Her faith-based songs – “The Tree,” especially, but also portions of her anti-war “I Will Not Dance” and the album closer, “The Wheel Of Life” – remind me just a little of the clear-eyed but somewhat naïve faith expressed in other pop songs of the time, most notably “Put Your Hand In The Hand,” the No. 2 hit by the Canadian group Ocean.

I think it was that quality in her lyrics – a slight bit of naïveté balanced with that clear-eyed and clear-headed assessment of the life choices she’s facing in her songs –that attracted me to this album again as I listened over the weekend. Coltrane’s lyrics are not sophisticated. They’re not witty. Nor are they simplistic or vague. They sound very much like the efforts of an intelligent young woman trying to make sense of the world, which should really be no surprise. And, listening to them for the first time in years, I found them charming.

Combine that with her music – she shows a sure sense of melody, seeming so at home in her music that it must have been scary and thrilling for Coltrane’s producers thirty-five years ago – and Chi Coltrane is a record that I thought I just had to share. It’s not without flaws: As charming as they are, her lyrics could have used a little more craft in terms of meter and rhyme, and a couple of the more contemplative songs sound a little similar.

The musicians backing Coltrane on her debut included some of the major studio players of the time: Jim Gordon on drums, Larry Knechtel and Lee Sklar on bass and horns arranged by Jim Horn.

...//...

 

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http://cgi.befr.ebay.be/Chi-COLTRANE-orig-1972-debut-LP-Thunder-Lightning_W0QQitemZ280162304465QQihZ018QQcategoryZ306QQtcZphotoQQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

It's clear from the opening moments of Chi Coltrane's self-titled 1972 debut LP that she's a singer/songwriter a few musical cuts above the rest. This is particularly evident in her keyboard prowess. Where even the most respected artists of the genre could only play basic block chords or arpeggios (Laura Nyro and Joni Mitchell, respectively), Coltrane is a player's player, and an equal of any session musician. The eleven songs on Chi Coltrane give her ample opportunity to show off. "Thunder and Lightning" (an absolute white soul gem) was her first single, and a top 20 hit, but it tells only a fraction of the story. The rest of the album displays a complete mastery and understanding of gospel ("Go Like Elijah"), as well as music of both the Classical and Romantic periods ("The Wheel of Life"), and in addition, she comes up with a few hybrids of her own ("You Were My Friend"). Her vocals, alternatively tender, spirited, angry, and with a wonderful "on-the-verge-of-tears" quality, invest every cut with a compelling sense of drama and anxiety. Her lyrics are clear-headed, unpretentious and direct, drawn mainly on love, friendship, religion (tentatively), and philosophy. Although much press attention focused at the time on her glacial, blonde good looks (I confess, when I first heard her sing "Thunder & Lightning" on the radio in 1972, I was expecting more Roberta Flack, less Peggy Lipton), this album was a triumph of style and substance in equal measure.

 

 

 

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Los Angeles Free press

71/06/04

Chi Coltrane debuts

by Chris Van Ness

 

Chi Coltrane debuts

Credit photo: Andy Perl

Chi Coltrane debuts

 

 

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Record Mirror

"Chi: more than just a face"

by Rick Sanders

Record Mirror April 14/1973

 

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Magazine Cosmopilitan

Cosmopolitan 1973/10

 

Here comes . . .

There goes . . . Chi Coltrane . .

by Richard Boeth

 

This is all about the possible rise of a rock singer named Chi Coltrane, but we need a little background music first....

Whenever I think upon popular American heroes, I never fail to cast the mind back to the fighter pilots of World War II - authentic folk idols they were, ever ready to fly their Birds of Paradise up the other guy's nose if it meant a few less Nips for Uncle Sammy to have to worry about. Since then, it seems, we have got to the point where almost all our pop heroes have something basic in common with World War II fighter pilots-one brief but glorious arc across the sky as the whole nation cheers, then phooom and on to the next folk hero. Andy Warhol, in his ghostly way, caught the essence of it when he remarked that in the next generation, everybody in the whole world is going to be famous-for five minutes.

