(comments delivered at the first John Coltrane Symposium, Philadelphia, PA, October 26, 2019)

In some ways being asked to talk about the connection between John Coltrane and African spirituality is like being asked to explain something as natural as the morning light coming through the windows, as the meaning of birds singing at dusk. It is as natural as those things, as profound as those moments. And this musical invocation is as much as a part of who we are as every other “non-musical” thing that we are. And of course, that’s why it sounds like it does. It is revelation of everything we know that we are and everything we know that it is possible to be. And more.

Lest, I sound like I am exaggerating, recall the first time you heard A Love Supreme. The opening note of “Acknowledgment” is an announcement of a presence, it is birth, the first time around the cycle. It is what the ancient Egyptians would call sp tpy, or “the first occasion.”

Spiritual presence however is not something one should limit to that period of Coltrane’s music. It is often the case that this idea of periodization attempts to cordon off the music in order to demonstrate an evolution. Stages and succession become markers of progress. But John Coltrane is more complicated than these categories, than these logics. In fact, one such category, “spiritual jazz,” has been imagined as a moment that produces the genealogy that succeeded Coltrane on the saxophone: Pharoah Sanders, Gary Bartz, and so many others.

But what these assumptions of progression often fail to reveal, is that it is all spiritual. They are different parts of our whole. If we reify these categories we might obscure the fact that what some have called bebop and what some might call “free” jazz are both grounded in a particular spiritual tradition that emanates from a common foundation.

African spirituality is at its core about relationships, how to make meaning of what and who we are in relation to others, those seen and unseen forces. These are relationships that not only have to be germinated, they have to be cared for. Over and over. This is why there is so much beauty in the repetitions of Coltrane’s horn. That sounding a note, elongating it, and then re-emphasizing it, as in his collaborations with Thelonious Monk from the 1950s, becomes about maintaining a relationship, caring for it. This is what spirit does. It shows up for us, and reminds us of its existence.

But it is not our salvation. Spirit is there to mark a particular relation. When we say that there’s spirit in everything, what we are really saying is that we are trying to relate to something, and through that relation better know possibilities we would not have known. Salvation can be constructed to mark a kind of closing of possibility. As beautiful as being saved might be, we know that liberation requires more than being rescued. It requires doing something in that moment of rescue, of escape. It requires a different kind of relation.

The world is our kin. And music is the family reunion. Through sound and vibration we re-establish what may have been disrupted. And this has taken on added meaning for Africans, whose spiritual traditions have had to address the deep duress that this world, this modern moment has imposed upon us. So we get compositions like “Alabama,” with both its pathos and resolution without settlement. For if something becomes too settled, we might forget that it requires constant care. We also get in those earlier compositions like those on the record Blue Train, moments of flight and movement, as potential for radical possibility.

What Coltrane’s spiritual journey also reminds us is that there is a need to note just how our spiritual traditions might address the problems we face in the world—in the here and now. We might think of our modern predicament as a disruption, a corruption of relation. And music is the family reunion.

The politics is in the poetics. And poetics are in the composition.

But part of attending to sound, and those who create sound, is the importance of space. Space is what makes available the possibility. In recent months, I have been seriously thinking about what space involves, how it is cleared, how it is made, and what we do within it. It is a central question in art-making. But it is also a question central to imaginings of liberation. So we might think with Coltrane and so many others, about the use of space.

In his case, it is in the soloing. This is the moment of imagining liberation, its beauty and possibility. Think of the ways that he pauses between these notes, in particular in his solo for Monk’s “Well You Needn’t.” That is where it all happens. It is pausing for breath, but also preparing the way, clearing space for the next moment. That is what makes it work.  It is not entirely abstract if you realize that everything that makes those moments of improvisation also exist in the material world. That is, the abstract and the concrete are not opposed. They are a relation,  taking a breath is creating of space to realize the connection between ideal and material. 

In space, though, we also might think of isolation. So many African spiritual practices are pursued in isolation—not in total absence, but in individual communion with ancestors, with the divine. Sometimes we have to sit with the self to reach and reveal the thing that this world tends to restrict. For much of what we tend to fight against, is a distraction, really and truly, a departure from practices that might otherwise keep us alive, care for us. So our spiritual practices require another kind of relation, a relation between the self and the soul.

That is what I imagine happened in that session when Coltrane composed A Love Supreme. I think about the old Southern tradition of the prayer closet—the elder who knew that they had to commune with the divine in isolation, in constant practice—a kind of discipline of spirit.

What comes out of this is a lightness. It is an intense exertion of sound that reveals light. A few months ago, I attended the services of Coltrane Church during their visit to Washington, DC. And that imprint was there—the music was played in a room that was filled with light. Somehow their evocation of Coltrane made it seem like these things were connected, were related.

The sounds we hear from Coltrane’s horn were light in another way—for they were not heavy. What I mean is that this is playing that is not overbearing, not overwrought. He is not trying too hard. But that does not mean that it is easy. Think of The Offering. It is a live performance where it is clear that there is something working on him, that there is a spiritual presence that is difficult to bear, to slough off. And there in those moments of intensity, we see how lightness produces a form that is also excessive. That has to be worked through and out. He exhausts the saxophone. So in that moment, Coltrane famously vocalizes, and then he thumps his chest. What was on him had to go, it had to be transmitted and given to us as a new relationship.

African spirituality is all around us. But it is still up to us to practice care, to take hold of it. To relate. We have to carefully listen for it, to listen to that which is all around us. It is these practices that made Coltrane so familiar from the first. It is a familiarity that endures.