Floating in Space

I suppose my mood is being affected
by a lot of dying right now. I'm reading death poems
by the saints and angels, the Zen masters
who on their deathbeds would dictate one last poem,
haiku, tanka, Chinese syllabic quatrain, whatever.
The enlightened masters gave one last lesson
when departing. One of the greatest of masters
left us with the haiku: "Now that I'm enlightened,
I'm just as miserable as ever." I suppose that must
be true, or at least hopeful. Meanwhile I read poems
from Jim Harrison, of late life, the darkest things
I've read from him since "Letters to Yesinin," where
he wrote to Sergei as a way of not joining Sergei,
not killing himself and becoming another dead poet.
That whole book, and one other, inspired me to do the same,
not kill myself, when I was dying, or so close to it
that I didn't want to live. I didn't care. Nothing
was less fun than living, just then.
And today the news is full of the last words
from another saint, David Bowie. Someone once asked
John Coltrane what he wanted to do, now that he had changed
the entire face of jazz. He said, "I want to become a saint."
And he did. THere's a church in San Francisco
dedicated to Trane's sainthood, where they wroship
with an all-day free jazz jam. I can't think what's more fitting.
Now Bowie. I'm not sentimental. I never cry when expected.
I reserve my tears for when I cannot prevent them,
which is rarely the usual suspects or times.
Some movies will make me weep consistently, who remains
dry-eyed at most funerals. The truth is, when you're too full
of feeling it stops you up rather than brims over.
When it's too much, you go numb, at least for awhile,
and nothing can come out without explosives.
The tributes that get to me are the ones as weird as
who inspired them: like Chris Hadfield singing
on the International Space Station, a free-fall rendition
of "Ground Control to Major Tom." Hollywood, never the best
at being tasteful or sublime, couldn't pay for a backdrop
or special effects like that. Actual guitars floating in space.
Now this long distracting mournful stretch of a day
is ending. All day I've tried to focus on what must be done,
and never got as far as chores or duties. I was stuck
on the cusp of contemplation, a tired man sitting on a stump
in a desert thunderstorm, weeping.
What else is there to do? I'll tell you:
If you want to make a tribute to the artists who have changed
your life, do something at least as amazing as what they did
that changed yours, or at least inspired you.
DOn't settle for weeping with the herd. Make a fire.
Here's a random guitar. Place it on the funeral bin,
or set it slowly spinning down the length of the tin can
out there in space, with the Earth rotating out the window.
Don't imitate, steal. Be just as good as your gods.
After all, that's the minimum tribute they deserve.

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Chris Hadfield performing Bowie's song "Space Oddity" on the Space Station

Jan Garbarek: An Appreciation

Jan Garbarek, saxophonist, composer, bandleader, and musical shaman, has been one of my favorite musicians for several decades. I listen to his recordings with fresh ears every time, no matter how often I've played them before.

I'm not going to write a biography here, because those are available. Most of Garbarek's recordings on the ECM record label, most of them still in print and available. Indeed, Garbarek's characteristic musical style has had an important role in shaping the sound of the entire record label.

What I want to give here is my personal reactions to a music that has meant a great deal to me.

Garbarek can be lyrical, even softly beautiful. His early work with Keith Jarrett has many such moments. But his distinctive tone and compositional style, his signature if you will, is a soprano saxophone tone that is hard-edged, sustained, clear as winter ice, and gets under your skin in the most remarkable way. It's a northern sound—the sound of Arctic Circle winters, the sound of wintermind, the sound of ice in the soul.

There are albums of Garbarek's, such as Dis, that rip your skin off and leave you naked to world. That leave claw-marks on your soul. There are others, such as Twelve Moons, which are the healing mirrors of Dis, in which your ripped-apart soul is reassembled with lyrical attention, with elegiac grace. Sometimes all at once.

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Garbarek's music is a kind of improvised and composed music that, in the latter half of the 20th C., can only be described as shamanic. Spiritually, it follows in the footsteps of the late John Coltrane, of Albert Ayler. Like Coltrane's late work, this is music that transports, that transcends, but that doesn't ignore the suffering that led to transcendence. There is always a shadow of northern tragedy in Garbarek's music—this is almost a cliché to say, but it expresses it well—the same sense of tragic destiny and striving against the gods that one finds throughout the Norse Sagas. There is always, in the Sagas, a sense of the hero waging war on himself, as well as on others; of fate being simultaneously resisted and acknowledged.

