Love Supreme Research Articles

“See clearly … feel deeply”: Improvisation and Transformation: John McLaughlin Interviewed by Daniel Fischlin

On the cusp of a North American concert tour in late 2010 and hot off the release of To the One, his musical meditation on Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” and his own lifelong spirit-quest, celebrated guitarist John McLaughlin agreed to a CSI request for an interview focusing on improvisation and spirituality. In addition to being a prodigious musician in every respect, McLaughlin has had an exceptional, if not unparalleled, trajectory through the crucible of twentieth and now twenty-first century music.

Sampling Kimberly Benston's 'Coltrane Poem'

At the height of the Civil Rights Movement, John Coltrane became a major African American cultural icon whose magisterial 1964 A Love Supreme acted as a model for black artists infused with the spirit of the Black Arts Movement. In his study of black modernism, Performing Blackness (2000), literary critic Kimberly Benston defines the numerous poems dedicated to the musician as a distinct genre, that of the ‘Coltrane Poem.’ A close reading of three major texts by Jane Cortez, Sonia Sanchez and Michael Harper illustrates how the poetry of the black aesthetics raises jazz music to the rank of the ultimate medium of interrogation, transgression and innovation that poetry itself in turn incarnates. After Coltrane’s disappearance in 1967, black poets construct an elegiac mode by revisiting the myth of Black Orpheus from dismemberment to resurrection. Poetry is performance, immediacy, and presence, to the point of letting the voice alone bear the burden of a vanishing text. The violent political context of the sixties, the avant-garde desire to disrupt barriers between music and words and the impact of Coltrane’s conversion in 1957, account for the revolutionary character of these texts. ‘Coltrane’ is not the ‘subject’ of a meditation. His radically new approach to jazz and his genius for improvisation–he also wrote poems that he incorporated into his music–inhabit a questioning of the form itself and of the nature of art as a medium, often at the peril of the word and at the risk of meaning. Elegy and eulogy are as many fighting modes on the battlefield of sound and voice, faced with death, chaos and silence, but full with the promise of transcendence.

Sonic Revolution

Page 9 March–April 2008 critics to deal with the ambiguities of Charlie Parker’s brilliance—Gennari completes his map of the discourse with attention to jazz during the 1960s. He devotes major attention to the work of LeRoi Jones/ Amiri Baraka and Ralph Gleason, and, finally, in the contemporary era (influenced by Stanley Crouch’s neoclassicism and Gary Giddins’s ability to avoid pigeon holes) fuses dozens of disparate strands of the contemporary and historical tableau. Maps of critical discourses can make for numbing prose. Not here. Gennari’s prose conveys a sense of immediate importance and makes for a surprisingly rich narrative structure. Central to the story is the ever-present lens of racial focus and distortion in American life and letters. As Gennari notes several times, the fact that many of the critics were white and that jazz is (if in a way no one can seem to pin down) fundamentally a black idiom creates important ripples in the discourse. Part of the brilliance of the book is Gennari’s skill for marking the ripples without concluding that some (somehow, otherwise available) Platonic truth has been sacrificed. He understands that the distortions are part of the story and, in any case, unavoidable. To this sense of intellectual , interracial tact, he adds significant, sensitive, and illuminating readings of the work of black critics , most importantly Frank Marshall Davis, Ralph Ellison, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, and Greg Tate. In the end, Blowin’Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics takes its deserved place among the most valuable books devoted to jazz. Gennari’s ability to merge the biographical, historical, intellectual, formal, geographic , and ideological trajectories that informed the combination of music, critical discourse, and audience appreciation makes it clear that the writing about jazz is an essential part of our understanding of the superstructure of American modernity. Ed Pavlić’s most recent book is Winners Have Yet to Be Announced: A Song for Donny Hathaway. He lives in Athens, Georgia where he directs the MFA / PhD Program in Creative Writing at the University of Georgia. Pavlić continued from previous page Sonic Revolution Colin Fleming Coltrane: The Story of a Sound Ben Ratliff Farrar, Straus and Giroux http://www.fsgbooks.com 272 pages; cloth, $24.00 Equally adroit at dividing audiences as parsing sound into its individual components of rhythm, meter, and harmony, the John Coltrane that emerges from this study by New York Times jazz critic Ben Ratliff has something of the yogi about him. Not that it’s uncommon for Coltrane bios and musical analyses to cast the tenor sax giant as a sort of mid-sixties Beatrice, a source of inspiration in the inferno of the civil rights era, against a backdrop of jazz’s New Thing, a term with its share of pejorative associations. Namely, that this was a music that had all but murdered melody, doing away with such basic musical strictures as key, and sounding like a dozen cars backfiring at once. Repeatedly. Giving the first half of his study over to Coltrane’s music before delving into that music’s broad cultural impact in the second, Ratliff posits Coltrane as a riff-blowing, note-splitting paragon of democratic ideals. Quite the little paradox for listeners who’ve long regarded Coltrane’s music as impenetrable to the poor fellow without a musicology degree—fit for museum walls, were such conceits possible, but not exactly fodder for the iPod on that jog around the neighborhood. Or so goes the rhetoric that still exists in resisting Coltrane’s music, particularly when it comes to the recordings following 1964’s A Love Supreme, the saxophonist’s suite to God, which regularly turns up on those “best ever album” lists that you find in huge-circulation rock magazines even—in turn sending the curious on to what followed in 1965, a great year for pop music in general, and the beginning of the final phase of Coltrane’s sonic revolution, when he devoted himself to the obliteration of familiar musical forms and devices. The dying John Keats exploded poetic conventions; Coltrane, nearing the end of his own life, tapped into his personal version of the analogy: if you...

