VA - Spiritual Jazz 4 Americans In Europe (2013)
Amabella Tevebaugh
As always, our double gatefold LP features extensive liner notes inlcuding a history of the label as well as notes on each of the individual tracks. Photos from the recording sessions and cover art from each of the LPs from which our selection has been taken is also included. A free 320kbps MP3 download card is included as a bonus. With in-demand tracks from the likes of Billy Gault, Johnny Dyani and Khan Jamal, and the unearthing of deep cuts from greats like Jackie McLean and Mary Lou Williams, our Spiritual Jazz 11: Steeplechase pays tribute to one of Europe's most important jazz labels and furthers our exploration into the infinite realms of spiritual jazz.
One of Ayler's key free jazz recordings is Spiritual Unity, including his often recorded and most famous composition, Ghosts, in which a simple spiritual-like melody is gradually shifted and distorted through Ayler's unique improvisatory interpretation. Ultimately, Ayler serves as an important example of many ways which free jazz could be interpreted, as he often strays into more tonal areas and melodies while exploring the timbral and textural possibilities within his melodies. In this way, his free jazz is built upon both a progressive attitude towards melody and timbre as well as a desire to examine and recontextualize the music of the past.[13]
Fast-rising altoist Lakecia Benjamin talks to Thomas Rees about the healing power of music and the story behind Pursuance, her star-studded, intergenerational tribute to those twin powerhouses of spiritual jazz, Alice and John Coltrane...
Although dance in Congo Square ended before the Civil War, a related musical tradition surfaced in the African-American neighborhoods at least by the 1880s. The Mardi Gras Indians were black "gangs" whose members "masked" as American Indians on Mardi Gras day to honor them. Black Mardi Gras Indians felt a spiritual affinity with Native American Indians. On Mardi Gras day gang members roamed their neighborhoods looking to confront other gangs in a show of strength that sometimes turned violent. The demonstration included drumming and call-and-response chanting that was strongly reminiscent of West African and Caribbean music. Mardi Gras Indian music was part of the environment of early jazz. Several early jazz figures such as Louis Armstrong and Lee Collins described being affected by Mardi Gras Indian processions as youngsters, and Jelly Roll Morton claimed to have been a "spyboy," or scout, for an Indian gang as a teenager.
Percussionist Emmanuel Abdul Rahim recorded this mix of latin & spiritual jazz in his adopted home of Denmark in 1988. Sought after for the African influenced Kalahari Suite 'Harlem' is actually 8 tracks of brilliance that sees the veteran performer lead a local band through their paces. A perfect example of America meets Europe.
He then made the soulful 45 'When You Lose You Groove' b/w 'The Knower' and the spiritual jazz classic 'Total Submission' for Cobblestone, which featured the updated version of 'The Knower' called 'Al-Alim' which we included on Jazz On The Corner 2. After that like so many American jazzmen he packed his bags and headed to Europe to carry on his career, which is where, in 1988 he recorded 'Harlem'.
Until it was swept aside by the pop explosion of the 1960s, jazz was the most popular modern sound on earth. From the New World and the Caribbean to Africa, across the Soviet Bloc and the British Empire to the Far East, jazz music was embraced, adopted, played and enjoyed. Having examined spiritual jazz as it was expressed in the US, and followed its messengers and influences in Europe, this fifth installment of our Spiritual Jazz series presents jazz from the rest of the world: a collection of jazz messages hailing from the four corners of the world that are united in their diverse treatment of the jazz idiom.
Spiritual Jazz - Finally, my favorite. This is a subgenre where the name spiritual jazz is not really the fully accepted codified term, but it works. This was late 60s through 70s stuff. Musicians who were getting really into the spiritual side of music were putting out this stuff, it tends to have pretty long songs, from 10 to 30 minutes. Often there is a lot of influence from the music of the continents of africa or asia. Typically this stuff can be pretty free, and could be called free jazz, but tends to have a different sound. Very powerful, the artists were always really trying to express something related to their spirituality. Also John Coltrane was really the first to push this stuff with A Love Supreme.
Even though many African American jazz musicians have acknowledged the role of spirituality in their creative process, jazz scholars have tended to neglect this important context. More commonly, they have situated jazz, particularly in the 1960s, within the Civil Rights Movement and have focused on issues of political oppression.1 An examination of the artists John and Alice Coltrane, however, suggests the limitation of exploring 1960s jazz solely within this political framework. Their compositional titles and their extensive commentary in interviews and in liner notes from the mid-'60s onward stressed the personal and the spiritual, not the explicitly political. Of course, I do not mean to suggest that the religious and political facets of culture stand at oppositional poles. Rather, they should be viewed "as bands in a single spectrum" (Ellwood 1994:9). This is particularly true in an examination of both African American musical and political culture, where the divide between the sacred and secular has been historically nebulous.
