From Coltrane to Magma and beyond: Interpreting musical meaning through composition

<p>This thesis is an exploration of the work A Love Supreme composed by John Coltrane, his influence on the band Magma, and their composition, Zëss. By applying Clifford Geertz’s interpretive framework to the work of Coltrane and Magma, I suggest that the spiritual concerns of these composers was the primary motivating factor in the creation of their music. I argue for a definition of Coltrane’s musical work, particularly A Love Supreme, as ‘arranged spontaneous spiritual music’, acknowledging that Coltrane’s spirituality was a vehicle for the music and, simultaneously, the music was a vehicle for his spirituality. I also discuss the composer of Zëss, Christian Vander, who has a deeply cemented love of John Coltrane’s music and spiritual concepts, both of which coexist in the music of his band, Magma. My composition synthesises and expands on the work of both Coltrane and Magma. Descend, based on Dante’s Inferno, contains my own interpreted meanings of A Love Supreme and Zëss. The story of Inferno is similar to that of Coltrane’s and Vander’s commitment in their spiritual lives, and in this project I make my own interpretations to access my own spirituality through the act of composition.</p>

From Coltrane to Magma and beyond: Interpreting musical meaning through composition

<p>This thesis is an exploration of the work A Love Supreme composed by John Coltrane, his influence on the band Magma, and their composition, Zëss. By applying Clifford Geertz’s interpretive framework to the work of Coltrane and Magma, I suggest that the spiritual concerns of these composers was the primary motivating factor in the creation of their music. I argue for a definition of Coltrane’s musical work, particularly A Love Supreme, as ‘arranged spontaneous spiritual music’, acknowledging that Coltrane’s spirituality was a vehicle for the music and, simultaneously, the music was a vehicle for his spirituality. I also discuss the composer of Zëss, Christian Vander, who has a deeply cemented love of John Coltrane’s music and spiritual concepts, both of which coexist in the music of his band, Magma. My composition synthesises and expands on the work of both Coltrane and Magma. Descend, based on Dante’s Inferno, contains my own interpreted meanings of A Love Supreme and Zëss. The story of Inferno is similar to that of Coltrane’s and Vander’s commitment in their spiritual lives, and in this project I make my own interpretations to access my own spirituality through the act of composition.</p>

The Mind of the Artist

Because artists make something out of nothing, the process can seem like magic, divinely inspired and inexplicable. It’s not. A single, potent factor lies at the heart of most everything creative: the mysterious, multifaceted trait of “openness.” This book describes the role of the openness dimension in the typical artist mind: how it loosens thinking, how it widens feelings, how it motivates behavior, and how it foments a useful inner chaos encouraging artistic invention. For creatives, openness is a unifying glue. It binds together states and processes at the core of the art-making impulse. A related key variable is trauma, according to scientific findings: the raw material with which so many artists work. In novels, poems, stories, and photographs, trauma gets symbolically repeated, shaped in the direction of a torturous beauty. Scientifically astute, conceptually subtle, and packed with richly detailed artist examples—from David Bowie to Frida Kahlo, from John Coltrane to Francesca Woodman, from Diane Arbus to Kurt Cobain—The Mind of the Artist demystifies artistic genius. It is a new, true portrait of artistic vision.

The Unifying Glue

Chapter 3 zeroes in on the trait of openness exclusively, including its structural and motivational elements. The author discusses how openness, like the rest of the Big Five traits, affects every aspect of mental life, but notes that traits are abstract potentials. Their existence is inferred from what people say and do, how they behave. Of more interest in this book are the habits of mind they give rise to. These involve ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving. The author describes how, depending on how high a person is in O, certain challenges may (or may not) materialize. Three artists are profiled in the chapter: John Coltrane, John Lennon, and Francesca Woodman.

The Experimental Composition Improvisation Continua Model: A Tool for Musical Analysis

Among improvisers and composers today there is a resurgence of interest in experimental music (EM) practices that welcome contingency; engaging with unforeseen circumstances as an essential component of the music-making process, and a means to sonic discovery. I propose the Experimental Composition Improvisation Continua (ECIC) as a model with which to better understand these experimental musical works. The historical Experimental Music movement of the 1950s and 60s is briefly revisited, and the jazz tradition included as an essential protagonist; both being important historical movements leading to the formulation of ideas around contingent musical practices. The ECIC model is outlined as providing a means to observe the interactions and continua between composition and improvisation on the one hand and more or less experimentally conceived music on the other. This model is applied as an investigative and comparative tool to three distinctive works in order to illuminate the presence or otherwise of various experimental interactions within them. The works are: “Spiral Staircase” – a composition by written by Satoko Fujii in late 2007, John Cage’s 4′33″, and a performance of “My Favorite Things” by the John Coltrane Quartet. Further possible applications of the ECIC are suggested in the conclusion.

