1. For instance, in Ken Burns’s popular documentary Jazz: A History of America’s Music (2000), as well as in the film The Story of Jazz (1993), the contributions of John Coltrane represent the end of jazz’s stylistic evolution. The divergent genres since the late 1960s, such as fusion and free jazz, are commonly viewed as ruptures in tradition. Post-Coltrane musicians are commonly presented outside the fold. See, for instance, Gridley 1991.
2. See James 1999, which calls attention to the radicalism of “black protofeminists” such as Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman.
3. Bernice Johnson Reagon, a founding member of the musical group Sweet Honey and the Rock, has published several musicological works that explore African American vocal traditions. See Reagon 1992, 2001.
4. See James 1999, hooks 1981, and Wallace 1982.
5. Sun Ra was perhaps the only other jazz musician who had this kind of iconoclastic and otherworldly persona. For a comprehensive study of Sun Ra’s music and his mysticism, see Szwed 1997.
6. See, for example, Koskoff 2001.
7. Drawing on the concept of hegemony, Slobin calls attention to the ways in which these structures are both internalized and contested.
8. For a further account of the place of testifying in African American culture, see Smitherman 1986.
9. Historical overviews that have been crucial to my research include Jean Humez’s edition of Jackson 1981, Andrews 1986, and Collier-Thomas 1998.
10. Haywood appropriates the term “prophesying” to describe this justice-oriented aspect of their work and defines prophesying as “a perceived mandate from God to spread his word in order to advance a conscious or unconscious political agenda” (17).
11. See Foster 1993, Braxton 1989, and Douglass Chin 2001.
12. “Womanist” is a word Alice Walker (1982) coined to refer to a bold, spiritually minded, and humanistic brand of feminism resulting from the African American experience.
13. See the works cited in the previous footnote, as well as Connor 1991 and Baker, Alexander, and Redmond 1991.
14. Music historians have discussed this persistent attitude toward black Christian worship. For instance, writing on the early cultural contact between whites and blacks, Eileen Southern has stated: “nowhere in the history of black experience in the United States was the clash of cultures-the African versus the European-more obvious than in the differing attitudes taken toward ritual dancing and spirit possession” (Southern 1983, 171). For a discussion of the strategies jazz writers have used to make jazz a highbrow art, see DeVeaux 1991.
15. See, for example, Jost 1974, Dean 1992, and Litweiler 1993.
16. See, for instance, Baraka 1963 and 1970, Sidran 1971, and Kofsky 1998.
17. Scholars who have made preliminary inquiries into the political dimensions of the spiritual jazz of the sixties include Kelley 2002 and Monson 2007.
The epigraph to this chapter quotes from my 2001 interview with Alice Coltrane.
1. See Sugrue 1996, 43, for a discussion of Detroit’s reputation as “the northern-most Southern City.”
2. These and later population figures are from the U.S. Bureau of the Census.
3. Prior to the Great Migration of blacks from the South, between 1915 and 1930, most of the roughly 6,000 blacks in Detroit belonged to what W.E.B. Du Bois called the “talented tenth.” This small upper class were educated professionals-lawyers, doctors, schoolteachers and members of the clergy-who earned a good income and lived in “well-appointed homes” (Ricks 1960, 98). By 1920, the community had changed dramatically. According to the U.S. Bureau of the Census, more than 40,000 blacks lived in Detroit at that time, and most were struggling families.
4. See “Detroit is Dynamite” 1942 and Shogan and Craig 1964.
5. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, African American families shared their blocks with other European immigrant groups-predominantly Jews from various countries and Christian Poles. However, by the thirties, the white community had become competitive and hostile, perceiving the swelling numbers of poor Southern blacks as an economic and racial threat. Housing discrimination, intimidation, and episodic violence pushed the black population into densely settled areas. For a detailed explanation of this transformation over several decades, as well as specific incidents such the Ossian Sweet story, see Sugrue 1996.
6. In an interview with me, Vishnu Wood described this type of neighborhood affiliation. Bjorn and Gallert 2001 also mentions the East-West divide and its meaning for musicians.
7. For instance, Mukenge writes that “racial and class interests coincide to the extent that the black population remains largely undifferentiated . . . differentiation of the black population is an urban phenomenon brought on by economic, political and consequent demographic factors which reached their peak in the first quarter of the twentieth century” (1983, 26).
8. See Sugrue’s discussion on housing shortages (1996, 41).
9. Here I use the word “spiritual” to refer to religious folk songs composed by African Americans before or outside their involvement with white Christian religious institutions. These songs, according to Ricks, are of three types: spirituals, which are sad in mood; jubilees, which are happy in mood; and shouts, which are used for dancing and may take the form of either a spiritual or jubilee. Three other subcategories of folk songs are “moanin’ songs, songs for the dead, and narrative songs” (1960, 52).
