Traning the nineties, or the present relevance of John Coltrane's music of theophany and negation.

McDonald, Michael Bruce

Can it be merely accidental that recent works by such otherwise dissimilar film makers as Spike Lee and Oliver Stone feature striking allusions to - and, indeed, appropriations of - the music of John Coltrane? The burden of this essay is to demonstrate that this phenomenon should not - must not - be regarded as a mere accident, or lucky coincidence. Rather, I shall insist that the renewed interest in Coltrane's legacy signaled by these films stems largely from concerns immanent to his work, and that these simultaneously social and aesthetic concerns have particular and special relevance for contemporary issues of American, and indeed worldwide, culture.(1) Beginning with a consideration of the reasons Coltrane's work holds particular significance for Stone's The Doors and Lee's Mo' Better Blues, I shall seek to demonstrate that Coltrane's aesthetics of dissonance provides an indispensable glimpse, and immanent invocation, of the spirit so vital to the democracy still aborning - and too frequently suppressed - in America, as in the world.

Surprisingly perhaps, The Doors exemplifies - albeit in somewhat sketchy fashion - the renewed interest not only in Coltrane's music, but in his abiding belief in the special restorative power that music can possess, the power to revitalize even a seemingly moribund culture. In this regard, Stone's film is praiseworthy, whatever its faults in other respects, for acknowledging - as rock mythographies all too rarely do - Trane's considerable influence on many of the more adventuresome rockers of the mid- and late Sixties.(2) The film s allusions to Coltrane, moreover, while naturally interesting for music aficionados and historians are, it seems to me, crucial for our understanding of a phenomenon that has been too frequently overlooked by connoisseurs: the vital interrelationship of culture specifically jazz culture - and democracy.

Having directly acknowledged his debt to Coltrane in an early scene evoking The Doors' burgeoning improvisational proficiency, Val Kilmer's rapidly aging "Lizard King" - now so sodden as to seem virtually incapable of meaningful speech - tersely counters a crass comment regarding his audience with: "You know what the audience wants? They want an experience of the sacred." While this remark might seem compromised by Morrison's extreme debauchery at this stage in the narrative, the vital attitude that it nonetheless expresses toward his audience - and toward the function of art - strongly resonates with, and echoes, Coltrane's oft-repeated assertion that his foremost musical aim was to bring listeners just such an experience of the sacred.

Especially toward the end of his life, Coltrane came to feel increasingly responsible for creating nothing less than a music of theophany, not just a music capable of conveying experiences of the sacred to those able to heed its insistent call, but one that would immanently embody, that would itself be, such experience.(3) Indeed, I hold that Coltrane's art is especially important for the present era, precisely to the extent that our age is fraught with longing for something akin to sacred experience - whether or not such experience be gained through traditional methods and institutions - contemporary injunctions to the contrary noted but notwithstanding.(4) This sort of hunger persists even in the face of the ubiquitous commercialism which has appeared, to so many commentators, tantamount to a hegemonic force underlying the production and consumption of contemporary popular music.(5) The longing for numinous experience remains an important basis for resistance to a culture industry whose hegemony might otherwise seem so unflappable, so utterly secure.

In following this very line of inquiry, Jon Michael Spencer has asserted the need for a new discipline - theomusicology - aimed at evaluating those aspects of popular music which embody the sacredness embedded in, and forever haunting, the secular:

. . . theomusicology [must] concern itself with the creators and consumers of popular music, in order to discern how this vast segment of American culture perceives the great mysteries that myths rejoin, and how these ultimate concerns figure into the [secular] world view. . . . the secular are not as unreligious and as unconstrained by the need for mythical language in their self-understanding as they may suppose. . . . (1)

Spencer particularly seeks to identify those aspects of popular music which may signal a "renewal of hope" for an increasingly troubled, even moribund American society.

