John Coltrane, 1962
Book Details
Tony Whyton
BEYOND 'A LOVE SUPREME'
John Coltrane and the legacy of an album
160pp. Oxford University Press. Paperback, £11.99.
978 0 19 973324 8
Ajay Heble and Rob Wallace, editors
PEOPLE GET READY
The future of jazz is now!
312pp. Duke University Press. Paperback, £16.99 (US $25.95).
978 0 8223 5425 3
On John Coltrane's A Love Supreme and the dogma of improvisation
ERIC J. IANNELLI
On December 9, 1964, the saxophonist John Coltrane entered the Van Gelder Studios in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, to record A Love Supreme, his now legendary thirty-two-minute jazz suite, in a single session. In addition to Coltrane as bandleader, the line-up consisted of his Classic Quartet: Jimmy Garrison on bass, Elvin Jones on drums and McCoy Tyner on piano, all of whom would later individually recall the subdued atmosphere and the uniquely "telepathic" (as Jones put it) improvisational nature of the recording. Before that date, Coltrane had emerged after five days in isolation – "like Moses coming down from the mountain", according to his wife Alice – with the complete composition in hand, an offering to and ostensible gift from the God he had discovered following a near-fatal overdose some seven years earlier. Indeed, "Psalm", the suite's fourth and final movement, is a musical interpretation of Coltrane's poem to his higher power printed in the album's liner notes.
A Love Supreme was and continues to be exalted for its authenticity and immediacy, for its abjuration of commercial considerations, and for its bold new musical direction not just in Coltrane's own discography but in the entire jazz catalogue. There are, however, a number of paradoxes at play that have supported the mythification of the album and the consecration of its creator. We are to understand that the suite arrived (or was received) fully formed, and yet, improvisation being one of the cherished cornerstones of jazz, we are also invited to believe that it evolved dynamically through a group effort around the barest of motifs. The performance is universally regarded as direct, unadulterated, in line with its spiritual conceit, obscuring the fact that, as a recording, it is mediated by its very nature, and that, to give but one example, Coltrane's infectious chant of the suite's title was achieved using overdub techniques. And though A Love Supreme is still considered an uncurated, air-tight masterpiece, there was indeed a second recording session on December 10 when a second bassist, Art Davis, and the saxophonist Archie Shepp played on alternate sextet takes of "Acknowledgement", as the album's double-disc reissue from 2002 makes clear. Those important, if uneven takes were set aside by the bandleader in favour of the quartet version with the vocal chant, and remained vaulted or lost for several decades.
In Beyond 'A Love Supreme', Tony Whyton neatly identifies the "established dualisms" of which these are a part. He comes not to unseat Coltrane or to repeat the detailed history already laid out by Ashley Kahn in A Love Supreme: The story of John Coltrane's signature album (2002), but to determine why these dualisms exist in the first place, so as to "develop an awareness of our own mythmaking tendencies and the way in which we project desires and imagined narratives onto our listening experiences". The author's broad conclusion is that these dualisms function "mainly as constructs that preserve an idealized view of jazz history that is devoid of complexity and contradiction". They allow us as listeners to indulge in a certain amount of cognitive dissonance, whereby an album that sold half a million copies in its first five years alone remains untainted by the whiff of the commercial, and that same album can simultaneously be lauded as the result of the visionary composition of one man as well as the dynamic and spontaneous creation of an ensemble. It is Whyton's opinion that, by encapsulating so many of these "mythic binaries", A Love Supreme can help us recognize them and take discourse about jazz music – and one is tempted to add, music discourse on the whole, given the parallels that can be drawn between Coltrane's landmark album and one such as Radiohead's Kid A – beyond its customary assortment of taboos, dogmas and idols.
As noted above, one such dogma concerns improvisation, often advanced as one of the "key tenets of great jazz performance that serve to separate the music both from the calculated, rational, and, by implication, sterile and contrived world of western classical music, and from the overproduced, predictable and formulaic sounds of popular music", as Whyton explains with characteristic concision. The belief in the unassailable superiority of improvisation pervades People Get Ready, a collection of essays on the state of free, experimental and avant jazz inspired in part by the Guelph Jazz Festival Colloquium. "Improvisation", Julie Dawn Smith writes in "Listening Trust", an essay on the trombonist George Lewis's quartet, "generates a creative, interactive dimension through sound: a boundless engagement with our own revolutions and the revolutions of the other." In his own contribution on the similarities between punk and free jazz, the volume's editor Rob Wallace argues that the "insidious, racialized fear regarding jazz's collective improvisation" is nothing less than "the fear of a black planet". The closing essay, "People, Don't Get Ready" by the saxophonist and scholar Tracy McMullen, takes a more cosmic view of improvisation, linking the spontaneous, in-the-moment act to Derridean and Buddhist concepts, though it does little to expand on these associations, ending abruptly on a rhetorical, inspirational note. And in a transcribed conversation with Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky) called "Improvising Digital Culture", the pianist and composer Vijay Iyer maintains that "there is . . . no difference between human and experience and the act of improvisation. [T]his insight about improvisation makes it so primal, as a concept, that it becomes almost impossible to place value on it". Improvisation is therefore so valuable that it moves beyond value. Or is perhaps so saddled with meaning that it becomes meaningless.
Somewhat more vexed is the way in which culture, and by association race, is bound up in many of these authors' notions of improvisation. That improvisation has deep roots in African musical traditions is beyond question; likewise, the political dimension of free jazz, which was informed by the social activism and identity politics of the 1960s. But the way the two are repeatedly conflated throughout People Get Ready often makes the practice of boundary-expanding improvisational music appear more like an act of reclamation than a progressively post-racial, pan-cultural art. Greg Tate's essay, "Black Jazz in the Digital Age", acknowledges that "the episteme we know as 'race' in America . . . is not so surgical a tool to use when holding forth on creativity" after seven dazzling, digressive pages of nostalgia that limit jazz to a "black art form" and "a black music". John Szwed, in his piece on Duke Ellington's unaffected avant-gardism, plays up white interest in black artists as a type of cultural voyeurism, "an alien code to be used in order to reject and contradict their own tradition". While not wholly inaccurate, this broad-brushed dismissiveness is disappointing, especially coming from the sedulous biographer of Sun Ra, a founding father of free and fusion jazz who famously shrugged off black/white binaries for the mystical angel race of Saturn. To return briefly to Whyton and his thoughts on that same binary: "[T]he continuation of African American exceptionalist readings of the music today often leads to jazz being represented in essentialist terms" and inevitably "serves to exclude people from accessing an 'authentic' culture".
Some frustrating aspects of People Get Ready are typified in the penultimate contribution, a self-congratulatory panel discussion among members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians during the 2005 Guelph Jazz Festival Colloquium. Here concerns about younger generations' lack of interest in experimental music are addressed by reminiscences about the halcyon days of the 1960s, the popularity of hip-hop is summarily explained by "how much money it makes . . . for a few people in suits", and an audience member's question about the "political and social implications" of the AACM's music is spurned with an unnecessarily confrontational retort. Some of this collection's head-scratching over the inability of contemporary improvised jazz to attract a wider audience might be alleviated were this discussion to be reread with an outsider's eye. Still more might be alleviated by careful consideration of the points raised in Beyond 'A Love Supreme'.
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