10. More specifically, these were Protestant hymns and anthems written by such composers as Isaac Watts, John Newton, and Charles Wesley during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. These were rather formal compositions-lyric poems set to smooth melodies with European harmonies. Many of these works were collected and published by Richard Allen of the American Methodist Episcopal Church in 1818 and have been particularly favored by black Methodist congregations. However, these older hymns are sung in mainstream Baptist churches as well. For a detailed discussion of black Methodist hymnals, see Southern 1983, 80, and 1986. For an overview of black hymnody, see Spencer 1992.
11. These songs have been traced to the camp meetings of the Second Great Awakening. In part the product of African American musical practices that spread in the religious fervor of the meetings, the American hymnody that evolved at that time differed in its formal style from the European American kind. This genre is characterized by folk tunes adapted to an array of religious texts, “a stringing together of isolated lines from prayers, the Scriptures, and orthodox hymns, the whole made longer by the addition of choruses and the injecting of refrains between verses” (Southern 1983, 85). This repertoire most often relied upon, and featured, a song leader who was expected to improvise and embellish phrases. Call-and-response forms and wandering verses-catchy refrains that were inserted in or tagged onto more than one song-became popular among the congregants.
During the Gospel Revival Movement of the 1850s, new songs were written by black and white composers that were much like the earlier camp songs in their formal style and their incorporation of popular melodies. Two evangelical crusaders, Dwight Lyman Moody and Ira David Sankey, collected many of the older camp songs and the new gospel compositions and published them in 1875 in Gospel Hymns and Sacred Songs, which became popular in the cities among both blacks and whites. While American hymnody by Moody and Sankey fell out of favor in many white Protestant churches, black Baptist, black Methodist, and independent black denominations maintained the use of this mid-nineteenth-century gospel repertoire.
12. For an examination of the style of early gospel music, see Boyer 1984.
13. Southern writes: “The year 1921 brought a milestone in the history of black-church hymnody. In my opinion, Gospel Pearls, published that year by the Sunday School Publishing Board of the National Baptist Convention, U.S.A., ranks with Richard Allen’s hymnal of 1801 in terms of its historic importance. Like the Allen hymnal, it is an anthology of the most popular black-church music of its time. The Music Committee that compiled the hymnal . . . included some of the nation’s outstanding composers and performers of religious music . . . and the result was truly a soul-stirring message-bearing song-book” (1986, 156).
14. For a detailed description of the contents of Gospel Pearls, see Southern 1983, 450–51).
15. Southern 1983 uses the term “folk church,” and Ricks (1960) uses the term “shouting churches” to designate African American Christian churches independent of the mainstream black Baptist and Methodist denominations.
16. Ricks 1960 is the only scholar I have found who attempts to provide a genealogy of folk music types that form the basis of urban gospel music (1960).
17. A mention of the 1970s Art Davis and Earl Madison affair with the New York Philharmonic is in order here, since this was one of the major public cases of racism in orchestral employment, and it led to the adoption of new standards and practices for auditions. It was Madison and Davis who suggested that they and other applicants play behind screens to remove any possibility of racism in the selection process. This is now a standard practice.
18. For a detailed cultural and historical analysis of ballroom dancing as popular entertainment in America, see Erinberg 1981.
19. Detroit’s famous McKinney’s Cotton Pickers was one of the first black dance bands to play for white audiences. For a detailed examination of racial politics and jazz culture in Detroit during the teens and twenties, see Bjorn and Gallert 2001.
20. For a lengthy discussion of Paradise Valley’s musical heyday and its subsequent demise due to urban renewal, see Bjorn and Gallert 2001.
21. It should be noted that both Milt Jackson and Lucky Thompson, two former Detroiters, played in the pioneering bands of Parker and Gillespie during the period.
22. There has been little scholarly discussion of regional variation in bebop styles. The pervasive and monolithic bebop narrative implies that its New York-based progenitors sought critical distance from the notion of jazz as dance or entertainment music. In Detroit, however, the bebop approach was seldom divorced from the blues-based, dance-music continuum. For a discussion of the origins and development of bebop, its growing distinction as art music, and its use as cultural capital within New York’s beatnik subculture, see DeVeaux 1997.
23. As relayed to Mark Slobin in conversation with Kenny Burrell.
24. Personal accounts such as Davis’s Miles: The Autobiography (1989), as well as journalism and jazz criticism-which call attention to the more degrading aspects of the entertainment business and jazz culture-are responsible for such stereotypical associations. For an examination of the trope of the jazz musician as socially deviant, see Monson 1995.