While the "popular" status of Coltrane's music has proven notoriously difficult to assess, a theomusicological reading may nonetheless reveal how the theophanic dimension of his work - his quest for the numinous immanent in music - is thoroughly interwoven with a negation of facile spirituality, a pseudo-spirituality that would blithely conflate harmony - and harmony alone - with divinity itself. The unique blend of assertion and negation in Coltrane's music points, indeed, to the manner whereby the musical traditions he both extends and exemplifies bear not only the promise, but capacity, of cultural and spiritual renewal. Paradoxically, however, Coltrane's music offers such hope only inasmuch as it refuses to proffer a facile, too easily won hopefulness, a hopefulness which fails to acknowledge the ineluctability of dissonance in all that is audible, and within social relations themselves.

Despite his notorious and frequently condemned antipathy toward jazz, Theodor Adorno nevertheless offers an indispensable glimpse of the role played by dissonance in acting as a kind of check on the more facile tendencies of harmony:

The more deeply works of art become engrossed by the idea of harmony . . . the less they can feel content with it. . . . such divergent phenomena as the antiharmonistic postures of Michelangelo, of the mature Rembrandt and Beethoven are all attributable to the inner development of the concept of harmony and in the last analysis to its insufficiency. They have nothing to do with the subjective pain and suffering experienced by these artists. Dissonance is the truth about harmony. Harmony is unattainable, given the strict criteria of what harmony is supposed to be. These criteria are met only when the aspect of unattainability is incorporated into the essence of art [for] . . . harmony presents something as actually reconciled which is not. (Horkheimer and Adorno 161; emphasis added)

Adorno's remarks bear quite directly on our understanding of the informing dynamic - and innermost paradox - of Coltrane's art. For the more Coltrane relentlessly struggles to articulate the harmony his work is so manifestly engrossed with, the less his music can express contentment with the facile resolutions for which harmony too readily tends to settle.

But this dissonant ethos is, in itself, hardly unique to Coltrane; rather, it is, in various manifestations, central to the development and durability of the musical traditions we associate with the word jazz. Thus, despite the ongoing controversy over his self-proclaimed role as a sort of cultural conservator,(6) the work of Wynton Marsalis often resonates quite nicely with Trane's more resolutely dissonant aesthetic. Even as he tends to slight the significance of the "free jazz" movement associated with Coltrane's later works, Marsalis has become a persistent advocate for the greater tradition which Coltrane does, in fact, exemplify. For Marsalis, this tradition is in many ways about the refusal to settle for the facile harmonies of the cultural status quo, directing itself rather toward the realization of certain principles which, to paraphrase Spencer, are fraught with the fundamental aspirations of American spirituality.

These issues inform the "sermon" written by yet another controversial figure, Stanley Crouch, for the superb Marsalis recording The Majesty of the Blues. Here, Crouch asserts the need to reclaim a musical tradition whose "passing" has, far too often, been too hastily mourned, subjected to "Premature Autopsies," as the sermon's title would have it. Tellingly, Crouch proclaims that, in blues but especially in jazz, musical "notes themselves provide the levels of revelation we can only expect of great art." This assertion demands particular attention, for it pertains directly to the idea that the theophanic function of music is immanent within music itself, not to be found in any discursive supplement offered for the sake of comprehending a musical work. Thus, if the "noble sound" Crouch speaks to does effectively counter "the despair imposed by grand dragons" (and not just those of the KKK but of the institutionalized racism still haunting the USA), it does so not at the level of the narrative spin that Crouch, or I, or anyone else might put upon that sound, but within - and only through - the music itself. And the sound is noble not because of its majestic harmonies alone, but precisely because it tacitly acknowledges that even the most majestic harmony marks - in its very fleetingness - a condition of ultimate unattainability rather than closure, repletion.

