John Coltrane is generally regarded as a master of jazz saxophone and jazz music in general and, along with very few other composers and performers (such as Miles Davis), as the plain and simple epitome of the jazzman as a tireless experimenter; even to his own detriment.
Coltrane was born to a Methodist family in 1926 in Hamlet, North Carolina, then a state subject to so-called “Jim Crow Laws”, which enforced racial segregation. Also due to the limitations of free speech caused by widespread and institutionalized racism, Methodism has always strictly tied faith and liturgy to musical expression, so that the two things actually overlap: rituals and ceremonies are entirely sung collectively. Since his childhood years, for Coltrane music was the main form for expressing religion and religion could not be expressed through nothing but musical sounds. It is impossible to reconstruct here his entire Bildung, but it suffices to say that, once Coltrane did engage with musical career, in the late 1940s, he engaged with all its flipsides as well; most notably addiction to heroin and alcohol, since a common belief among jazzmen at the time was that they would enhance creativity. Coltrane would later recall this dark period of his life describing himself as a sinner. In 1957 he eventually experienced what he himself defined as a “spiritual awakening”, thanks to his wife Naima (Juanita Naima Grubbs; he had married her in 1955), a Muslim believer, and the discovery of Eastern philosophies and religions. Thanks to that, Coltrane got off drugs and embraced a personal syncretic religious view of the pantheistic kind, according to the idea that “there are so many religions: if one is right, the others are wrong” (quoted in Chasing Trane).Footnote 8
Not only since his early years Coltrane was used both to experience and express religion through music, to conceive religion as music, but he also ended up conceiving music as a form of religion, which he believed to and through which he aimed to express the love of God. To Coltrane music meant essentially “uplifting”, a call to constant betterment, from the most basic level of musicianship (such as practicing the instrument), to the highest one, that of aesthetic research; Coltrane struggled with his perfectionism and was always unsatisfied about what he had accomplished. As it has been widely noted in literature [32: 781–782], Coltrane’s conversion was actually double, as the idea of shifting from solid, well known roots to new forms of experience pervaded him existentially and musically at the same time; not only he abandoned the Methodist tradition but also the traditional language of jazz. Firstly, he experimented the new compositional technique of modality, as opposed to classic Western tonal system.Footnote 9 Then, he embraced the once despised language of free jazz; the “new thing” or “free form”, as it was also called, which started off with the album Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation, issued in 1961 by saxophonist Ornette Coleman [42]. Coleman (1930–2015) was the epitome of unorthodoxy and albeit some considered him as the typical eccentric, misunderstood genius (or, at least, a kind of idiot savant), many simply labeled him a poor musician, whereas not a slob; even when complimented, the idea that he was “doing wrong” was predominant. For instance, composer and double bassist Charles Mingus (1922–1979), another master of jazz, is renowned for saying: “It’s like organized disorganization, or playing wrong right. And it gets to you emotionally, like a drummer. That’s what Coleman means to me”.Footnote 10 As many other talented, hyper-technical jazzmen, Coltrane did not acknowledge Coleman’s musical revolution at first glance, even though he had become a friend of his. As recalled by Coleman himself:
It took a few years before he really understood what I was playing. Only when he recorded Ascension did he change his mind.Footnote 11 Just then he sent me a telegram to tell me that he had finally understood my music. He also sent me thirty dollars with the telegram, to show me his appreciation in a tangible way [31: 734, my trans.].
Coltrane was a musical talent, but he was more than that; he was a musical genius in the constant search of something which would enable him to simply “create beautiful music” (McCoy Tyner quoted in Chasing Trane). He mastered the grammar of traditional jazz and, once he had experimented the most advanced new jazz languages (modality, free jazz), he became a leading figure within those fields as well.
Both Coltrane’s conversions, the religious and the musical one, concurred to the same goal: translating religion into music, translating music into religion, making one out of the two of them. We may talk of a case of intersemiotic translation or transmutation, according to Roman Jakobson’s classic typology [20], or of intermodal translation (transduction); namely, a case in which a given semiotic system (religion, a prominent modeling system, according to Yuri Lotman’s semiotics of culture [25]) is translated into another one (music). In fact, we should talk of something different, which we may temporarily call “discoursive” or “figural translation”Footnote 12; namely, the translation of one virtual semiotic system into different Substances, where none of them has chronologic, logic, nor ontological preeminence over the others. This would mean that we do not have religion first, on the one hand, and then music, on the other, the latter trying to convey the former; rather, we would have different versions (according to different modes, substances, or media) of the same semiotic system (the very form of life). Coltrane does not aim at conveying only the authenticity of musical expression, on the aesthetic level, but rather the authenticity of being, on the utopian-existential level.Footnote 13 The idea is that Coltrane would not play music, but rather “he played life” (Carlos Santana quoted in Chasing Trane).
Besides the possible choice between one semiotic category and the other, it is a fact that Coltrane’s music constantly aims at talking about something which is not only of the musical kind. To do so, he employs paratextual apparata so as to convey paramusical—i.e. “real life”—meaning; a case in point are “talking titles”, the aim of which is to make the meaning or even the specific referent of a given piece of music explicit. For instance, instrumental tune Alabama, included in Coltrane Live at Birdland (1964, Impulse!) [45], was written in response to the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing occurred on September 15, 1963 due to a Ku Klux Klan attack in Birmingham, Alabama, that caused the death of four African-American girls. Anyone familiar with the expressive stylemes (stylistic features) of Western music and jazz music would feel the gloomy, grim tone of the tune, which the title helps amplifying and situating, as it was common, for instance, in so-called program music (instrumental music with a narrative attached via the paratextual means of concert or programme notes).