25. Miles Davis came to Detroit to kick his habit, knowing that heroin in Detroit was harder to find than in New York. For a detailed account of his time in Detroit, see Bjorn and Gallert 2001, 133–38.
26. Family musical lineages have been particularly important to the early careers of female jazz musicians, offering them professional exposure that might not otherwise have been available due to sexism in the professional world, religious and bourgeois values that curtail women’s mobility beyond the sphere of domesticity, and the potential dangers encountered as an itinerant entertainer.
27. For a discussion of housing patterns in Detroit, see Sugrue 1996.
28. This quote is taken from an unpublished interview with Lars Bjorn and used with his permission.
29. Alice’s brother, Jackie McLeod, told me this in a conversation at Baker’s Keyboard Lounge, in Detroit, in November 2000.
30. For a detailed ethnography of Detroit’s West Side clubs, see Bjorn and Gallert 2001.
31. Full transcriptions of Alice Coltrane’s solos with Terry Gibbs are available on the Wesleyan University Press website.
The epigraph to this chapter is quoted from my 2001 interview with Alice Coltrane.
1. John Junior died tragically young in an automobile accident in 1985.
2. In 1970, several years after John Coltrane passed away, Alice played harp on Tyner’s album Extensions.
3. Despite the diverse styles of post-1950s jazz, avant-garde musicians have been generally distinguished from the mainstream jazz community by their explorations of free meter, free-form, and group improvisation. However, within the first and second generation of avant-garde players, such as Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, and Charles Mingus, and in the music of their disciples, variable “formative principles” have distinguished their styles (Jost 1974, 9). The aesthetics of “free” music have therefore been extremely difficult to categorize as a whole. David Such explains “free” jazz as a general need to lessen restrictions on various formal elements of jazz. He equates the jazz avant-garde with contemporary movements in modernist painting that have explored texture, structure, and new mediums (1993, 28). The free-jazz community has also been associated with a postmodern creative philosophy, summarized in statements such as this: “free jazz is a music without boundaries; or is genre-less, so to speak. Any process of creating, transmitting or learning music, and the assimilation of any external influence, from any geographical location, past, present, or future, is possible” (Kiroff 1997, 18).
4. “Cool” jazz is a highly amorphous musical category. As a racialized term, it typically refers to the soft aesthetics of white, “West Coast” players such as the trumpeter Chet Baker and the saxophonists Stan Getz and Paul Desmond. However, the concept of “cool” is also associated with Miles Davis and his late modal approach, typified on the 1958 album Kind of Blue as well as in Davis’s orchestral projects in collaboration with the composer-arrangers Claude Thornhill and Gill Evans. Here, I am referring to works that purposely make use of the gospel idiom, a subgenre of hard-bop often called “soul jazz.”
5. See, for instance, Murray 1976, Boyer 1977, Levine 1977, Maultsby 1992, Hersch 1995–96, and Ramsey 2003.
6. See Weinstein 1992 and Turner 1997.
7. Don Ellis, Paul Horn, and John McLoughlin are some of the more influential white jazz musicians to have explored South Asian religions. For a comprehensive overview, see Farrell 1997.
8. Sun Ra was perhaps the only other jazz musician to attempt this kind of project at the time. However, Ra’s personal eccentricities in dress and demeanor, his unconventional “intergalactic” orchestra, and his lack of backing in the recording industry resulted in his comparative obscurity. Coltrane visited Sun Ra several times in Chicago in the late 1950s. Ra claims that he was the first to inspire Coltrane to follow this path of musical and spiritual transcendence. See, for instance, Ra’s comments in the documentary Tell Me How Long Trane’s Been Gone (2001). For a comprehensive study of Sun Ra’s music and his own brand of mysticism, see Szwed 1997.
9. See Tynan 1965.
10. See Olatunji’s remarks in Tell Me How Long Trane’s Been Gone (2001).
11. One can reasonably argue that John Coltrane developed this creative approach with previous musical mentors such as Miles Davis, or that he took cues from avant-garde pioneers like Ornette Coleman and Albert Ayler. Regardless, when this philosophy of self-expression is manifested in Alice’s avant-garde music, it immediately triggers an association with her husband’s artistic example and their relationship.
12. H. Richard Niebuhr first articulated this manner of social organization in his classic study The Social Sources of Denominationalism (1929).
13. See, for example, Levine 1977, Maultsby 1985, Wilson 1992, and Floyd 1995,
14. Though dealing almost exclusively with European American culture, several authors have taken up the issue of American interest in Eastern spirituality during the 1960s. See Cox 1977; Wuthnow 1978 and 1998; Ellwood 1979, 1987, and 1994; Tipton 1981; and Prashad 2000.