This sense that the aesthetics of dissonance implicitly undercuts the claims made in the name of a self-sufficient harmony is crucial for understanding the disaster of Spike Lee's use of the opening section of Coltrane's A Love Supreme for the soundtrack of Mo' Better Blues. Both purveyor and opponent of the American culture industry, Lee - even while tacitly paying homage to Coltrane's extraordinary pursuit of theophany - actually cloaks the discord so poignantly informing the aesthetics of A Love Supreme. Lee's peculiar use of this composition manages to obscure the ways in which it interweaves, in exemplary fashion, a profoundly harmonic ethos with atonal saxophonic cries or "shouts" which, through the sheer intensity of their exposition, herald a crucial act of negation: the negation of facile harmonies. Lee's soundtrack tends to mask the discords which, contrary to our received notions about dissonance, themselves comprise, and delineate, the precise nature of the enduring beauty - and broad cultural significance - of Coltrane's work. By appropriating only the opening, majestic statement of a composition which, through its own noble sounds - and, indeed, noble discord - counters the insidiousness of facile harmonies and their attendant despair, Lee has inadvertently reinscribed the very cultural dynamic that his work generally so clearly, and effectively, seeks to oppose.(7)

Composed just prior to the period when Coltrane turned decisively to a thoroughgoing exploration of the idioms which have proved so unbearable to many listeners, A Love Supreme carefully juxtaposes relatively sparing yet profoundly intense discords with a startlingly intense drive toward harmonic reconciliation, and in such a way that we are able to hear a fully articulated, fully embodied expression of the idea that "dissonance is the truth about harmony." Moreover, Trane's strategically placed saxophonic cries bear out Adorno's assertion that such art is not about "the subjective pain and suffering" of the artist, so much as it heralds a harmony unattainable according to its own criteria. However, it is crucial to note not only that Trane's jarring tenor shouts immanently figure dissatisfaction with harmony's unattainability, but that through the juxtaposition of such moments of supreme dissonance with more obviously harmonic gestures, this music also marks the refusal to let the dream of harmonic reconciliation lapse in the face of the recognition that it is ultimately unattainable.

I want to insist, with Coltrane, that the dissonant cry of harmony's dissatisfaction with its own unattainability has everything to do, paradoxically enough, with the open dedication of this composition to God. While we may tend to associate the idea of harmony with that of divinity itself - and actually figure divinity in terms of what we know of harmony - the fore-grounding of dissonance in Coltrane's work marks the strength of his refusal to "present something as actually reconciled which is not." Coltrane refuses, in other words, to represent divine being as something that can be reconciled with the aesthetics of closure - of the cadenced march toward a seemingly final resolution - embodied in the very concept of harmony, and in the philosophical traditions which tend to invoke harmony's name.

In the verse dedication accompanying A Love Supreme, Coltrane returns again and again to the assertion that "No matter what . . . it is God." This "no matter what" very precisely addresses the reasons that divinity cannot be delimited by the concerns of harmony alone, the reasons that the divine must necessarily include the dissonant. Proleptically confirming Crouch's assertion that the "noble sounds" of African-American music embody "the presence and the power and the possibilities of the human spirit," Coltrane's mature compositions refuse to reconcile, in any facile way, those possibilities with a harmony too easily achieved. Coltrane refuses, in other words, to mark human possibility coloristically,(8) as mere decoration embossing the aegis of a falsely triumphant aesthetics of closure. Indeed, harmony's very inability fully to resolve the dissonance it is, in fact, predicated upon becomes, in Coltrane's masterworks, the precise evocation of a certain understanding of divinity itself. The expression of intractable discord within an essentially harmonic structure is itself a theophanic proclamation, that is, of the fortunate unattainability of a certain kind of spiritual realization: that which would stake everything on a harmonious state of being while ignoring the dissonances which figure the actual diversity - and thus the varied possibilities - of the human spirit.

