I got up this morning with the intention of thinking about John Coltrane and his music and then blogging on about Trane and his music. Cornel West, the Princeton professor, set me on this course. I've been listening to him via Tavis Smiley's PBS program and YouTube. I'm certainly in line with Dr West's political stance and his criticism of the President, Congress, Banks, and all of that. But what really moves me about West is his humanity and his concern for human beings and his emphasis on those of us down here on the ground. Cornel West is part of a political and rhetorical tradition that I'm used to and that I favor: the tradition of Amiri Baraka, Kenneth Cockrel, Sr., John Sinclair, General Baker, and Michael Eric Dyson - all but Baraka are of Detroit, Michigan; so we have West of the west coast, Baraka of the east coast, and the Detroit faction of the midwest. And we have John Coltrane of Hamlet, North Carolina. And as Baraka says in his poem Wise 3, "yeh, we gon be here/a taste".
David Murray aired this notion in my presence: funk is the preacher and jazz is the teacher. I think Dr West holds this view also. I came across a couple of reminders recently on the internet, one of which was quite surprising. The un-surprising but very important reminder, something I knew but hadn't consciously dealt with for many years, is the subject of Mr Fish, the byline of a column in TruthDig.
http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/print/civilization_and_its_malcontents_20110526/
The author of the article entitled, "Civilization and its malcontents" (touches on Freud doesn't it) brings in to sharp contrast the period of the 50s, 60s, and 70s - The Enlightenment - with that which followed, call it what you choose. Since I'm blogging on about Dr West in part, let's call the period that followed the Enlightenment the Catastrophe - one group's catastrophe is another group's trophy. Mr Fish remarks that in our Enlightenment we (Fish and I at least) employed (and enjoyed) multiple sources of information and knowledge. He writes,
In order to understand why peace was so elusive in Indochina, for example, in addition to contemporary scholarship and modern reporting on the subject, one was as likely to draw on the teachings of Gandi, Jung and McLuhan as much as on on the work of Kerouac, Coltrane and Warhol.We learned from Coltrane's haunting Alabama, a reminder of the darkness cast on us by the Birmingham church bombing and the tragic loss of young lives. We learned from the Black Arts Movement (BAM), from the poets, artists, blues shouters, Curtis Mayfield, James Baldwin, Ralph Ginsberg, Aretha Franklin, The Freedom Riders, Rosa Parks, Dr King, Bertrand Russell and The Last Poets.
Today, from whom can we learn? We learn not only from great men and women but also from movements, from the Civil Rights Movement. It appears that students in the Middle East are learning from Gandi and Dr King. Perhaps we can learn from these students as we face the opposition to human beings and humane treatment displayed by our elected officials in Washington, D.C., Wisconsin, and Ohio. Until just recently, the exemplars of the love of humanity and human freedom were for the most part the older citizens of the world; this was true in the arts also. Now it seems that our younger citizens of the world are taking the lead. How did this transformation take place?
Read Carefully. Education, declining birth rate, and economic circumstances. See the interview with the French political scientist Emmanuel Todd in Der Spiegel below.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,763537,00.html
We're almost out of dictators, a worrisome situation for our government and its ally. Our illusions in the USA are based on a prolonged Cultural Blackout and Military Spending instead of Education Spending. Congress is bent on killing our citizens - perpetual war, health-carelessness, joblessness, and the 'War on Drugs' - read James Ellroy regarding the latter.
None of the above is surprising or new. We do need to be reminded. At least we have Cornel West, Noam Chomsky and Chris Hedges.
What is surprising.
I was shocked by the excellent Wikipedia article on Coltrane changes - another link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coltrane_changes
If one attends to this article and follows the links therein one will receive quite a music education. The article outlines a sound-path starting with Rogers' & Hart's Have you met Miss Jones through Tadd Dameron's Lady Bird, Trane's Lazy Bird, Giant Steps and Countdown and the latter by means of Miles Davis's Tuneup - tuneup and countdown, yeh! It's not an easy read, but a must read. Lewis Porter in his John Coltrane: His Life and Music, U of M Press, 1999 treats these matters in Chapter 13. There are also two photographs of Trane taken at The Village Gate, August 1961. I wrote about The Village Gate performance previously.
I close with this sad news:
Gil Scott-Heron (R. I. P.)
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/05/gil-scott-heron.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/may/29/gil-scott-heron-appreciation-jamie-byng
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