ALS and Pop Music

ALS and Pop Music

“Love Supreme”: On Spiritual Experience and Change in Personality Structure

This article attempts to address the crucial question of how an experience of God might lead to changes in personality. Important concepts are drawn from psychoanalytic theory emphasising relational perspectives which have developed in recent decades. While somewhat under developed, there were relational aspects in Freud's thinking, both clinically in the transference and theoretically with oedipal dynamics and the formation of the superego. There is a brief mention of other psychoanalytic theorists and an outline of the work of Hans Loewald in regard to internalization of relationship patterns. There is an examination of some relevant results from infant observation and developmental research. And finally the article presents a view about how experiences of God are internalized in terms of relational patterns, adding structure to personality in a maturing and possibly healing way. This thesis is illustrated with a case drawn from the author's practice.

Book Review: A Love Supreme: A History of the Johannlne Tradition

Book Review: A Love Supreme: A History of the Johannlne Tradition

A Love Supreme: A History of the Johannine Tradition – By Allen Dwight Callahan

A Love Supreme: A History of the Johannine Tradition – By Allen Dwight Callahan

Red

Red Tama Baldwin (bio) 1. Snow had closed down color for another season, the cold curtaining all the windows with frost. I lay still, allowing myself to be remade between thumb and forefinger, the charcoal line of breast bleeding into rib, rib into the plateau of belly, belly cupped by hips, the cylinders of my legs flattening into the flippers of my feet. I am floating on my back across the canvas, having levitated from the very real hardwood floor of the studio to the very real wall of the gallery, only to have a woman, one of his colleagues, say to me: "I would never let a man paint me like that." "Like what?" I asked. "It's so cold," she said. "There you are so ecstatic, and all he does is douse you in icy blue gouache." It was true that he was happiest touching me from across the room. He loved most geometric forms that composed my body, the electromagnetic me traveling through space as light. It was true, too, that the colors he chose emphasized the distance between his eye and my body, but I had known this about him right from the start, and I didn't mind. I didn't want whatever it was she thought I should have been on the canvas, whatever it was she thought I should share with a man. 2. On our first real date we rowed out under a full moon and lingered for hours, drinking wine, reciting half remembered fragments of a Li Po poem about rowing out under a full moon to linger for hours, drinking wine. The poet died, some say, from cirrhosis of the liver caused by toxins in longevity elixirs. The poet died, some say, drowning in a drunken attempt to embrace the reflection of the moon. Those who choose to believe the latter are his truest readers. There was a hole in the sky that night, a portal [End Page 5] through which poured light thirteen hundred years old. We searched the pines on shore for the poet dancing with his shadow. By midnight the moon had pulled away from us into an observational mode, its klieg light glaring until the whole world seemed overexposed. We drifted in silence for a while, our bodies on opposite ends of the boat. My eyes were closed, my mind lobbing itself toward sleep, when I heard the crush of ash on paper. I opened my eyes to see his hand moving charcoal over a moon-bleached page. This was how he navigated the world: light to eye, eye to hand, hand to line. Later, on shore again, we kissed for a while—the first real kisses of my life—and then he drove me home, both of us enjoying the silence between us. I remember leaning my head against the coolness of the window, watching the earth roll past, feeling as weightless as an astronaut. The next day I found tacked to my door his thanks for the night we had shared: a huge red and blue fish painted in the manner of de Kooning. A fish as much color as line, body of water and blood, his papery, paint-heavy length shifting in the breeze of my apartment hallway. 3. The first assignment of the semester was a nude self-portrait. The image was to be life-sized, a full frontal perspective. This, he had said, would encourage respect for the human form, and would stress the importance of seeing even one's own flesh as a subject—the sort of detachment fundamental to Life Drawing 101. I sat in his studio watching him pose naked before the mirror. He played Coltrane's "A Love Supreme" over and over, chain smoking unfiltered Camels, drinking bottle after bottle of Rolling Rock. We were chatting about the class, wondering about how each student would confront the task, especially Mr. P. who had entered the fine arts program at the age of 83. The nude self-portrait tended to be a weed out exercise. Those who were not ready to complete it were presumably not ready for the journey of the course. We did not expect Mr...