Lee's tendency to obscure the larger implications of A Love Supreme is adumbrated in the specific use he makes of the first few bars of "Acknowledgement," the first of four sections in Coltrane's composition and the section used exclusively for the film's soundtrack. These opening bars accompany a shot which marks the beginning of the film's coda: a long, steady view of sunrise over New York Harbor, the Statue of Liberty prominent in the distance. If, as I have suggested above, the "acknowledgment" figured in Trane's brief opening statement has everything to do with the idea that "no matter what . . . it is God," and thus comprises a tacit recognition of the important role which dissonance must play for democracy and theology alike, then perhaps this music could be said to suit Lee's grand image of the statue, city, and harbor. Even as we are presented with Coltrane's monumental and majestic musical statement, however, we may well find that we remain skeptical about the ultimate symbolic value, and conceptual integrity, of "Lady Liberty." For we are faced not only with Lee's iconic image, but with our own lingering questions concerning whether the nation whose promise the statue heralds truly embodies a kind of "no matter what," a genuine and lasting ability to welcome downtrodden peoples impartially, regardless of ethnic and cultural considerations.(9)

The opening statement of A Love Supreme is heard immediately following a scene in which the protagonist, jazz trumpeter Bleep Gilliam (played by Denzel Washington), has asked Indigo Downs (Joie Lee), one of the two women he has been involved with throughout the film, to marry him. Gilliam can no longer play the trumpet because of a permanent injury to his mouth, an injury incurred through a vicious beating received while attempting to defend his shady manager - played by Spike himself - from vengeful creditors. Essentially, the burden of the film's final minutes - the very burden that, in the virtual absence of dialogue, Coltrane's composition is forced to narrate - has to do with figuring the perseverance of the jazz tradition in the birth of a son to this couple, a son who will himself, from all appearances, grow up to be a jazz trumpeter too.

Lee's appropriation of the opening section of A Love Supreme becomes profoundly unnerving - at least for anyone concerned for the legacy of Trane's aesthetics - as the music plays on through a montage in which the wedding of Bleep and Indigo is celebrated, their son is conceived and born, and that son rapidly grows old enough to take trumpet lessons from his father, all in the space of a few minutes of cinematic time. Meanwhile, even as Coltrane's exposition of the work's initial theme has moved into an area in which the sort of dissonant cries previously alluded to are expressed with considerable force, the volume of those cries is, at Lee's direction, rapidly made to fade. Moreover, the composition's burgeoning discords are increasingly cloaked by the sounds of revelry among the wedding guests, despite an interesting moment wherein one of Trane's now rapidly fading "shouts" immediately precedes the baby's first cry.

The coda of Mo' Better Blues, in the very course of appropriating one of its masterworks, thus obscures a crucial facet of the tradition which, as Crouch reminds us, finds exemplary embodiment in the "desire for the refined and impassioned depiction in music of the presence and the power and the possibilities of the human spirit." Such aspirations are embodied in the lifework of Duke Ellington, who becomes the exemplary figure for the closing section of Crouch's sermon by virtue of his sheer, determined acceptance of the rigors that such aspirations, such musical aims, entail. Crouch's sermon proclaims that Ellington "NEVER came off the road," precisely because that quintessentially American road is, perhaps paradoxically, both literally and emblematically the place where the diverse possibilities of the human spirit are best explored. This view strongly echoes Walt Whitman's notion of the "open road," the element of American life one abandons oneself to in order, first, to observe how the lifeways of American democracy are played out, but ultimately in order to refigure what the possibilities of democratic life can be:

Here the profound lesson of reception, nor preference nor denial, / The black . . . the felon, the diseas'd, the illiterate / person, are not denied . . . . / They pass, I also pass, any thing passes, none can be interdicted, / None but are accepted, none but shall be dear to me. (258)