Until that era arrives, we have a pretty good approximation of it in the institution of the rock star. I don't refer here to the neighborhood rock star, earning $100 a weekend at the Dew Drop Inn and wondering where to send that demonstration record he made last month in somebody's basement. I was thinking of the thousand more or less professional groups and singles that have come and gone in the last decade. They played for $2,000 or so a night- superloud, derivative electronic whingwhang with too much past and no future-warming up the concert crowds for Sly and the Family Stone or Poco, and maybe putting out one album on Buddah Records, plus a hit single that reached number eighty-seven on the charts. These near-miss groups got a very brief, very dizzy ride for their pains. One minute the air was thick with grass and adulation; they rode limos to the airport with groupies in the glove compartment and a tax man riding shotgun trying to help them figure out where last year's $200,000 went. The next minute everything was gone (it wasn't really there to begin with, of course), and the lead singer was back driving a taxi in Detroit and dreaming of the second big break that would almost surely never come.

There is a big dream behind it all, however-and it is this large economy-size job that keeps the whole carnival spinning. Every knock- kneed banjo player, every mudcolored group catastrophe, has visions of becoming the rock trade's newest Messiah: the He, She or It who will turn out to be another true superstar, someone who will bridge the great divide between rock and pop and will go on selling records, year after year and million after million. Presley, the Beatles, Dylan, the Stones, now maybe James Taylor, Carole King, Cat Stevens-all these performers were and are true superstars, true perennials, arners of legitimate bankable millions in their own right and of millions more for all those record companies, electronics manufacturers, rack jobbers, and simple unassuming ticket-scalpers who work the Felt Forum and the Portland Auditorium. Where will we find their like again?

Where, indeed? Actually, the superstars are hardly monuments to permanence themselves (always excepting Presley). Hendrix, Joplin and Morrison are dead, the Beatles have split up, and while it may be too early to predict just when the string will run out on the rest, it doesn't seem unfair to say that rock superstars have a natural performing life of a decade or less. That's enough, really. The economics of the music business today are such that Dylan can make more money in five years than Duke Ellington has in fifty-so five colossal years count as a whole career now, and the record companies are constantly on the prowl for anyone with any sort of potential for making it into orbit that long. So it's a fascinating and elusive chase, made up in about equal parts of hard show-biz professionalism and soft, dreamy-eyed divination and wishful thinking. The odds are enormously against anyone's making it all the way to the top rung, but the rewards are so huge up there that the performers and the record companies alike can't resist taking an expensive crack at it whenever the slightest plausible long shot presents itself. So here, for your edification, is the story of one Plausible Long Shot: a pop-rock singer still only in the larval stage, promotionally speaking, but one who has been picked out for the big push by Columbia Records, which has a track record of pouring more money, determination and know-how into these cosmic creations than anyone in the business. And still the odds are enormous that our heroine won't be any more of a household name a year from now than she is today. What makes it fun is the other possibility, the one- in-a-million chance that by the time you read this our heroine will be rubbing royalties with Melanie and Laura Nyro-or maybe even with Carly Simon and Carole King. Ready, set, go.

She is called Chi Coltrane, and she wants it known that this is her real name, so why not? The Chi is pronounced "shy," the Coltrane is no relation to the great jazzman John Coltrane, and it is possible that you have heard of her already. Her first album, which came out in the spring of 1972, sold something close to 100,000 copies (and we shall have more to say on this in a moment). One single derived from that album, a driving, up-tempo member called "Thunder and Lightning," reached member thirteen on the national charts that summer, selling about 500,000 copies overall, and in a few cities such as Boston and Chicago it was one of the biggest hits of the season.

Chi is an honest twenty-five now (she usually knocks a couple of years off her age out of fear that the teen-agers, who are every rock musician's lodestar, will have more trouble relating to an older woman), and she is in every way a splendid singer person: smart, gifted, determined, pretty, ballsy, and very good at what she does. What she does is play half a dozen musical instruments, preeminently a piano from which she coaxes everything from piano-bar kitsch to funky back-alley blues, and sings. Her songs cut across a similar range: reedy little Carole King-like laments, whammy up-tempo revival numbers, earnest and well-meant blues that just don't have enough sex in them to warrant comparison with Joplin (much less Nina Simone) but that sound pretty good in comparison to a nice sweet thing like, say, Carly Simon. Chi writes all her own material, too. Shez didn't use to, not until a couple of years ago, but then she figured out that all the really big rock stars write their owns songs. Anything the big girls do, Chi figures she can do, too.