A Love Supreme and Dim Sum

A Love Supreme and Dim Sum

"Everything We Hoped She'd Be": Contending Forces in Hopkins Scholarship

Pauline Hopkins's emergence in American and African American literary scholarship has been quite a success story. Rescued from obscurity with a biographical article by Ann Allen Shockley in 1972 and with the reissuing of her novels by the Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers series in 1988, Hopkins now enjoys a measure of academic popularity, evidenced by a 1996 collection of scholarly essays devoted to her work and by the growing number of hits under her name in the MLA Bibliography. Indeed, at a recent conference on American women writers, some of us quipped that it might have been a Pauline Hopkins conference, so ubiquitous was her critical presence. Recently I ran a Pauline Hopkins search on Amazon.com. I was curious as to whether a publisher had reissued any of her three novels originally serialized in The Colored American Magazine and reprinted in one volume in the Schomburg collection. Having worked on Hopkins for some years, I felt confident that I knew all her work; I wasn't expecting any surprises. But I was surprised to find A Love Supreme by Pauline Hopkins--a book completely unknown to me--available from The X Press, along with two of the magazine novels, now published separately. As it turns out, A Love Supreme is the X Press's new title for Hopkins's first novel, Contending Forces. The cover of this edition features a photograph of a sultry, dark-skinned woman gazing up at the viewer positioned above her. The back cover touts the novel as a political fiction and, perhaps appealing to a modern audience's notion of political, attempts to hide the book's use of the tragic mulatta convention, a convention that has troubled literary scholars. But even more startling is The X Press's reprinting of her last serialized novel, Of One Blood. Now just One Blood, the cover sports a man visibly of African decent (unlike the novel's protagonist, who passes as white for the majority of the novel). His head shaven and his chest bare, he carries what appears to be an African artifact--possibly a spear. The back cover's sexy and aggressive description bears almost no resemblance to the novel's character or plot: Medical student Reuel Briggs doesn't give a damn about being black and cares less for African history. When he arrives in Ethiopia on an archeological trip, his only interest is to raid as much of the country's lost treasures as possible so that he can make big bucks on his return to the States. (1) Anyone familiar with this novel would be surprised at the tone used here to describe a protagonist who is subdued, even depressed, until falling in love and who, inspired by that love to make his fortune, goes on the archeological trip as the team's doctor, where he engages in numerous philosophical discussions about Ethiopia as the true source of civilization. Initially, I was taken aback at this reworking of Hopkins. These reprints attempt to lift Hopkins out of the post-Reconstruction milieu in which she lived and wrote and set her down in an era of radical race activism reminiscent of the nineteen sixties. They flatten out her complexity and try to fit her into a comfortable pattern of race activism that will, presumably, sell to modern readers. But upon reflection I began to wonder whether her recent scholarly recuperation lends itself to--even calls into being--such a revision of her oeuvre. Hopkins has been recovered as a radical race activist, and scholarship clings to and celebrates accounts of her radical politics in spite of evidence complicating these accounts. The defining feature of her activism is her firing from the editorship at The Colored American because of her radical politics, an event that has become almost a commonplace in Hopkins scholarship. (2) This explanation for Hopkins's leaving The Colored American certainly makes for a satisfying narrative for scholars who wish to see her as a radical race activist, and I do not seek to dismiss this profile out of hand. …