If Duke Ellington exemplifies the willingness - and determined ability - to embrace the consequences of what for African-American musicians has too often proven to be a not-so-open road, just as much as he exemplifies an indomitable conception of musical practice, then John Coltrane both fulfills and extends Ellington's legacy. Coupling theophanic revelation with a firm negation of the facile harmonies of American life, Coltrane's music decisively limns the possibilities of the human spirit within the "open road" of musical expression, as it were. To describe this dynamic somewhat differently, Coltrane's music - especially that of his later years - addresses itself very particularly to the problem of affirming the presence of a divine voice in music without allowing that affirmation, that proclamation of transcendent harmony, to be co-opted and debased by what Crouch terms the "ignoble proclivities of the marketplace." In this respect, Coltrane's exploration of dissonance within the dynamic of a music openly dedicated to divinity itself marks his indomitable resolve, his will to negate facile spirituality. For this very quality has tended to cost him the wider audience he wanted to reach, making his music too difficult, apparently, for untold legions of listeners - especially those who come to music for a certain kind of pleasure alone - even to tolerate, much less honor and praise.

There is something undeniably charming about the neat symmetry of Lee's coda - culminating with kindly Bleep taking the trumpet from his son and saying, "All right . . . you're finished for today" - juxtaposed as it is with an early scene in which we witness young Bleep's father forbidding him to stop practicing in favor of playing with friends. Nevertheless, the charming symmetry which closes Lee's film has little to do with the renewal of hope which is the enduring promise - and demand - of the musical legacy exemplified by John Coltrane. Rather, it is the obdurate discordance in Trane's music - the very quality which Lee's soundtrack simultaneously pays homage to and veils - that constitutes an enduring challenge to our acceptance of facile harmonies, our willingness to settle for easy entertainments rather than accept the burden of Duke Ellington's - and John Coltrane's - open road.

As Whitman proclaimed long ago, the burden - and delight - of the open road. is that here the various possibilities of the human spirit confront us not just as visions of harmonic reconciliation, but with the full, jarring force of their irresolvable dissonance, an intractability to bland homogeneity which, when acknowledged as such, is no cause for despair, but the actual, persistent, radiant sign of democracy's promise, its enduring source of unhopeful hope.

Notes

1. My thanks to Kalamu ya Salaam for directing my attention to one such phenomenon that I might otherwise have missed: a TV promotion for Jeep Cherokee featuring Coltrane playing "Naima," and with the slogan "There's only one Coltrane, and one Jeep!"

2. This debt has been readily acknowledged by Roger McGuinn of the Byrds, and Trane's influence on the group is evident in the modal improvisations of "Eight Miles High" (Untitled, Columbia, 1970), improvisations which echo Trane's solos on such recordings as Transition and A Love Supreme. For a detailed discussion of Coltrane's influence on Sixties rock, see the concluding chapter of Nisenson (218-65). Trane's legacy of modal improvisation has, arguably, been furthered most, interestingly enough, by musicians whose work blends elements of rock and jazz. While the so-called "fusion" of the Seventies and Eighties certainly deserves acknowledgment in this regard, the work of contemporary artists like Don Byron (Tuskeegee Experiments, Elektra Nonesuch, 9 79280-2, 1992), John Zorn (Naked City, Elektra Nonesuch, 9 79238-2, 1989), and the late Sonny Sharrock (Ask the Ages, Axiom, 422-848 957-2, 1991) has been more fully exemplary of this trend. Of course, this is but a small sample of the excellent musicians currently pursuing Trane's legacy. But it is, I would argue, Bill Frisell whose recent work has been most insistent - and effective - in proclaiming the interdependence of an aesthetics of dissonance with democratic aspirations and ideals. Especially noteworthy in this regard are Have a Little Faith (Elektra Nonesuch, 9 79301-2, 1993) and This Land (Elektra Nonesuch, 9 79316-2, 1994), recordings which feature striking reworkings of compositions by such varied artists as Copland, Ives, Sousa, Madonna, and Dylan, and tributes to such diverse figures as Jimmy Carter and Julius Hemphill.