The Fragmentation of Jazz Styles

In the post–World War II years, jazz started to split off into many different directions, spurring a fragmentation that expanded the creative range of the idiom but caused long-lasting divisions among artists and fans (the so-called jazz wars). The first fault lines emerged between traditional and modern jazz exponents, but during the 1950s and early 1960s, many different styles emerged—including cool jazz, hard bop, soul jazz, West Coast jazz, modal jazz, Third Stream jazz, and various experimental approaches. This chapter traces these stylistic developments, and their leading exponents. It looks at the life and work of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Stan Getz, Charles Mingus, and Bill Evans, among other major jazz stars of the era, and assesses key albums such as Kind of Blue, Mingus Ah Um, and Giant Steps.

The History of Jazz

The History of Jazz, 3rd edition, is a comprehensive survey of jazz music from its origins until the current day. The book is designed for general readers and students, as well as those with more specialized interest in jazz and music history. It provides detailed biographical information and an overview of the musical contributions of the key innovators in development of jazz, including Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Coleman Hawkins, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, and others. The book also traces the evolution of jazz styles and includes in-depth accounts of ragtime, blues, New Orleans jazz, Chicago jazz, swing and big band music, bebop, hard bop, cool jazz, avant-garde, jazz-rock fusion, and other subgenres and developments. The volume also provides a cultural and socioeconomic contextualization of the music, dealing with the broader political and social environment that gave birth to the music and shaped its development—both in the United States and within a global setting.

Miles Davis

Miles Davis is consistently regarded as one of the most iconic, impactful, and creative innovators in the history of jazz. He is recognized by most jazz historians as being a key player in the development of several of the major subgenres in modern jazz. As a bandleader, Miles Davis repeatedly created some of the most cohesive, integrated, and innovative groups in jazz. Many of the musicians who joined Miles Davis groups became major voices in jazz, both with his groups and as leaders; a short list includes John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, and Chick Corea. Born Miles Dewey Davis III on 26 May 1926 in Alton, Illinois, Davis was the son of a dentist and was raised in a middle-class lifestyle, yet one amid the endemic racism of the Midwest in the 1930s. While still in his teens, Davis moved to New York City and almost immediately was playing music with the progenitors of the modern jazz movement. After replacing Dizzy Gillespie in the frontline of Charlie Parker’s quintet, Davis went on to lead his own mid-sized group, the Miles Davis Nonet, which explored a novel approach to modern jazz that was later associated with the cool jazz subgenre. Never willing to compromise and striving for continual development, Davis fought through heroin addiction in the early 1950s and produced music in 1954 associated with the development of yet another subgenre, hard bop. With the critical and popular success of a 1955 performance at the Newport Jazz Festival, Davis ascended to the highest ranks of jazz stardom, and formed the 1950s Miles Davis Quintet with John Coltrane, regarded as a model of modern jazz interaction and performance. 1959 saw Davis exploring another new approach termed modal jazz and producing what is commonly regarded as the best-selling record in the history of jazz, Kind of Blue. By 1964, Davis had retooled his quintet to produce the Miles Davis Quintet of the 1960s (known to many as Davis’s Second Great Quintet), featuring Wayne Shorter, which created an approach to composition and group improvisation subsequently referred to as post bop. Refusing to become static creatively, Davis was innovative in the application of popular and rock music influences to jazz, helping lead the way toward the development of jazz-rock fusion. Davis continued to explore electronic forms of jazz until his death in 1991. This article generally privileges scholarly writing and collections to best aid the Miles Davis researcher.

The Form of Life of Sanctity in Music Beyond Hagiography: The Case of John Coltrane and His “Ascension”

The paper investigates the cultural unit of “sanctity” in the light of the notion of “form of life”, in order to show how jazz master John Coltrane (1926–1967) pursued sanctity as a regulative model with regards both to personhood and musicianship, so as to translate his existential quest into music. Firstly, the paper briefly summarizes: what we mean today by sanctity (focusing on Catholicism and distinguishing between a traditional view and a contemporary, post-Conciliar one); what are the relationships interweaving music and sanctity (the latter mainly providing the former with imagery and narrative—e.g. hagiographic—model); what we mean by form of life—a notion (Lebensform) brought into philosophical discourse by Ludwig Wittgenstein—in semiotic terms (Jacques Fontanille) and why we can apply it to sanctity. Afterwards, the paper addresses Coltrane’s musical career, relying both on hagiographic discourse built around him (e.g. John Scheinfeld’s documentary Chasing Trane, 2016) and his discography, with special focus on three game-changers among his albums: Giant Steps (1960), A Love Supreme (1965), and Ascension (1967, published posthumously). Coltrane headed a twofold conversion: he abandoned his native Methodist faith to embrace a personal form of syncretic pantheism; he abandoned the language of traditional jazz to embrace the avant-garde technique of modal composition (in the line of George Russell, Bill Evans, Miles Davis) and the once despised free jazz (Ornette Coleman). Not only Coltrane wanted to be a saint, not only was he regarded as such to the extent that a “St. John William Coltrane Church” was established in San Francisco (by 1969, with official recognition in 1982), but he tried to be one through music; namely, by conveying his spiritual journey via sonic means: proposing a musical catechism (Giant Steps), a musical mass (A Love Supreme), and his own mystique (Ascension). Consistently with the process of selection any saintly figure—and mystiques especially—undergoes in order to be canonized stricto sensu, only some tokens within Coltrane’s body of work were included in the canon (both of the musical and religious kind), while his later works were left out due to their radicalism.