A lot of Garbarek compositions are directly influenced by Norwegian folk music, and other Scandinavian folk music, including the shamanic chants of the living singers of Finland. There have been times when the music triggers a deep inner imagination, a kind of waking dream, that is very similar to shamanic journeying—at least for me. Perhaps that's because half of my personal ancestry comes from Norway, from north of the Arctic Circle. This music resonates deep in my bones.



There is also a deep inner silence in this music, which also leads it towards that shamanic, vatic, visionary thread in late 20th C. art—a thread often dismissed or ridiculed by the mandarins of artistic culture, particularly in this narcissistic contemporary moment, but there nonetheless. Garbarek is, I believe, part of this often-unrecognized thread of art that speaks directly of vision, of the inner self, of the life of the soul. The music is part of the soundtrack to this thread. It's obviously a thread in art that matters to me, and which I place myself within, as an artist. This is art that is intentionally transformative.

The shamanic aspect is like shamanic initiation: the dismemberment experience found in so many shamanic traditions, in which the spirits rip you apart, symbolically, actually, rip your soul to shreds, then reassemble your body in a newer, stronger, more powerful form. Some of Garbarek's music feels exactly like that to me. I've been listening to it for literally decades, yet it still has the power to rip me to shreds, then put me back together. The feeling emotional cathartic release is quite profound in much of this music, and it has the power to recreate that catharsis in the listener.

That is my main point here. Others can discuss the music in terms of jazz history, music theory, or other forms of discourse. Sometimes those other discourses seem pallid to me, unable to really capture the heart of the music; descriptive words for this kind of music stumble and fall short. So others can talk about musicology and music history.

What I want to say is very simple: jan Garbarek's music has the power to change your life, again and again, if you let it. At least it has, for me. There have been some occasions, when I was close to the dark night, when listening to this music was the only thing that gave me the strength to go on, to get through the night, to make it till dawn, to survive the void and abyss. I have survived my own dark nights possessed by shadow and darkness, in part, because listening to this music gave me the will to endure. Simply to endure. It's something to hold onto, when all else fails.

The Artist's Life as a Kind of Monasticism

Courtesy of Mark Vernon, and his sculptor friend Guy Reid,here's a quote from Thomas Merton:

Hurry ruins saints as well as artists. They want quick success and they are in such a haste to get it that they cannot take time to be true to themselves. And when the madness is upon them they argue that their very haste is a species of integrity.

This speaks against the constant rush and acceleration of daily life, not only art. The century continues to accelerate; connections continue to be tied more tightly into knots; we all know more than we used to, but it's also shallower than it used to be; we all have massive amounts of raw data to hand, and no time to interpret or evaluate any of it. Life moves ever faster for most people, driven by technology and communications and the manifest activation of Teilhard de Chardin's noosphere and Marshall McLuhan's global village. Perhaps life moves ever faster especially for those who choose to move with the social or political whirls; the news-stream becomes their caffeinated fuel.

But the increasing speed of life guarantees neither depth nor wisdom. In fact, acceleration tends to lead to skimming: shallow perception of quantity, rather than slowed perception of quality. What happens to quality of life when the dominant cultural message is about quantity; specifically, consumer quantity? As every monastic knows, the path of contemplation leads to richness; and it is better achieved by minimalism and reduced means. The world and the world's trials can all be found in the monk's cell, where you have no option but to confront your own true self, without distraction. In the same way, there's a saying in Aikido that the mat is the world: all of life's issues appear on the mat, in the dojo.

And now my own life is slowed down, by circumstance, choice, and events. I've had no choice, at times, but to slow down; but it's a choice I've made before in life, even before I was forced to. I once lived for two years without a home telephone; which forever cured me of the urge to always rush to answer, especially in these days of anytime, anywhere cellphone conversations that most people seem to do without thinking.

I'd rather live a simpler life than one that means I have to juggle several plates in the air all at once. I'd rather have more time to do what I want to do, which is mostly to be creative daily, and less money that I don't have time to spend, only time to earn. The truth is, I was forced to slow down partly by chronic illness; one whose chief side effect in debilitating tiredness; I doubt I could work at a high-pressure fast-paced many-hours-a-week job anymore, my body just isn't up to it. When I chafe at that circumstance, it's because of financial fear, not because I'm restless to work at a job I don't want to do anyway. When I can calm the financial worry, I find myself very much at peace about my slower pace of life.

