Meditations on Coltrane's Legacies

by Salim Washington

Although John Coltrane achieved canonical stature during his lifetime, the meaning and even the worth of his music are still controversial more than three decades after his death. Just as there are multiple Coltranes, corresponding to the various styles and techniques that he employed throughout his career, there are multiple Coltrane legacies as articulated by musicians, listeners, musicologists, critics, poets, writers, and even theologians.

The assessments of Coltrane tend to fall into one of four groups. Primary among these various legacies is Coltrane the innovator in American music. Coltrane is seen as an unusually fecund, almost continually evolving artist, whose impact on the language and practice of jazz was as paradigmatic as that of Louis Armstrong or Charles Parker. Another legacy for Coltrane is as an iconic figure for those who would honor the tradition of black creative genius in America. While this assessment is based upon Coltrane’s musical achievements, those who see his significance in this light regard him as a black champion of freedom and justice.

Alternatively, others regard Coltrane as a charlatan. These commentators vilify Coltrane as the man who help to kill jazz, or at least hindered its progress due to the musicians who follow the “wrong” aspects of Coltrane’s oeuvre. Some of the people in this camp allow that Coltrane is an important figure in the music, but feel that he threw away the promise that shone through his pre-1965 virtuosity, and squandered it on self-indulgent assaults against the beauty, and even meaning, in jazz.¹ Finally, for still others there is Coltrane the spirit-filled man who, through both his art and his life, found a way to wed compassion and religious expression to the pursuit of truth and wisdom. This is Coltrane the prophet, who appeals to the spirit, leading himself and his listeners towards worshipful appreciation of life and creation, and compassion towards humanity. The vertical axis of man’s faith-based relation to God is accompanied by a concern with man’s Earthly relationships. His music calls for love, peace, and even serenity, while at the same time fully acknowledging the need to truthfully confront the terrible and the potentially devastating.

Coltrane’s place as an innovator in jazz is secure, as there are now several generations of jazz musicians who have taken up aspects of his personal idiom as standard material to be absorbed by all improvisers. Some of these innovations are harmonic, including extensions upon the discoveries in diatonic harmony that the beboppers offered as well as the introduction of Indian and African melodic materials in jazz practice. His tritonic harmonic substitutions are also standard fare for jazz musicians, as is the more general abstraction of harmonic motion in major or minor thirds (rather than fourths or fifths), which he also explored during the same period. The harmonic sequences that Coltrane utilized to reharmonize standard jazz progressions in songs like “Giant Steps,” “Countdown,” “26-2,” “But Not For Me,” and “Body and Soul” have become known as “Coltrane changes.”

The compositional techniques utilized in his later periods are equally influential. The introduction of playing in a single mode for long, indeterminate periods is another compositional practice that was widely accepted in jazz due to Coltrane’s example. The abolition of harmonic cycles helped to open the door to Coltrane’s introduction of long enduring evocations of timelessness, and hence spirituality, that are influenced by the music of various African and Indian cultures through such practices as rhythmic chanting or the playing of ragas. Even more fundamental are the expanded timbral qualities and extended range of Coltrane’s saxophone playing.

Another way to view Coltrane as an innovator is through a consideration of him as a performer. Bootleg videos of Coltrane’s 1965 tour and photographs of him from this time on reveal a bodily involvement that was quite unrestrained compared to the videos and photographs of his earlier years. As his performance practices evolved, Coltrane became less restricted by “correct” posture and instrumental technique, just as he became less bound to the conventions of harmony or of sound production. This unself-conscious absorption in Coltrane’s late performance style is part of a virtuosic jazz act that in Coltrane’s social moment signified a transcendent process and an exalted state of concentration. It also implies that nothing is held back, that the musician is completely available to his muse, and hence to his audience. Coltrane’s musical innovations combined his harmonic and melodic discoveries with the quartet’s rhythmic innovations.