The role of the Black Protestant Church has figured prominently in scholarly discussions of African American music culture, and to some extent its importance has been explored with respect to jazz.2 However, with the exception of the Nation of Islam, the influence of Eastern religious practices among black Americans has not been significantly researched nor have adequate connections been made between these spiritual pursuits and the musical innovations they inspired.3 Nevertheless, since the mid-'60s, black American artists have explored Yoga, Hinduism, various sects of Buddhism, Ahmadiya Islam, and Bahá'í. The aesthetic impact of these pursuits has been multi-dimensional and far-reaching. In [End Page 41] their study of Asian philosophy and religion, jazz musicians have been exposed to the sounds and musical processes they have discovered in the cultures from which these traditions have emerged. One can hear this influence in musical borrowings, such as the use of traditional instrumentation, the reworking of melodic material from folk and classical genres, and the incorporation of indigenous improvisational and compositional techniques.4 Though less audible, Eastern spiritual traditions have also exerted a more abstract philosophical influence that has shaped jazz aesthetics, inspiring jazz musicians to dissolve formal and stylistic boundaries and produce works of great originality.5 Contextualizing the spiritual explorations of John and Alice Coltrane within American religious culture and liberation movements of the 1960s, this essay explores the way that their eclectic appropriation of Eastern spiritual concepts and their commitment to spiritual universality not only inspired musical innovation, but also provided a counter-hegemonic, political, and cultural critique.
In 1976, Alice Coltrane had a mystical experience in which she received divine instruction to renounce the world and don the orange robes of a swami, or spiritual teacher, in the Hindu tradition. Until her recent passing in January 2007, she had been the guru at Sai Anantam Ashram, a predominantly African American spiritual community in Southern California, where she and her students studied the philosophy of Vedanta, and regularly participated in services of devotional music that she presided over. This essay, then, highlights Alice Coltrane's career and continued exploration of innovations developed alongside her husband and can be seen as a counter-narrative to the typical historical narratives of modern jazz, which tend to define her career as a mere footnote to that of her husband.
Although his canonical status as jazz guru belies the fact, a reputation cemented by the platinum selling album A Love Supreme (1965), John Coltrane was not the first jazz musician to draw on spiritual subject matter for musical inspiration. Other famous jazz composers such as Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus had alluded to the black church much earlier in their respective works, "The Black and Tan Fantasy" and "Prayer Meeting." In the late 1950s, this trend became increasingly popular as hard-bop players drew consistently from the gospel genre in order to differentiate and reclaim their music from that of the white "cool school."9 By the mid-to-late 1960s, however, jazz musicians drew not only from African American spiritual traditions, but also from non-Christian, non-Western, even idiosyncratic, spiritual concepts. In some respects, such musical and spiritual explorations of "the East," of Africa, and of various cosmic realms distanced jazz from the traditional Protestant church as the locus of black ethnicity. Yet many of the same "functional dimensions" of African American sacred music persisted to use Melonee Burnim's useful term. The new spiritual jazz continued to provide "a means of cultural affirmation, individual and collective expression, and spiritual sustenance" (Burnim 1988:112).
Nevertheless, within the jazz community, John Coltrane's spiritual impact was singular; he imbued modal and avant-garde jazz improvisation with spiritual significance, and, in many respects, succeeded in creating a new religion for jazz musicians based on what Ms. Coltrane described as, "the entire experience of the expressive self" (Coltrane 2001). Let me offer Alice Coltrane's recollection of playing with her husband:
In the introduction to the album Universal Consciousness (1971), the first LP that Alice Coltrane (now known by her new spiritual name Turiya) recorded after her first trip to India with Swami Satchidananda, she emphasized the importance of her pilgrimage: "Having made the journey to the East, a most important part of my Sadhana (spiritual struggle) has been completed." Her trip to India had a dramatic impact on her spiritual evolution and her related aesthetic sensibility. Upon returning, her new creative goal surpassed that of making music in a technical or artistic sense; she was now determined to express "extraordinary transonic and atmospherical power," which could send forth "illuminating worlds of sounds [End Page 50] into the ethers of this universe."21 As evidenced on the last group of albums she made for Impulse! and Warner Brothers, Universal Consciousness (1971); World Galaxy (1971); Lord of Lords (1972); Eternity (1975); Transcendence (1977); Radha Krsna Nama Sankirtana (1977); and Transfiguration (1978), the experience of her spiritual awakening could no longer be contained within the timbral palette of the jazz rhythm section, even at the latter's most expressive and avant-garde extremes. She began to explore the combined potential of rhythm section, orchestral strings, tambura, harp, piano, percussion, and her newfound improvisational vehicle, the electric organ.
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