15. While McAlister’s focus is on the Nation of Islam, her insights and observations can be extended to other forms of non-Western spirituality.
1. Many of the sections of Monument Eternal read much like Paramahansa Yoganadanda’s Autobiography of a Yogi (1946), a mystical text from India’s yogic tradition in which the aspirant-writer endures a series of mental and physical tests. John Coltrane had a copy of the book in his library-it was a very popular book at the time-and it is likely that he passed it on to Alice.
2. One visit in particular has acquired the stature of legend among practitioners of Integral Yoga. Apparently unbeknownst to Alice, the Integral Yoga Institute needed an additional $3,000 to buy what is now its building on West Thirteenth Street. Alice was visiting Swami Satchidananda the afternoon that the sale was being negotiated, and she accidentally left her checkbook behind. When she returned to fetch it, an hour before the deal was to fall through, she spontaneously left a donation for exactly $3,000. Today members of the institute believe this gift to have been the result of divine intervention.
3. See Thurman 1979.
4. For a comprehensive overview, see Farrell 1997. Other jazz artists who have explored various sects of Japanese Buddhism and have acknowledged the aesthetic influence of their spiritual practice in interviews and liner notes include Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter. Yusef Lateef’s involvement with Ahmadiyya Islam and Dizzy Gillespie’s practice of Bahai have surfaced in interviews and in biographical sketches.
5. The Hindu philosopher and writer Sri Shankara (788–820) is responsible for establishing Advaita Vedanta as the dominant Hindu philosophical tradition.
6. This quote is taken from the liner notes to Universal Consciousness (1971).
7. Dvorak is renowned for having argued during this period that America should develop its own national school of music based on the folk music of its native peoples and traditions. He was also extremely interested in promoting and educating black American composers. See Beckerman 2003.
1. I have borrowed this notion of “one and many” from the Hindu religion scholar Diana Eck. For a thoughtful comparative study of Christianity and Hinduism and a discussion of this theological position, see Eck 1993, 53.
2. He has become a highly influential public figure in India, partly because of his supposed miracles and partly because of his reported good works-he has founded numerous charities, medical clinics, and educational centers throughout India. His organization claims to have over 30,000 centers around the world working to extend his message and ministry. The main center is Sai Baba’s village ashram in Puttaparthi, India, which houses an airport to facilitate the tens of thousands of devotees who come annually to pay their respects. His miracles include materializing sugar candy, flowers, vibhuti (sacred ashes), and other presents for his devotees; they also include healing the sick and knowing the thoughts of his disciples, wherever they may be. Despite his own claims that he is divine and possesses infinite power, Sai Baba maintains that he did not come to earth to establish a religion. Rather, he sees his mission as restoring the dharma.
3. The last paragraph of this quote appears on the Sai Anantam Ashram website, quoted from A. Coltrane 1981.
4. The Srimad-Bhagavata and the Vishnu Purana describe nine forms of bhakti worship. They are sravana (hearing stories about God); kirtana (singing of God’s glories); smarana (remembering God’s name and presence); padasevana (service to God’s feet); archana (worship of God); vandana (prostration to the Lord); dasya (cultivating the attitude of a servant to God); sakhya (cultivating friendship with God); and at manivedana (complete surrender of the self).
5. Esoteric writings on mantras and music also correlate the actual sounds of Sanskrit vowels and musical pitches to specific chakras, or psychospiritual nerve centers. Some bhajan practitioners believe that regular devotional singing can stimulate and awaken shakti, or divine energy, in the physical body. See Padoux 1990.
6. Because of its lengthy history, ubiquity, and regional diversity, it is possible to offer only the barest outline of traditional bhajan practice here.
7. Classical singers have also set the poetry of bhajans in more formal compositions.
8. Hatha yoga is a South Asian spiritual discipline that focuses on physical and mental control. In the United States, it has become a popular form of exercise.
9. Both in the United States and in India, the two words tend to be used interchangeably for antiphonal devotional singing, though some practitioners argue that there are subtle differences between the two genres. In Sanskrit, kirtana literally means telling, repeating, or praising. However, in South India, kirtan(am) overlaps with the kritti genre of art music, whose poetry is devotional in content but which is performed by soloists in classical style. To make matters slightly more confusing, both bhajans and kirtan are often confused with nam sam kirtan, which is the simple repetition or chanting of God’s name. Though members at Sai Anantam Ashram call their hymns bhajans, given their variety, they are best seen as drawing from this larger pool of antiphonal devotional genres.