The idea that the performing musician is a conduit brings the notion of spiritual involvement to the fore. First, the preparation for the transcendent performance relies upon inspiration and genius as much as the products of the titanic composer. Second, the performer must have a degree of humility to be able to be so transparent about his/her struggles with the form and the message of their art. Of course, this kind of generosity with the spirit has always been recognized as a hallmark of African American performance style, and is often what is referred to as “soul.” What makes Coltrane so compelling as a performer is that he was not only one of the most soulful players, but also one of the most virtuosic, technically and harmonically, and one of the most conceptually visionary as well.

Not everyone hears innovation and genius in Coltrane’s music, and indeed, some question his basic competence. Some of his detractors, such as Ira Gitler, have since become admirers of his music. In addition, there is the perhaps tacit apology from one of Coltrane’s harshest critics, John Tynan, who demonized Coltrane while he was alive, but since the saxophonist’s death has honored him by publishing transcriptions of his solos. However, many remain at least skeptical of Coltrane’s late phases, and for some, Coltrane’s chief legacy is not as innovator, but as a charlatan. This skepticism about his music during his later phases at times lapsed into hostility when some critics speculated about the putative harm done to jazz by those who followed his example.

Coltrane and his disciples were accused of being “anti-jazz” by certain quarters of the critical establishment in the 1960s, and even held responsible for dwindling jazz audiences in the decades since. In Down Beat’s 1998 commemorative issue on Coltrane, John McDonough gave a dissenting opinion to the hagiography that lay within. In his article “Dissin’ the Trane,” McDonough makes an impassioned plea for Coltrane skeptics to come out of the closet. Arguing that Coltrane’s version of “In a Sentimental Mood” would have been a preferable “gift to God” than “A Love Supreme,” he, in effect, disparages Coltrane’s personal vision, implying that Coltrane should have remained closer to Ellington in his muse:

Unfortunately, the longer Coltrane played, the more elusive the results became. In his last years, the command and lucidity that had brought him to greatness seemed to disintegrate under his fingers. After the almost unlistenable Ascension, he became lost in his own quest, a not-ready-for prime time player and mystic always in motion in the hopes that he might, by some accident, bump into an idea.²

At the heart of this kind of criticism is a basic unwillingness to understand the music on its own terms. McDonough condemns “A Love Supreme” as a chant, without commenting that Coltrane does nothing to disguise this fact. Given Coltrane’s investigations into the world’s religions, it is, in fact, the point. The non-linear sense of time and the disruption of the Cartesian world through spirit possession are practices that are common in the world’s sacred musics, and they were consciously incorporated into Coltrane’s work.

However, McDonough is right that this music is not for prime-time consumption. His instincts show through in his selection of Coltrane’s exquisite “In a Sentimental Mood” as better suited to represent Coltrane than what he calls the “pontifical, self-asserted pretenses of ‘A Love Supreme.’” McDonough’s conservative opinions about American music are not limited to Coltrane, but extend to all who questioned the European hegemony over the nation’s musical language. This kind of critique does not value the quality of risk-taking exemplified in the music in part through explorations of new systems of sound and forms.

Cornel West suggests that the “professionalization of the scientific endeavor” results in the modern evasion of the dark side of humanity. The resultant idolatry of technique that West identifies in the public notion of the scientific has found its way into the realm of art. A school of jazz criticism has flourished since Coltrane’s time, and especially in the last two decades, that values perfect execution over risk-taking, that idealizes the hip or the clever idea over and above the notion of feeling the spirit through art. Coltrane’s example stands out as one of the more comprehensive rejoinders to this point of view.

Not all of those critical of Coltrane are so dismissive. Gerald Early paints a picture of Coltrane as a “brilliant,” if “greatly flawed” artist. Nevertheless, he does not hear Coltrane as earnest, but rather as obsessed. His appreciation for Coltrane does not come from an aesthetic point of view, but chiefly from a technical one. Thus, he praises Coltrane for being “a very proficient player—arguably the best technician of the tenor and soprano saxophone in the history of jazz....”³

Despite whatever empathy Early, as a black intellectual, may have for Coltrane and his devotees, he has little sympathy and no admiration for them with respect to their stance on the relationship between artistic innovation and “therapeutic redemptive spirituality.” He dismisses Coltrane’s grasp of religion as “not profound” on the basis of his pantheistic poem printed on the cover jacket of A Love Supreme. He also finds his music to be misguided, if not insubstantial. Early simply does not hear in Coltrane’s music what sympathetic listeners claim is there: terrifying beauty, redemptive spirituality, earnest goodness, and courage.

