John Coltrane at 100: Part 4 — The Matter of Meaning

by Fritz Byers

We’ve spent the week trying to see John Coltrane clearly. Tuesday, I proposed to think about the arc of his career as one, long unbroken search rather than as a series of reinventions. Wednesday, the focus was his two indispensable apprenticeships, looking at what he took from his time from Miles, and, more decisively, what he carried forward from Monk. Yesterday, a handful of records that deserve your attention alongside the more usual suspects. Now it’s Friday.

The occasion for all this is Coltrane’s centenary. We did a similar four-part immersion in May to mark Miles’s centenary. Twice in one year – how about that!?!

(I just thought of the song on The Police’s 1980 classic, Zenyatta Mondatta: “When the World is Running Down, You Make the Best of What’s Still Around.” As Dizzy Gillespie would say, “Shaw ‘Nuff.”)

I have a friend who says of himself, “I give good summary.” It is a talent to be proud of. I’m not sure I have it, but I want to spend today’s Coltrane time thinking about what it all means, why it all matters.

I want to begin by returning to a concern I mentioned Tuesday, because I think this week’s listening and pondering suggests that there’s an answer. John became, almost from the moment of his death (and by many accounts, before) a kind of secular saint — a spiritual seeker, an oracle of the horn, a man spoken of more often in the language of testimony than in the language of music. I worried that this reputation gets in the way of listening, of really hearing John’s sound, his music, of feeling it with the immediacy with which he created it.

And some of his late music is genuinely difficult: dense, turbulent, built to unsettle rather than to comfort, despite its evident goal of spiritual peace. If the sainthood depended on the music’s being accessible, the two would be at war, and the music would eventually win, because music always wins.

But I’m wondering if that’s really where the reputation comes from. I’m beginning to think that it comes not directly from the music, but from something evident in the man, independent of whether any given record is easy to love. By every account, John practiced close to eight hours every day, for years, even after having achieved a level of accomplishment that would have let nearly anyone else stop working nearly that hard. (In this, he is, as his own tune says, “Like Sonny [Rollins].”)

That’s not ambition in the ordinary sense. It’s something much closer to devotion, to fidelity, a conviction that there is always more — more virtuosity, more harmonic possibility, more of whatever beauty has not yet been glimpsed — and that reaching it requires a discipline that has nothing to do with reward. 

It takes real confidence to believe you’re capable of that kind of search. It also takes something rarer, humility, to do the necessary work once you believe it. John had both, in a combination you rarely see in a person of his talent, and it shows in his recorded legacy: no coasting, no repeating a discovered success, nothing that looks like complacency, like an artist protecting what he’s already made. Whatever else you may think about John’s late recordings, as alienating as some listeners found them, they are not the work of an artist resting on anything. I think that, more than any doctrine or liner note, is where the sainthood comes from.

This conviction shaped his career, and it’s the reason his story reads so differently from the one I told in May about Miles. Miles moved from one challenge to the next, a tale of constant reinvention. John’s life is one sustained search. Each is a legitimate way to become, and be, a great artist, as each undoubtedly was. But John’s method provides a special kind of instruction, because it asks something of the listener too — not engagement with novelty, but with depth, with the drive to keep returning to the same ground and find, again and again, that it is inexhaustible.

Throughout John’s search, and regardless of what he was finding, his sound — full,  warm, inviting — is always there for you. You can detect it in the first phrase of any given solo, and it never changed, even as what he tried to do with it grew ever more demanding.  

On A Love Supreme, John deployed that sound in furtherance of a through-composed act of thanksgiving, gratitude for having survived himself and having been allowed to go on making music. This isn’t a claim for beauty as the source of artistic permanence, which is, as I said in May, why Miles’s music matters. Rather, it’s a claim that the meaning of music is rooted in conceiving it as a form of service, of self-abnegation in the presence of something larger. You don’t have to share John’s faith to recognize that this is a different, and in some ways a more demanding, way to find meaning in music.

John’s music is beautiful. Locating that beauty is easier when listening to his earlier work, but I think you can find it in everything John did, even the late unsettling sonic avalanches, if you’re willing to hear it on its own terms. And I think the beauty is in the spirit John brought to every note he played, the spirit of questing, of resolution and pursuit, and the hope for peace.

This weekend on Jazz Spectrum, four hours each on Friday and Saturday night, and four more hours of deeper cuts on Jazz Spectrum Overnight, the music of John Coltrane.