I have found another reason to admire John Coltrane. Inside the booklet that comes with “The Complete 1961 Village Vanguard Recordings” is a picture of Coltrane reading a book, the pages open near the end. The title is The Opium of the Intellectuals, Raymond Aron’s trenchant study of the left-wing mind, best exemplified by Sartre. (Aron’s question: “Why is it that the left-wing intellect holds liberal democracies to the standards of the Kingdom of Heaven, while it excuses and overlooks the greatest crimes of totalitarian governments”?)
No surprise, though. By 1961, Coltrane was heading deeper into ponderous musings upon form and spirit and inspiration, a heady mix of abstraction and feeling. The music was getting more meditative, brooding, and experimental, and lots of people didn’t like the drift. That didn’t matter to Coltrane — or at least if it did, he didn’t alter his direction. The agenda went on, Coltrane reading, thinking, studying, praying, and practicing practicing practicing, sometimes eight or nine hours a day.
In late October of that year, he arrived at the Village Vanguard for live performances, some of which would be recorded by Rudy van Gelder. Van Gelder captured four nights, Nov. 1, 2, 3, and 5, and they stand as a monumental occasion in the story of jazz (which is why I included the Nov 1 version of “Spiritual” on my list of jazz songs that qualify as high art). They are, one can tell, the result of an uncompromising vision, an anti-sentimental, brutal aesthetic of intensity, challenge, and overcoming.
I listen to them over and over, but one has to wonder about the influence of the Village Vanguard sessions and much of Coltrane music for the rest of his short life. Did too many younger jazz musicians hear them and not only admire the music but adopt the identity? Coltrane aimed not to entertain, but to illuminate and uplift and inspire. He wanted to evoke a religious experience in listeners, and he spoke easily of good and evil forces. He invested his performances with high-stakes seriousness. How many rising jazz musicians wanted to do the same?
Terry Teachout’s column two weeks ago in The Wall Street Journal suggests a lot of them. He writes that jazz musicians today “regard themselves as artists, not entertainers, masters of a musical language that is comparable in seriousness to classical music.” That goes with my experience attending several jazz performances in the 1990s and finding the headliners a serious lot who seemed more interested in their own playing than in the audience before them.
During the 80s, I caught Horace Silver, Dizzy Gillespie, and Art Blakey, and they were different. Each one kept up a stirring current of fun throughout the occasion even as they played hi-octane hard-bop classics. I haven’t attended any performances in several years, and I presume that hundreds of performers instill the spirit of entertainment in their acts. But in most people’s minds, jazz still signifies a cerebral, cutting-edge, challenging art form, and it is one of the things that prevent jazz from coming back as a popular form.
The problem is that an art form can’t thrive if its extreme figures, such as Coltrane, become a model for the rest. They shoot too high and far, and while others may repeat the motions of extremity, they don’t achieve the magic or beauty or genius — whatever is it that carries it into the realm of high art. The extremists secure an audience for themselves, but their many votaries do not.
11 Responses to John Coltrane’s Bad Influence
akafka - August 18, 2009 at 12:29 pm
Readers might be interested in Jack Sullivan’s insightful 2008 essay contrasting Coltrane’s prayerful approach to Lester Young’s partying approach, and how their bios played into that. See http://chronicle.com/article/PartyingPraying/25125/-Alex, an editor at The Chronicle Review
luther_blissett - August 18, 2009 at 6:19 pm
I’d agree that a certain type of intellectual affect often got the better of jazz musicians like Archie Shepp in the wake of Coltrane. But if we’re going to discuss the move from jazz as entertainment to jazz as art, we need to begin with Duke Ellington, who as far as I can tell, was the first seriously to consider how jazz might make that transition. His various jazz symphonies, his suite on *The Tempest*, his concert-style arrangements of his older “pop” material, all point to something that bop and modal jazz artists would reconsider later. I also wonder about this easy opposition between jazz as art and jazz as entertainment. It suggests that the two are mutually exclusive. It also suggests that jazz has some essence which is entertainment-oriented.One problem is simply historical. Even if jazz never changed stylistically or formally, it would have lost its status as entertainment. Entertainment is almost strictly tied up in fashion. One era’s entertainment is another’s boredom. In fact, so much of the canonization of popular music has to do with that transition, as an older generation holds up its entertainment as the highest and proper form of art to the next generation, which has moved on to new forms. This has happened in rock music, as Elvis or Carl Perkins or The Beatles went from sensational teen music to “pop classics,” often used to beat up on the entertainment of the next generation. Modern art often finds its most objectified status once its organic social connections are severed. We see this today with disco, which has gone from being seen as the most artificial and mindless entertainment to the foundation of much contemporary art music and independent music. Once musicians could confront disco outside of the culture and the easy connotationsl, they could reflect on the formal and technical innovations of the music itself. I’d say something similar happened to jazz. Once rhythm and blues and rock and roll took over as popular music, jazz musicians no longer has a strictly pleasure-seeking audience. The jazz that remained popular was of a few certain types: Heritage Jazz performed for older, nostalgic