A love supreme: the story of John Coltrane's signature album

A love supreme: the story of John Coltrane's signature album

Impro

My most intensive experience as a listener to jazz extends from 1959 – the year of release of groundbreaking albums that included Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, Charles Mingus’s Ah Um, and Ornette Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come – to the period in my late teens and early twenties when Archie Shepp released Fire Music and Four for ’Trane, Albert Ayler released Bells and The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra appeared mysteriously in my collection (which also heavily featured albums by John Coltrane, especially the quartet with McCoy Tyner on piano, Elvin Jones on drums and Jimmy Garrison on bass). As I recall it, this was, among other things, a period in which improvisation was in different ways attempting to free itself from shaping structures such as chord changes, melodic lines, “modes” or even “notes” as such: as Albert Ayler famously remarked, “it’s not about notes any more, it’s about feelings.” In the wake of the civil rights and other liberatory social movements, as I remember it, jazz at this time was also, in some of its manifestations and particularly among black musicians, moving away from featured soloists toward increasing collaboration – or group improvisation, as on John Coltrane’s late albums, including the classic A Love Supreme, which consists of group improvisations around a basic four-note theme, extending over two sides of vinyl – one of the few non-classical “record” albums that actually benefited from the reformatting required by its re-release on CD.

When the Saints

A problem is a stumbling block, something thrown in the way. Problem comes from the Greek-pro (before, in front of) + ballein (to throw)meaning anything thrown before you, directly ahead of you. You either face your problem, a potentially null encounter, or go back the way you came. There is no way around the problem. Parable is a form of problem. Like problem, parable also comes from Greek. The difference is between the para (to the side) and the pro. The parable is something thrown to the side, a by-word, the stumbling block alongside you. And like a parabola, the parable is a curve whose ever-widening, infinite symmetries most often escape notice and so close in on you. The parable, like the parabola, is both open and closed. It's a matter of looking in the right direction. John Taggart's latest book, When the Saints, the second part of which first appeared in this magazine and the whole of which was published by Talisman House last fall, is not a parable. As Taggart writes in the opening lines: The subject was roses the problem is memory that was the subject roses piled to burn intensity of a fire in summer intensity in intensity ashes in a ring pale rose hue of the rose ashes that was the subject the problem is memory the problem a problema the problem a problema a problem to find a problem to find the unknown Memory is a stumbling block. The choice of roses as a subject is not incidental. Of all the things to write about, roses are most difficult, most like a stumbling block. What can you do about roses? Taggart uses the stumbling block as material on which to inscribe the poem. The problem is how to remember without being overtaken and closed in on by memory. memory is musical memory is musical in suggestion suggestion of a progression of a progression to a destination the destination of music is harmony everything joined to fit to fit together closely fitted close harmony which closes on a close which closes in on itself there are other harmonies there are other harmonies which do not close which close to open which close in open harmonies Invoking figures as various as Simonides, Simon Weil, and Charles Mingus, When the Saints is an extremely ambitious poem that manages to maintain its focus through seventy-two pages. It is an elegy for Taggart's friend, the sculptor Bradford Graves, a photo of whose stone xylophone graces the cover. It is a meditation on Coltrane's A Love Supreme. It is a collection of quotations, including some from Coltrane's poem on the inside cover of A Love Supreme, taken, cut up and rearranged. When the Saints is not, however, a collage. Like the New Orleans funeral dirge from which Taggart has taken half his title, When the Saints is a procession of the saints of Taggart's imagination. The primary figures in the procession are Coltrane, Rilke, and Sainte Colombe, the late-seventeeth-century and early-eighteenthcentury century French composer whose main contribution was the addition of a seventh string to the viola da gamba, thus giving the instrument a more mournful tone. Taggart is deeply influenced by each-the long riff of Coltrane, the elegiac and spiritual concerns of Rilke, and the almost dronelike vibration of Sainte Colombe's seventh string-but the connection is more than his admiration. …