I would be lying if I said I'd never thought about the monastic life. I have, more than once. What holds me back is the obedience to the established rule of an established order: I would no doubt chafe, and would no doubt become an anti-authoritarian troublemaker. I've thought being a lay brother at a monastery. I've made retreats at two or three different orders' houses. I live alone for now, and I like the silence and solitude a great deal. I like being able to follow a monk's daily discipline, but with the flexibility to vary the details of my daily practice.

So I think also of Marsha Sinetar's essential book Ordinary People as Monks and Mystics. Sinetar writes in her Introduction:

I call the monk one who had detached emotionally from a known, familiar and comfortable way of life in order to embark on an uncharted inner journey. The monk responds to an inner call, reinterprets his/her basic way of being in the world—which might include reinterpreting the way s/he relates to others, work, marriage, Church or other organizational status, and even includes a renewed definition of self and his/her basic place in the scheme of things.

And I mean more: I use the term monk without reference to gender, material statuls, occupation, or place of residence, and with full knowledge that some I'd call monks would not, and do not in fact, call themselves "monk." . . . I simply needed a word which embraced the imagery of silence, the dignity and obedience that automatically accompanies those who embark on an inner journey, whatever route that may take, whatever the costs.

Sinetar's book contains a lot of practical wisdom, mostly expressed by example rather than theory. Before the current wave of interest in voluntary simplicity, before the urge to slow down began to manifest as a grass-roots movement, Sinetar was interviewing and describing people who had already chosen the path of lifework as contemplation. Some of them lived off the grid, in more or less monastic solitude; others lived and worked in the hearts of cities, holding down high=pressure jobs, but their attitude towards life and work was a monk's attitude. One of contemplative engagement with the work; one of detachment.

I also think of the great avant-garde saxophonist and composer John Coltrane, who was asked not too long before he died, now that he had achieved a pinnacle of creative, artistic and financial success, what did he want to do next? Coltrane answered simply: I want to become a saint. He took his time about it, and I think he achieved that goal.

Thomas Merton had much more to say on art, being a writer and photographer himself. He was a good photographer, although he was not known as one till after he died. He borrowed cameras from friends, and went through film roll after roll. He was friends with a couple of professional photographers who lived near the monastery, and who both encouraged his explorations in their medium, but also gave him creative feedback. Some of Merton's most lucid photographs are simple, plain images of brilliant afternoon light falling on the simple, plain objects in his hermitage in the Kentucky hills. Some of his most memorable photos are snapshots of the Spirit in repose or in motion. The best photos contain a great stillness. One can well imagine Merton taking his time, looking first, before making a photograph. He looked, he saw, he composed, and then he took the photo. As Minor White said about his own often very spiritual photography: No matter how slow the film, Spirit always stands still long enough for the photographer It has chosen.

So, a few more Thomas Merton quotes now. Spirit also stood still long enough for Merton to sketch its likeness into words.

Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.

Solitude is not something you must hope for in the future. Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present you will never find it.

Do not depend on the hope of results. . . you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to that you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself.

John Coltrane: the story of a sound

My review of Ben Ratliff's new book Coltrane: the story of a sound has been posted on Monsters & Critics. Enjoy!

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(Update: Here's the body of the review, reprinted here just for the heck of it.)


In the growing catalog of books on John Coltrane’s life and musical legacy, there tend to be three main species: 1. anecdotal oral-histories, along the lines of J.C. Thomas’ Chasin’ the Trane (1975); 2. fan-written, passionate, even spiritual books, including those that view Coltrane as a spiritual seeker primarily; and 3. cooler, more analytical books, along the lines of traditional academic music histories. Ben Ratliff’s new book on John Coltrane’s legacy falls into this third camp.

The overall tone of this book is cool and detached, yet easily readable. Most of the time this works well, although once or twice I wished Ratliff had tried less hard to be coolly objective. This is the sort of book only an enthusiast would write, so there were moments I wished for more enthusiasm revealed in the writing. Thus, those moments when I felt I was hearing Ratliff’s own voice expressing a strong opinion, the book seemed to come alive, and be more compelling.

Of all the existing Coltrane studies, this book has been claimed (probably more by the publisher than anyone else) to be the first to examine Coltrane’s contribution to jazz from the viewpoint of the development of his unique signature sound on his principal instruments, tenor and soprano saxophone. This isn’t a strictly accurate claim. There have been other studies that approach Coltrane from this angle, notably John Fraim’s Spirit Catcher: The life and art of John Coltrane (1996). I believe Ratliff is attempting to be intellectually rigorous, however; there is more than enough music theory in this book, short of actual transcriptions, to satisfy most jazz theory-heads. The musical analyses are detailed, and I find myself agreeing with Ratliff’s insights most of the time.