 

Illustration Cosmopolitan

 

It would seem from all these qualifications that Chi is pretty well set. She has talent, experience, one well-received if not quite sensational album already on the market and another aborning. Best of all, she boasts the standard one plus-four recording contract with Columbia - meaning that Columbia promises to bring out one Coltrane LP in the first year of their association (as it has already done), with the option to renew each year for four more years. Chi's option for the second year has already been picked up, and Columbia remains genuinely and all but irrepressibly excited about her future. Too many people believe in Chi for her to have much chance of failing-everybody from Clive Davis, [then] company president, on down," says Bob Altschuler, Columbia's publicity chief but not a wholly irresponsible source of information for all that. "It's overwhelming, it's all one-sided. Everybody thinks she's going to be the next real superstar." And this could be the truth.

So what is this girl's problem'? Why is all the talk about Chi's future when it would seem to any casual observer that she is doing pretty well right now? Answers in a moment, but first let me bolster the illusion of her present success even further. Just from her first album- with its hit single, "Thunder and Lightning" - Chi would seem to have pulled in enough money to keep anyone but a glutton in truffles, for a few months, anyway. Under her contract with Columbia, she earns about forty-five cents from every LP as a performer, plus another twenty cents as composer- a total of almost $60,000 if we figure on a conservative basis of ninety thousand albums sold. The single brought her a nickel a record-add another $25,000. Then there were air-plays; as composer of " "Thunder and Lightning," she received two cents every time the song was played on a commercial radio station in this country. Figure six plays a day on 3.600 radio stations for the four weeks the record was hot, and that comes to another $12,000 or so, making for a grand total (flourish of trumpets) of about $85.000, not counting the $21,000 that Columbia, a talent agency, and various clubs threw in last August to underwrite a promotional tour.

That's not bad bread, or at least it wouldn't be if it were real. But the truth is that Chi is living in a $200-a-month apartment in West Hollywood, on the unfashionable side of the Sunset Strip. She drives a battered heap in place of the white Lincoln Continental she once had in Chicago (it got totaled by an oil truck), and the mink coat once shimmering in the closet has long since been sold to pay the rent. All the money from her records has gone to pay off various necessary advances from Columbia, and she is tens of thousands of dollars "in debt" to the record company, various lawyers, agents, managers and arrangers. It's impossible to put a hard figure on Chi's "indebtedness," because much of it is as illusory as her wealth, that is. Various people and companies have advanced her all kinds of services, facilities and expertise in the expectation that she will someday make it big. If she does, she pays them off; if not, or if she drops out to join a Nepalese nunnery, everyone's all square. In the meantime, though, Chi literally struggles along close to flat - broke on what looks at first glance like an "income" of better than $100,000 a year but is, he truth, a fraction of that. What she actually lived on for the last five months of 1972 was $3,000 carefully saved from her promotional tour.

To understand how this very appealing girl got into this perfectly typical fix (typical for a young recording artist, anyway), we had better double back to the thrilling days of yesteryear when Chi was trying to hack it as a sometime saloon pianist, sometime hard-rock bandleader in Chicago. This would have been the late summer of 1971, and things were both good and bad for Chi. She had spent the year before pouring most of her money, energy and soul into trying to make a go of her own band, known (naturally) as Chi Coltrane, and had come out of the experience weary, broke and sort of brittle - the state of mind in which you think you are tough as hell but you're really ready to crack the minute somebody taps on you. Add to the saga an unsuccessful marriage that had finally ended after four draggy years - that was a help. She had also been picked to represent the U.S. at an international rock festival in Rio (Elton John had been U.S. representative the year before), and that was good. Chi was also working regularly in such places as the Executive House and the Back End in Chicago, but the long- range career didn't seem to have many mountaintops in its future, and Chi was perhaps a little more receptive than she should have been when a Chicago theatrical personage told her he had the contacts to put her into records and concerts-otherwise known as The Big Time. Chi signed him on as her personal manager, then began discovering, she says, that his contacts weren't quite the right sort. "He knew a lot of actors and actresses," she says, but that didn't help me." Her new manager did persuade her to move to the West Coast, however, and she booked herself into a couple of pretty good clubs and wangled some guest shots on national TV, notably on the Merv Griffin show. What she needed, however, was a record contract, and that still wasn't forthcoming. So Chi took on another partner, an able and knowledgeable independent record producer named Mike Gruber, and with him formed Just Us Productions, whose sole purpose was to package and peddle Chi Coltrane to a big record company.

