large rests within lines, delicately spacing bursts of triplets, in the effort to achieve
rhythmic variation within given harmonic limits. When his playing became liberated from
the centripetal force of tonality, time became his prisoner and silence a
consequent choice against time–a choice that facilitated expansion within the
ultimately temporal musical order. The authority of the silences is a direct consequence
of the late pieces’ density of texture: each note and each rest is part of an integrated
design of utmost economy and vigor. The mystical effect, to paraphrase Nathalie
Sarraut’s account of the new, "nontonal" novel, is that of a time that is
no longer the time of our intended life, but of a hugely amplified present.
But this dialectic of sound and silence betokens more than just a technical imperial
expansion over wide, new territories. Trane’s is the silence of Orphic utterance
momentarily stilled, of the voice that temporarily ceases singing in the face of mystery,
only to embrace a new strain that will henceforward echo this silence, but in song.
This silence presupposes the possibility of song and the relevance of expression to the
life of the individual soul and the community. Trane, like his African forebears, was
delving for the primal Sound that lends music its magical quality. The very possibility of
such discovery, he intuited, begins in the silence of the quest, what Kenneth Burke termed
the hunter’s "silence of purposiveness."
[. . . .]
Baraka, Coltrane’s most sublime critic, was trying to express what anyone of artistic
awareness sensed in the presence of a music more powerful, more anguished and celebratory
than any in recent memory. But there is a source to this power, despite the blinding
sparks of Trane’s titanic assault on tradition (which I have, admittedly, stressed
somewhat tendentiously). What he actually did was to obey an obscure but profound impulse
to revolt against established conventions in order to rediscover convention on a deeper
level. Specifically, Trane recalled, for himself and for his generation, the old cry and
shout of the blues. This impulse can be felt throughout his career; in his
construction of melody, he always maintained a hint of the blues’ folk scales. When, in
the later works, the tonal centers were mixed and shifted in rapid succession, the blues
did not disappear. On the contrary, they were asserted more energetically, more primally
in the sheer outpouring of shout, screech, wail and cry, in the uninhibited pitch and
movement within the register. Listen to "Manifestation" (1966), to "The
Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost" (1965), to "Transition" (1965).
There are long patches there which are virtual encyclopedias of oral tradition, with
grunt, scream, joke, and soothing speech all intended as confessions and calls to the
people.
One feels the blues as naked vocality especially in recordings of Trane’s live
performances. Trane always sought to pull his audience into the force-field of his long,
explosive solos. His ideal, like that of the earliest jazz masters, was one of collective
improvisation. "When you know that somebody is maybe moved the same way you
are," he once said, "it’s just like having another member in the group."
Again, the contrast with the white avant-garde is revealing. To the latter, demands for
communication and participation are not only irrelevant but disruptive of the fundamental
rage for disorder. It seeks the dismemberment and abhors any interruption of its own
destruction. For Trane, as for all black artists, the community’s involvement in a ritual
of restitution is paramount. It is they who must ultimately–and
continuously–re-member his total Orphic being.
Excerpted from "Late Coltrane: A Re-Membering of Orpheus." In A Chant of
Saints: A Gathering of Afro-American Literature, Art, and Scholarship. Ed. Michael S.
Harper and Robert B. Stepto. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1979. Copyright ?
1979 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.