The Camillus Factory: Per Astra AD Ardeam

None but dry-eyed, calculating, angular little gentlemen can take much delight in the studies of the University.(Tennyson on Cambridge)Hard to believe. We are told something obvious, something reassuring, something foundational by Servius at the outset of theAeneid:totius autem Italiae curiosissimum fuisse Vergilium multifariam apparet.(ad Aen.1.44)Virgil cared the most to know all Italy—it's obvious in many a way.Any Roman rhetoric graduate knew that the surefire way to subvert all arguments is to argue that theyprevaricate: clearly, since texts are systemically interpretable, there is always a gap between the ‘multifarious’ moves they make and their ‘totality’, there is always a point passed by which could, so arguably should, have been featured; copiousness is always interested distraction. Thus, as a display of love supreme for all Italy, theAeneidrevels in wholesale incuria, acknowledging the guilt of pretention in massive, genocidal, proportions.

John Coltrane's "A Love Supreme": Jazz Improvisation as Composition

John Coltrane's "A Love Supreme": Jazz Improvisation as Composition

John Coltrane's "A Love Supreme": Jazz Improvisation as Composition

John Coltrane's "A Love Supreme": Jazz Improvisation as Composition

Don't They Speak Jazz

I was fortunate enough to be born at home, delivered by my grandfather, and so there was much lore attached to my birth, much signifying because I was marked for his father. My parents weren't rich, but they had a good record collection, and they prohibited me from playing any of their 78's, a guarantee that I'd investigate in my own time, always when they were out of the house. After dusting the records, and making sure the needle was in place, the records in the appropriate order, I'd forget not to hum the songs I'd heard, and get caught with a smile. I also had the habit of riding the subway trains on what we called off-days, days when we took off from school, all the Jewish holidays in particular; I'd been riding the subways since I was five, but my parents didn't know it, and it took them three years to catch me. On that fateful day I was illegally riding after school, and passed my father as he went to work; I knew he'd seen me, though he never let on, and I decided to get on the next train and continue riding. At the next express stop I got off intending to turn around and go back home to the inevitable whipping when I heard a tapping on a window of another train it was my grandmother; she waved faintly with a hint of a smile. Music and trains! Coltrane. One learns most by getting caught doing the things you love; it leaves an impression. I knew Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday from birth, but I was a horn man: President Lester Young; Coleman (Bean) Superhawk Hawkins; Big Bad Ben Webster; Charles Chan Parker, alias the Bird; John William Coltrane, alias the Trane. There's a story that Trane was searching for a particular tone on his horn; he had what we thought was a perfect embrochure, but his teeth hurt constantly, so he searched for the soft reed which would ease the pain. After searching for a year, each session killing his chops, he gave it up completely; there was no easy way to get that sound play through the pain to a love supreme. I wrote, secretly, in high school, buried in the back of some English class for fear I'd be asked to stand and recite a memorized poem: Donne or Shakespeare, or John Keats; luckily I tore up all these efforts, switched to prose, and short dramatic forms until I was almost through