3. Extended studies of Coltrane tend to share - whatever their differences otherwise - an acute interest in the question of his spirituality. For representative discussions of the spiritual aspects of Trane's music, see Cole, Nisenson, Simpkins, and Thomas.

4. For instance, while I admire the work of Fredric Jameson, he - like most commentators on post-modernism - tends to scant the question of postmodern spirituality. For Jameson, the very advent of postmodernity is characterized by a certain flattening out of spiritual experience, or the "waning of affect." Jean-Francois Lyotard emphasizes the disappearance or enervation of what were once the great "master narratives" of Western thought, and confirms Jameson's tacit assertion that the question of spirituality may not be terribly relevant for understanding postmodern culture. The work of Mark C. Taylor provides a useful alternative to such views, as do recent studies by Cornel West and Michael Eric Dyson. Like West and Dyson, Taylor discusses the heretofore unexamined confluence of postmodern culture with issues which have traditionally been the domain of theologians, or of those who, like Dyson, are concerned with the interdependence of personal and communal cultural experience.

5. See, for instance, the influential discussion of this problem in Horkheimer and Adorno (120-67).

6. Marsalis has frequently been criticized for exhibiting a tendency toward musical caution and conservatism, for failing to push his own music beyond the confines of the post-bop movement of the late Fifties, while railing publicly - and often - against the musical "primitivism" of rap, hip-hop, and popular music in general. And, in truth, there can be little doubt that Marsalis has rather deliberately cast himself as a kind of conservator for the entire jazz tradition, at least for that tradition as it extends up to the emergence of "free jazz" in the Sixties.

7. Compare, for instance, the rather more successful use of a Coltrane composition, "Alabama," for the soundtrack of Malcolm X. As Malcolm, Denzel Washington ruefully watches television coverage of police brutality in Birmingham as Trane's "Alabama," a slow dirge, plays mournfully in the background. "Alabama" is much more conservative, harmonically speaking, much less aurally demanding, than A Love Supreme, and its slow, majestic, sad harmonies are perfectly suited to the mood and scope of this scene.

8. For a discussion of the ideological uses to which a merely coloristic dissonance may be put, see Attali and Adorno.

9. Such skepticism might be all too justified, for instance, in light of the Bush/Clinton policy toward Haitian refugees.

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Trans. C. Lenhardt. London: Routledge, 1984.

Attali, Jacques. Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1985.

Cole, Bill. John Coltrane. New York: Schirmer, 1976.

Crouch, Stanley. "Premature Autopsies (Sermon)." The Majesty of the Blues. By Wynton Marsalis. Columbia, CK 45091, 1989.

Dyson, Michael Eric. Reflecting Black: African-American Cultural Criticism. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993.

Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York: Continuum, 1987.

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984.

Nisenson, Eric. John Coltrane and His Quest. New York: St. Martin's, 1993.

Simpkins, Cuthbert Ormond. Coltrane. New York: Herndon, 1975.

Spencer, Jon Michael. "Introduction: Philosophical Prolegomena to Theomusicological Thematizing of the Nonsacred." The Theology of American Popular Music. Ed. Jon Michael Spencer. Durham: Duke UP, 1989. 1-16.

Taylor, Mark C. Disfiguring. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992.

Thomas, J. C. Chasin' the Trane. New York: Doubleday, 1975.

West, Cornel. Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America. New York: Routledge, 1993.

-----. Prophetic Fragments. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988.

Whitman, Walt. "Song of the Open Road." The New Oxford Book of American Verse. Ed. Richard Ellmann. New York: Oxford UP, 1976. 257-66.

Discography

Coltrane, John. A Love Supreme. Recorded 9 Dec. 1964. Columbia, MCAD-5660 JVC 467, 1966.

Filmography

The Doors. Dir. Oliver Stone. Tristar, 1991.

Mo' Better Blues. Dir. Spike Lee. Forty Acres and a Mule (Universal), 1990.

Michael Bruce McDonald is Adjunct Assistant Professor of English at Iowa State University.