That, as it turned out, was a fairly easy thing to do. Chi had been writing material for some months, and had six songs ready to go; using just bass, drums and a guitar for background, and spending little more than $1,000, Chi and Gruber produced a demonstration tape with six songs on it. Gruber then called Paul Baratta, a veteran Artists and Repertoire executive at Columbia's Los Angeles office, and said, "I have a tape of Chi Coltrane's, and I think she's going to be a superstar." Veteran A&R men are supposed to be skeptical, but Baratta evidently didn't take much persuading. An oldtime theatrical casting agent, he tends to judge people by how they move. When he saw Chi walk into his office-all chunky hard-packed energy, with that pretty blond head riding above - he instantly became the mentor, guide and champion she had been looking for ever since she started singing for nickels and dimes in Zion, Illinois, seven years earlier. "Even before I heard anything,'' Baratta told me, "I thought she was the most emotion-filled talent I'd ever felt." The demo nailed it. Baratta immediately called Clive Davis at executive headquarters in New York and insisted on fetching Chi with him to meet Davis. "Davis would have gone along just on my faith." Baratta says, "but I wanted him to be involved."

Chi went to New York, conquered Davis, and went back out to the Coast to cut her first record in February of 1972. An uptown production using nine first-rate sidemen and a chorus; the eleven tunes took two weeks to record, with everybody working ten six-hour sessions, and then three weeks on top of that to do the "mixing" (the balancing and blending of song and rhythm tracks, and in this case the addition electronically of occasional horn or string backgrounds). When it was done, Chi sent the master tape to New York, where the ponderous machinery of Columbia's marketing and promotion departments groaned into action. In all, about fifty different executives and department heads crowded into Clive Davis's office to listen to the master tape (for most of them, it was the first time they had heard their latest phenom). Preliminary decisions were made about which songs might go best as singles. Chi herself-who had done everything from writing arrangements to booking hotel space in her knockabout musical career-flew into New York again and made herself known and agreeable to all the key hands, including the executives in charge of A&R, marketing, artist relations, publicity, cover design, the lot. About $10,000 was budgeted for ads, mostly in trade publications: a free-lance West Coast publicity outfit was signed on to do additional tub-thumping at $800 a week: a three- month tour was laid on for Chi and a backup group in Denver, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, Brooklyn, Washington (D.C.), Los Angeles and Ipswich (Massachusetts).

Chi now calls the tour "the hardest thing I've ever done in my life." Daddy Columbia had included a road manager in the traveling carnival, but Chi's years in the back alleys of the music business had left her with the feeling-which she still has, to the eye-rolling annoyance of some of the people who work with her-that nothing will ever get done unless she does it. "I put together the group, made air and hotel reservations, paid the bills, handled the phone calls, talked to writers and deejays, and rented the trucks for the sound equipment," Chi told me at lunch in New York recently. "There were supposed to be two guys doubling up in each of two hotel rooms, and me in a single. But two of them were clean livers and two were swingers. The swingers wanted a room of their own, so I ended up sleeping on a cot with the two clean livers while the swingers got room to play."

The purpose of the tour, of course, was not simply to introduce Chi to new club audiences but to reach the disc jockeys, who for the most part were tranquilly unaware of her existence. The ultimate object was what Altschuler calls "the single hardest thing in the whole world-getting airplay."

Whether it was the tour, Columbia's promotion efforts, the merit of the album itself, including the now-released single of "Thunder and Lightning," whatever was most responsible for turning the trick, Chi did begin to get her precious air-play soon after her tour began in May. Boston was the first city to go for her in a big way: the disc jockeys in Chicago picked her up a little later (without knowing what was happening in Boston), and several other key areas followed. New York didn't join the group. Despite a big ride on WCBS-FM, "Thunder and Lightning" was never a major wow in New York, a provincial town, musically speaking, which generally doesn't catch on to a new singer until all the rest of the world has caught on first. Still, the single made it up to number thirteen nationwide one week, a performance that, for a newcomer, ranks somewhere between sensational and dynamite.

All these happy successes represent the rosy side of the saga of the Plausible Long-Shot. What I've left out so far, in the interests of narrative clarity and suspense, is the fact that Chi Coltrane during this period of her glamorous emergence into the big time was as hassled and frightened as a chick can be -and, if anything, getting poorer by the minute. The economics of the record business is made up of some dazzling high-energy numbers, but these very rarely break down to the immediate enrichment of the performer.