audiences; smooth jazz performed for background music; and pop-fusion, performed for younger audiences prepared by jam bands and prog rock for extended electronic noodling. Another factor in the shift toward high seriousness in jazz is the history of racism toward black entertainers. In a world where the smiling, shuffling black male artist was the most socially acceptable position, bop and post-bop jazz musicians resented having to entertain in that sense of the word. Perhaps they went too far toward a kind of stuffiness, when you watch clips of Coltrane’s quartet, you see four men who are interested in connecting with an audience, but who seek to do so through the skill, intensity, and beauty of the music, and not through smiling, dancing, joking antics. And it’s not as if all art jazz is high seriousness. Anthony Braxton’s shows are like circuses, and he gets shit for it. I remember hearing some guys complain about a solo where the French horn player stuffed a pie pan in the bell of the horn; they didn’t like the humor of the music. Eric Dolphy and Charles Mingus also never cut out a sort of playfulness from their jazz, even at its most formally inventive. (Which is why Frank Zappa’s music is so deeply influenced by them.) John Zorn’s music is often full of humor and silliness, and his Masada project is perhaps the best combination of pleasure and experimentation in jazz for decades. Dave Douglass, again, offers all sorts of pleasures to his audience. In fact, the most ponderous jazz today, in my experience, is the Heritage Jazz Concert. Even when the songs are fun and the performers are enjoying themselves, the atmosphere is like a museum, everyone claps no matter the quality of the solos, and no one is prepared to do anything more than appreciate what they’ve been told to appreciate. I mean, is anyone more serious than Wynton Marsalis?
jgcarroll - August 19, 2009 at 11:29 am
Thanks for the essay. I think it is important to debate these aesthetic and cultural issues openly and without the added stresses of academic publishing. I’m not sure it is so useful, though, to blame Coltrane for being who he was.One of the great things to admire about Coltrane was his commitment to being – and an inability, really, to be anything other than – himself. I have always thought of the over-seriousness of some contemporary jazz players as being a misinterpretation of Coltrane’s example. That seriousness that people attribute to Coltrane is really a public persona, not a reflection of the man. While it is interesting to note what musicians are reading or what new compositional techniques pop up in their music, none of that detracts from the fact that the music is utterly enjoyable to many people – as well as, admittedly, excruciating to others. The important thing to note is that if someone is turned off by a particular musician or a particular form of music, there is plenty of other music to choose.That a musician is studious does not mean that the music needs to be dour. I won’t repeat what the other commentators have said, but I would simply add the example of Sun Ra. Sun Ra’s musical production, as entertaining as it was, was grounded in a life-long commitment to serious academic study. The resulting art may not present itself in the same manner as we are accustomed to within academia, but that is the essential point of his work; serious, depthful study does not need to be presented in a manner that washes out all traces of ones personality or one’s cultural heritage.What Coltrane and Sun Ra and all of the great artists mentioned in this essay and the other comments exemplify, in my opinion, is a sense of intellectual agency. None of these musicians should be held accountable for the ways in which their music is interpreted or misinterpreted. People need to find their own bag.
adampetershenne - August 19, 2009 at 11:56 am
Complete agreement with luther_blissett. Coltrane and some of his lineage-bearers may have been monkish (in the eclesiastic not Thelonious sense), but there’s no way that they’re the source of the deadly dull seriousness and unpopularity of contemporary jazz. And now that I’m thinking about it, I might have to reject the thesis that “fun” and “humor” constitute the problems with contemporary jazz. The Lincoln Center projects that luther_blissett mentions are not without humor – I recall Wynton doing a kind of lecture for kids that featured basketball and the dozens; it was funny. Likewise, one could argue that for a lot of Americans, the canonization of contemporary jazz began with Bill Cosby and the parade of jazz musician “uncles” on his show. But as Teachout’s piece and recent market research makes clear, America finds all that boring.And it’s the audience that matters here. As Dr. Baeurlein points out, Gillespie and Blakey and others brought and still bring the fun in a way Coltrane et al never did. But to the vast majority of people who don’t listen to jazz, or only listen to a little, or “like” jazz but don’t know much about it, that distinction is largely invisible. For most people, all jazz sounds the same. Neither jazz entertainers nor jazz priests are attracting any audience now. And even with humor, the Lincoln Center project and its ilk has done the most to make Americans under 40 associate jazz with school and other things that are good for us, which is the real kiss of death.While I’m ranting, I’ll add that I came to jazz through Coltrane’s extreme and ascetic later work. And I got to that music via heavy metal and hardcore punk – both deadly serious genres. And yet, I suspect that my vector of extreme rock –> extreme jazz –> all jazz is one that will continue to appeal to more young Americans than the quirky showmanship of the 40s and 50s. Drop by the Knitting Factory any day of the week to see the process in action. That’s a great jazz audience – young, enthusiastic, networked, good consumers… but white. If you’re interested in “what’s to become of jazz” and so forth, it’s the racial dynamics that are unsettling, not the fun dynamics.