These perceived qualities in Coltrane’s work are what fuel his legacy as a cultural prophet. While the writers of the Black Arts movement, like Amiri Baraka and Henry Dumas, saw Coltrane as a black avenger who murdered white forms musically, and white oppression symbolically, others understand him as the bearer of the message, the songs that uplift souls. As a religious expression, his message is, of course, decidedly non-sectarian, as the sacred rituals take place in that most secular of places, the jazz club. In a sense, the ritualistic nature of his mature stages and the willingness to be explicitly spiritual in non-consecrated spaces evoke the sacred worldview of traditional societies rather than the compartmentalized modern world.

However, Coltrane’s music and understanding are modern, and his spiritual message was non-religious in the sense of expressing no single dogma. He was ecumenical in his studies of both religion and music. He was known to travel with the sacred books of various world religions, and was an avid student of the world’s folk musics. Indeed, his incorporation of Indian, South American, and African musical elements into jazz in some ways was a prototype of what we today call world music.

The St. John Coltrane African Orthodox Church, located in San Francisco for the past three decades, has taken Coltrane’s example of courage and truth-seeking to formal principles in their version of Christianity. It began as a group of revolutionary black nationalists, and evolved into a group of spiritualists learning the Vedic scriptures and practices under the leadership of Coltrane’s widow, Alice Coltrane. The church’s liturgy is a mixture of Church of God in Christ practices—chants, songs, glossolalia, Bible-based, sanctified preaching—and the music of John Coltrane. In addition to holding Sunday school and other traditional church activities, the church offers food and clothing to poor people, and airs a daily broadcast of Coltrane’s music over community radio station KPOO. The Pentecostal character of the worship service hearkens to the spirit-filled, emphatic voice of Coltrane’s saxophone. Coltrane’s music from 1957 onward is understood a sacred text and figures prominently in the church’s liturgy.⁴

Because of certain events in Coltrane’s personal life, and certainly the music he created through his personal muse, we know that Coltrane was well aware of what Cornel West refers to as the “dark side of modernity.” This underside of modernity is, of course, experienced by all of humanity, but in a particular fashion by black folk in America. Blacks have paid a disproportionate cost for so much of the spoils of the nation without being fully included in the benefits and advantages of our aspirations towards democracy or modern enlightenment. African American culture therefore necessarily remains in tension with the nation’s view of itself as innocent and as somehow being outside of the responsibility of history.

In a nation that is so identified with modernity, progress, and near invincibility, there is a push for perpetual celebration. West argues that often modernity’s celebration gives way to an evasion of the fundamental problems of human existence, of “death, disease, dread, and despair.” It is the confrontation with these ever present conditions, along with the acceptance of the challenges and techniques of modernity, that has allowed the jazz/blues aesthetic to escape the sentimentality of much of American culture. Coltrane’s music was ultimately a meditation upon the joy and beauty that is possible in human life through knowledge and understanding of reality and devotion to goodness. His deep awareness of death and disappointment tempered his celebration through music, and retained the character of struggle that is necessary to gain real understanding of the fundamental conditions of human existence.

Jazz has always been associated with such celebration and with the spirit of modernity. Albert Murray’s insight into the blues (which for him includes jazz as a refined expression of the blues) also associates the music with a celebration. In this case, it is a celebration of victory in the heroic battle between the individual and the cosmos. Murray also emphasizes the more mundane impulses such as the desire to play or compete with oneself that informs the music as well. Coltrane’s music embodied these principles in such a way as to stand against the idolatry of technique that has been the potential danger of jazz ever since it became primarily a listener’s music rather than a dance music in the 1940s. Coltrane certainly embraced technical superiority and a particular methodical, scientific approach to his musical explorations. Yet, he always retained in his music a connection to black vernacular traditions, traditions in which the emotional and the spiritual were categories at least as important as the intellectual.