The largest worm in the apple is that all recording artists pay the production costs on their own records-or "borrow" them, as is more likely, as an advance from the record company. Chi's first LP was not an extravagant production, but it was well and carefully done, with good musicians and technical equipment and no corners cut in the studio. The result was that the record cost Columbia something close to $100,000 to produce, all of which went down in the little black ledger to be deducted from Chi's royalties as they came in. As we saw earlier, Chi has earned about $60,000 from the LP so far on sales of about ninety thousand copies-so she still owes the record company something like $40,000 just to get off the nut on her first LP. This may or may not be unfair, but is certainly standard practice: Paul Baratta told me that a performer has to figure on selling about 175,000 LPs and perhaps half a million singles before he, she or it begins to show a net plus.

The record company itself is not in so tough a bind. Though Columbia pays promotional and marketing expenses out of its own pocket, it still figures to net close to a dollar on the $3 wholesale price of a pop or rock LP. What this means is that the record company-unlike the performer-breaks even on LP sales of about fifty thousand, so Columbia made out all right on Chi's first album.

In Chi's case, the financial picture was a good deal worse even than we've seen so far. All the figures about royalties up to this point have been given as if these earnings went wholly to Chi-which they rather spectacularly did not. By the time she had finished signing up with her personal agent in Chicago-she is still bound to him in some mysterious legal way and Mike Gruber and Just Us Productions in Los Angeles, Chi had managed to divest herself of something more than 50 percent of her own earnings, often in fairly complicated ways. All her music, for example, was copyrighted and published under the name Chinick Music-a partnership between her and her original manager. So there went half of her composer's royalties right there, and it would not have been unusual (though I do not know that was the case here) for her manager to have taken about - 25 percent of her half of these royalties as a fee for personal services. Just Us Productions, which is to say Mike Gruber, also came in for a percentage of her earnings off the top, and there were a hundred other hidden costs for a neophyte to hang up against. An arranger named Toxey French made a few suggestions during the cutting of Chi's LP (almost none of them were used, she says) and submitted a bill for $1,800. This was not out of the ordinary in any way, but Chi still feels that she was booby-trapped. "Toxey didn't rip me off," she said. My own inexperience ripped me off." All in all, Chi was cut up so many ways that her nominal earnings of $100,000 in 1972 really came down to less than a half of that - and every penny of what she did make was spoken for before she properly got her hands on it, anyway. Chi has now hired some good lawyers (high-priced ones) to try to negotiate her way out of this mess with all her managers and agents but the likelihood is that she is going to have to be very rich indeed before she stops being poor.

What keeps this story from being an all-out tear-jerker is the internal evidence that Chi may well have survived too much for too long to let anything stop her when she is this close to cashing in big. She grew up grubby-poor in the rundown factory town of Racine, Wisconsin, one of seven children in a family so rootless that Chi attended twelve different grade schools in eight years. Music was her one salvation. She learned to play about eight instruments by ear, the piano supreme among them, and took her early influences where she found them - Strauss waltzes, Stephen Foster, even Liberace on the tiny tube. Leaving at seventeen she began singing weekends, just for kicks, with bands in small clubs just across the state line in Illinois. More out of boredom than anything else, she began working a few little clubs in Chicago about five years ago. From the start, she had a sort of schizophrenic career. Part of the time she spent singing rock, blues and gospel with black bands in out-of-the-way joints in Chicago; part of the time she spent hired out (at about $300 a week) to genteel cocktail bars, playing piano and crooning. "The piano bars were a drag," she says. But the money was good there, and she stayed at it at least part-time until the summer of 1970. Chi's subsequent attempts to make it as a rock star- first with her band, and then later as a solo performer-not only took most of her assets but also most of what was left of her trust in her fellow man. It is perhaps not irrelevant that she became a Jesus freak in those dark days-and still is, though she doesn't talk about it much except among other JFs. Christian fellowship provides her only deep human contact: she has little to do with guys, singular or plural, and has no real friends, except maybe for Columbia's avuncular Paul Baratta and his wife.

But soon the college and concert dates and the touring will resume, with Columbia Records doing its part by ferrying in disc jockeys, wholesalers, newspaper reviewers, and everyone else in the business to listen to the new sensation. By that time, the new LP will be out, and Chi will have passed one more milestone on the rock star's road to success. What milestone? Why, Chi Coltrane will be another $100,000 or so in the hole, and that's the surest sign of stardom there is.

 

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