The single most important new contribution this book makes lies in its part two, in which Ratliff discusses the ongoing impact of Coltrane’s musical ideas on jazz, and on popular music in general. Coltrane’s influences on rock ‘n roll, and on avant-garde new-music composers, for example, are addressed as well as his influences on contemporary jazz. Musicians will continue to need to come to grips with Coltrane’s influence for a long time to come. Like John Cage’s musical innovations, John Coltrane’s musical ideas are ones every musician (jazz or otherwise) must deal with, sooner or later, whether or not one ultimately agrees with the questions they asked, or likes the musical answers that resulted.

Ratliff correctly points out, in his concluding summation, that Coltrane was the right man at the right time to bring the new musical ideas into the spotlight. Coltrane was the point man in music history during the last ten years of his life. That he was also a gifted and adventurous musician, in any context, only amplifies the power he had of being the right man at the right moment.

As part of his summation, Ratliff also speaks to the backlash against free jazz that has happened since its moment in the spotlight. Ratliff’s accurate summation of the aims and failings of the neo-conservative “young lions” in contemporary jazz, led by Wynton Marsalis and his followers, is a masterpiece of critical understatement. Not a dismissal, but devastatingly clear about where the holes lie in their counter-revolutionary arguments.

Ratliff’s new book is overall a very good read, but there are a few inexplicable oversights. Most of the best-known Coltrane biographies and musical studies are listed in the “Sources and Acknowledgments” section at the back of the book. One or two are conspicuously absent. For example, it seems odd to have included Ashley Kahn’s Kind of Blue: The making of the Miles Davis masterpiece (2000), a book only peripherally about Coltrane and mostly about Davis, and to have not cited Fraim (mentioned above). Granted, Fraim’s book falls more into the fan/spiritual category I listed above, but it is a well-written book with some insights into Coltrane’s sound that are very similar to Ratliff’s own.

Ratliff does address Coltrane’s world-wide, universal influence in part two, although he mostly focuses on American jazz and American popular music. Yet he also overlooks some children of Coltrane’s sound that seem important, to me, to have been mentioned, including musicians who took Coltrane’s ideas and ran with them, not all of whom played saxophone: for example, Derek Bailey and Sonny Sharrock, both important free jazz guitarists. (To be fair, Ratliff quotes Sharrock at length on what happened to jazz in the aftermath of Coltrane’s death; I admit my opinion is probably biased, because I feel that Sharrock never got enough credit for his contributions to free jazz as a whole.) European free jazz saxophonist Peter Brötzmann is mentioned, but the equally important Evan Parker is not. Nowhere is Jan Garbarek mentioned, the great Norwegian saxophonist whose soul-searing tone, especially on soprano sax, is to my ears one of the most direct descendents of Coltrane’s sound and sensibility. But these are all relatively minor caveats.

Perhaps Ratliff’s oversights can be explained by an attempt on the author’s part to distance himself from the sillier fan-based Coltrane books. It could also be the New York-centrism common to many music critics who still have difficulty accepting the reality that genuine musical life and music criticism does go on, west of the Hudson River. New York-centrism also possibly expresses itself as overlooking the important European free jazz innovators, all of whom owe a direct debt to Coltrane, as mentioned above.

So, I’ll give this new book on Coltrane a mildly qualified rave. Some of what Ratliff presents has been said before, although his approach is mostly new. Coltrane: The story of a sound is a genuine contribution to Coltrane studies, and worth reading more than once. It is a book dense with information, and you will get more out of it each time you re-read.

Saint Coltrane

In San Francisco, there is a church that has dedicated itself to promoting the spiritual teachings of jazz master John Coltrane: St. John Coltrane Church. Their Sunday worship service culminates in a long jam session. I remember seeing a documentary some years ago about this church, and was impressed. The whole time I lived in the Bay Area, though, I never did get there; I'll remedy that on a future visit back to San Francisco.

Do you think it odd to call a musical master a saint? I don't. In A Love Supreme, Coltrane speaks of the unity and necessity of God. Near the end of his life, I remember reading years ago in a biography of Trane, he was asked what he wanted to do next. He replied, I want to become a saint. That's a good ambition for any artist.

Don't get it wrong: Trane wasn't speaking from ego or spiritual ambition; he was speaking from humility, and the desire to transcend ego. His late musical works, including A Love Supreme and Ascension, among others, all speak of that yearning, and that straining towards the Divine. This is what artists who are also mystics do: strain towards Union.