The revolutionary potential that is at the heart of the jazz/blues aesthetic is of course there; it is at least latent. However, Coltrane was not interested in revolution per se. He was methodical and comprehensive in his search and experiments, arriving at his mature voice after a long apprenticeship with several of the music’s greatest practitioners. In a 1963 interview he remarked: “I’m kind of—actually, I’m groping, I’m trying to find my way. I can only try to work out of what I’ve been in…. Work my way forward, so I just try to set one stone upon another as I go.”⁵

The quest for freedom was in Coltrane’s music all along, particularly from 1957 onward. The revolutionary zeal that characterized the music of his later years was the fruit of an evolutionary process that had unfolded more or less continuously for at least a full decade. In part, it is this coupling of such a remarkable respect for tradition with the far-reaching implications of his most radical music that makes him such an authoritative figure. Wedding these two extremes brings to the fore the notion of freedom, as opposed to unrestrained license. The seemingly relentless exuberance that some criticize as self-indulgence was always tempered by the extraordinary levels of preparation as well as a willingness to experiment and take chances. Coltrane’s reverence for truth required that technical restraints be placed upon his art at all times. These restraints, inasmuch as they reflect or seek truth, place the music in service of a higher good. It is intended to render the artistic creation more true to life, and to give its impact greater strength.

At the heart of Coltrane’s spirituality is the search for something he had never heard before, but believed he would recognize if he could only play it. Nevertheless, his goal proved unattainable. Whereas Early asks rhetorically whether the search for more freedom was a search for its own sake, Coltrane’s search for change becomes the journey towards an asymptotic ideal. The American emphasis on improvisation and contingency is thus recognizable in Coltrane’s artistry as a composer and performer. It is as if Coltrane would agree with Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower protagonist, Lauren Olamina, when she declares that “God is Change.” If Coltrane’s God is Change, it is not only St. John’s revolutionary, apocalyptic change of an avenging God as might be easy to construe from such songs as “Om” or “Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,” but also the God of Agape, as depicted in “Peace on Earth” or “Love.”

Coltrane’s quest for the truth engendered huge risks that he met with courage and humility as well as with mastery of his chosen idiom. When he advised aspiring musicians to improve themselves first as persons, he drew a connection between jazz and the moral life. Certainly, for many musicians and African Americanists, Coltrane as prophet is one legitimate way of understanding his ultimate significance. Any student of art can appreciate in Coltrane’s music the effort to wed the Dionysian passion with Apollonian control and form. Perhaps his most lasting legacy will be the example of the spirit-filled life combined with the intellectual rigor that Nietzsche called for in The Birth of Tragedy. Coltrane’s contribution to American civilization is clear, but his significance extends farther. His music represents a compelling example of how artists wrestle with the complexity and profundity of human life.

—Brooklyn College

Notes

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¹ 1965 is the year that Coltrane recorded Ascension, easily his most challenging work from the standpoint of the listener. Most commentators mark this year, with the dissolution of the classic quartet, as the point where Coltrane joins the avant-garde. While most people consider the classic quartet to represent Coltrane at his best, there are those, like John McDonough, who imply that Coltrane’s descent into decadence begins with the classic quartet.

² John McDonough, “Dissin’ the Trane,” Down Beat 65/6 (1998), 26.

³ Gerald Early, “Ode To John Coltrane: A Jazz Musician’s Influence on African American Culture,” The Antioch Review 57/3 (Summer 1999), 372.

⁴ Coltrane had a religious experience in 1957, claiming to have seen God. It is the year he quit his drug addiction and dedicated his life and music to God.

⁵ Interview with Benoit Quersin, in The John Coltrane Companion: Five Decades of Commentary, ed. Carl Woideck (Schirmer, 1998), 120.

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