wwelburn - August 19, 2009 at 2:02 pm
I’d recommend that Professor Bauerlein listen to “The Clown,” Charles Mingus’ commentary on the consequences of trying to entertain an audience. Arguably Mingus’ best live recording (“Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus”) was one where he order his audience to refrain from applauding or making noise, you know, the kind of thing that prevents jazz from “coming back as a popular form.” Mingus, Coltrane, and Ornette Coleman, like Bird and Monk, inspired generations of jazz musicians in musical movements in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, St. Louis, and LA who comfortably coexist with more popular forms of the music. Their music has clearly influence even more broadly, from the Grateful Dead to TV on the Radio. And I for one am heartened to hear numerous young musicians who are willing to give up popularity to continue to push at the parameters of the music. As long as they do, jazz ain’t dead.
luther_blissett - August 19, 2009 at 5:17 pm
wwelburn’s comment makes me think of how pop musicians from Greg Allman to Roger McGuinn have brought up Coltrane as a major influence on their guitar technique. The stellar 12-string work on “Eight Miles High” is a great example.(On an unrelated note, I was reading about Yes’ *Tales from Topographic Oceans* today. Incredibly pretentious exploratory rock, triple-LP set made up of six long songs, clearly influenced (however poorly) by out jazz — and yet it was a number one record in 1974. When people wonder what has happened to the audience for jazz, they should consider that.)
luther_blissett - August 19, 2009 at 5:25 pm
PS: Nate Chinen has an excellent reply to Teachout in the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/19/arts/music/19jazz.html?_r=1One point he alludes to: attendance is down at nearly all live venues, and on-line streaming and downloading has made that the “venue” of choice for nearly all forms of music today.
wwelburn - August 19, 2009 at 5:43 pm
Luther Blissett makes an interesting observation about the band Yes, which I’ll extend to the Grateful Dead. Not to judge yay or nay on the Dead, I find it interesting that their adventures into seemingly endless improvisation has enjoyed an incredibly strong fan base, perhaps because they do entertain with popular melodies. But their sessions with Ornette Coleman, David Murray, and Branford Marsalis (which are available through the Internet Archive http://www.archive.org) are considered legendary. I also believe that the pianist Vijay Iyer enjoys a smaller “cult” status in the U.S. and in Europe for his terse, electrifying compositions and performance. Thanks for the link to Chinen’s article.
markbauerlein - August 20, 2009 at 10:32 am
Do you mean Duane Allman, Luther, not Greg? And here’s an addendum from an email: “The allusion to Dolphy often returns me to Miles Davis’ 1964 DownBeat interview conducted by Leonard Feather, who grew up not far from where I’m writing here in London (though I’m a native New Yorker). Davis hated Dolphy’s playing and stated, among other things, that the next time he’d see him he’d step on his foot. He then added one of my favorite lines: If that’s what them critics like, them critics better stop drinking coffee.”
luther_blissett - August 20, 2009 at 10:44 am
Yes: Duane Allman. Great Miles Davis quip. Then again, Davis hated Ornette Coleman and told us all about Coltrane’s nose-picking habit. I love everything Davis did (until he came out of retirement), but if we’re gonna talk about bad influences, I’d say that Davis’ followers have been a self-serious and obnoxious crowd, whether it’s the cool jazzers of the 50s of the jazz-rockers of the 70s and 80s.
wwelburn - August 31, 2009 at 2:35 pm
Although I’m sure the conversation here has probably ended, I’ll just add a few more comments. First, regarding the Miles Davis quip, its typical for so-called jazz critics to encourage bantering back and forth between musicians. So Miles didn’t like Eric Dolphy. And Mingus, who loved Dolphy, criticized Miles for going electric… again in Down Beat, of course. And Wynton criticized may of his contemporaries, especially Lester Bowie. I guess if we really wanted to do so, we might criticize Miles for disparaging Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Charlie Parker in his autobiography. And I suspect people might say that Mingus didn’t like Sun Ra, although in conversation with Sun Ra he said that Mingus recommended him to Katherine Dunham to provide music for a piece she was choreographing. Hmm…My second point has to do with Dolphy, and it is good that you all brought him up. Dolphy devotee Alan Saul maintains an interesting website, which includes documents on Dolphy’s interest in physics (Eric Dolphy’s Physics Notes) while Dolphy was a student at LA City College (http://adale.org/Discographies/Physics.html). Like trombonist/composer/MacArthur Fellow/Yale philosophy graduate George Lewis and Yale/Berkeley graduate, jazz pianist Vijay Iyer, Dolphy put some hard thought into his music. I think its odd that in higher education we seem to devalue this by relegating jazz to a form of entertainment.