Yes, I think the music is rising, in my estimation, it's rising into something else, and so will have to find this kind of place to be played in. —John Coltrane

One of the interesting points of this is that the Church regards the post-1957 Coltrane as the Risen Trane: post-drug addiction, cleaned up, starting afresh, and beginning to openly seek spiritual experiences through music. (This music from the last part of Trane's life is much of my favorite of his recordings, too.) It was a path of spiritual awakening. He talked about it openly, and statements about it appear in the liner notes to his recordings, in interviews, and in the spoken and sung words on some of the recordings themselves.

What's interesting about the post-addiction, spiritually awakened Trane is that his experience so closely follows the patterns familiar from myths and stories of shamanism, psychology, and the literature on entheogens, which traditionally are defined as natural plants with psychoactive properties used in sacred ceremonial contexts by indigenous peoples throughout history.

My own feeling on entheogens is that they're wholly unnecessary: nothing is more available, and nothing is more of a fundamental human birthright, than unmediated transcendant experience. The argument is often made for the use of entheogens, as mind-altering drugs, that they help the sings of the soul take flight, by opening the doors of perception.

If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is: Infinite. —William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Maybe so. But if so, then entheogens are only meant to open those doors, and after that, you don't need to use them any more, any more than you need to use the training wheels on a bicycle after you've learned to ride. I don't promote the use of entheogens; rather, as I said, I think they're unnecessary. Shamanic practice in many cultures has definitively shown that ecstatic states are attainable without any chemical means, through meditation, trance practices, dance, and music.

So, even in those ceremonial contexts in which entheogens are used, the ultimate goal is to transcend their eusage and access those ecstatic states directly. The psychedelic breakthrough can happen, but then we're intended to move on. Continuing use entheogens after this stage, especially outside of indigenous ceremonial contexts, constitutes nothing other than recreational use, addiction, abuse, and ultimately, misuse of the entheogen itself. I can see no good reason for such recreational usages of sacred plants.

I think the majority of musicians are interested in truth. —John Coltrane

Ecstatic states are obtainable purely through the practice of music.

Coltrane's late works are all about this, and, I believe, prove the point.

Ascension is one of the most ecstatic pieces of music ever recorded. It's a tremendously powerful and uplifting recording. It is often misunderstood by more traditiona-bound jazz players and critics, though. I only came to understand the piece, structurally, after studying African-American sacred music traditions intensively. Ascension's structure is based, I believe, on call-and-response choral singing as in church revival meetings, and in African traditional religions, which were the ancestral musical sources of tent-revival meetings and similar spirit-driven pentecostal practices in the USA since the African slaves were brought here. Ascension contains single phrases of song that are echoed by each of the lead instruments, heterophonically rather than harmonically, in call-and-response simultaneity. This gives us several lead instruments playing the same theme at the same time, but not in unison; slightly out of synchronization, slightly out of form with each other. Several times during the course of the music, such phrases emerge, usually indicating changes in the music, often the mext soloist's section to jam, and the beginnings and endings of long sections. In African music, a lead instrument often gives audible cues within the music. This is a completely internal way of directing the music, and completely different from the way cues are traditionally given in classical European music, where such cues are given by the leader, but are not typically audible cues. (This is why the role of the conductor was solidified, as the orchestra grew larger in size during the nineteenth century.)

This understanding came to me from ethnomusicological and folklore studies. I never got it from music school. This might account for why some jazz musicians, who still don't get it, think that Ascension sounds like an orchestra tuning up. Well, it does: but the same way that a gospel choir in the throes of passion can cross that line into speaking in tongues. And it sounds even more like a group of spiritual seekers all traveling together on the same pilgrimage towards Union.

There is never any end. There are always new sounds to imagine; new feelings to get at. And always, there is the need to keep purifying these feelings and sounds so that we can really see what we've discovered in its pure state. So that we can see more and more clearly what we are. In that way, we can give to those who listen the essence, the best of what we are. But to do that at each stage, we have to keep on cleaning the mirror. —John Coltrane

Creativity is a spiritual practice, even a religious one. Mystics such as Meister Eckhart say that when we create, we are participating in the Creation, both the original Creation, and its continuous, ongoing process of growth and change. Music is one of the most authentic forms of worship, I believe.

My goal is to live the truly religious life, and express it in my music. If you live it, when you play there's no problem because the music is part of the whole thing. To be a musician is really something. It goes very, very deep. My music is the spiritual expression of what I am—my faith, my knowledge, my being. —John Coltrane