Emergent Tonal Structure in the Transpositions of the "A Love Supreme" Motif

This week marked the fiftieth anniversary of the recording of John Coltrane's A Love Supreme. As part of his Twitter homage to that record, Miles Okazaki tweeted the transpositions of the "A Love Supreme" motif—set-class (025)—in the key of the tenor saxophone. 

F G D Ab Db C D Eb Ab Db A F D Ab B E B Db Eb Bb C G D E Gb G Ab F (the modulations beginning at 4:54) #ALoveSupreme50
— Miles Okazaki (@milesokazaki) December 9, 2014

Ethan Iverson replied to point out that this sequence exhibits full chromatic saturation. Okazaki responded with a quote from Ravi Coltrane, and a photo from John Coltrane's score indicating that the inclusion of transpositions through all twelve keys was intentional. 

@milesokazaki As you know, this has all 12 keys. Any other mathematical reason for this particular sequence? cc: @dan__voss
— Ethan Iverson (@ethan_iverson) December 9, 2014

@ethan_iverson I've heard differing opinions. In Kahn's book, Ravi says "deliberately random." Coltrane's score says: pic.twitter.com/FDDwvDSi3Z
— Miles Okazaki (@milesokazaki) December 9, 2014

I answered by listing the transpositions in terms of interval class, which highlights how transpositions by whole-steps and fourths (ic2 and ic5) predominate. As Lewis Porter showed, these intervals—which also comprise the set-class (025)—underlie the composition of the entire suite.

.@ethan_iverson @milesokazaki Transpositions by interval class: 256512155443635522525522113 Steps &fourths prevail as elsewhere in the suite
— dan voss (@dan__voss) December 9, 2014

We could certainly speculate about why Coltrane found it necessary to "move freely" "in all 12 keys." But perhaps the indication in his score to "start & end in E♭ concert minor" is more suggestive. Indeed, I find myself inclined to hear the sequence of transpositions—despite the chromaticism—as fairly tonal in its higher-level voice-leading.

Coltrane's transpositions of the (025) motif initially outline an F minor triad. There is a step-wise ascent to the third, with the second scale-step G expanded by its lower dominant, and the fifth, displaced to the lower octave, is approached by its upper neighbor D♭. Next the seventh is reached by step, extending the tonic F minor triad to a seventh chord. 

The transpositions then proceed through two clicks on the circle of fifths to the submediant, D♭. To my hearing, this previously-foreshadowed upper neighbor (indicated by the flags above) to the fifth degree of the tonic F minor is prolonged and transferred to the lower register. The rising fourth of A♭ to D♭ is repeated as a transposition up a semitone and expanded by arpeggiation from the lower third. I have spelled this "D minor triad" enharmonically as E♭♭ to indicate that it can be heard to function as a Phrygian II to the prolonged D♭, and because the preceding D♭ does not sound merely like a chromatic neighbor but is additionally reinterpreted as a leading tone. Subsequently, Coltrane returns to the A♭/D♭ pole and inverts it to prolong a descending D♭ minor triad, embellished by leaps up to the seventh. 

At this point the initial ascent through the F minor seventh chord is roughly reversed. The original register is reinstated and E♭ falls back to C, which is immediately preceded by the only instance of the subdominant, B♭. Then, as earlier, the second scale degree is expanded, this time as a prolongation of the dominant of the dominant through a step-wise ascent from the lower fifth. Finally, A♭ falls to tonic F to complete the structure in appropriate blues fashion.

While Coltrane's sequence does not by any means possess a typical Schenkerian structure, its voice-leading nonetheless evokes a tonal outline. Rather than construct a step-wise Urlinie, Coltrane stacks thirds in a manner common both in his music and to blues music generally; a central elaboration follows, then a very roughly symmetrical return. (In the graph below, parentheses indicate that the register has been idealized.) 

Coltrane may have been "moving freely" through these transpositions, but the resulting music is hardly "random." The higher-level voice-leading reveals an emergent tonal structure which shows Coltrane's improvisation on A Love Supreme to be as ordered and coherent as his composing. 

Apophatic Music

"Music is a movement of nothing in a space that is nowhere, with a purpose that is no-one's, in which we hear a non-existent feeling the object [and subject*] of which is nobody. And that is the meaning of music." 

Roger Scruton, Perictione in Colophon 

[*added in The Soul of the World]

Art Taylor on Art and Academics

“The student in the university will avail himself to many other facets of music that I didn’t even consider when I was playing. For instance, playing different instruments. Learning how to read, and read in a manner that would enable him to play in a classical situation, Western classical situation, and an Afro-American classical situation. We have to get into these terms now. You notice I’m using these terms because these were the terms that were thrown at me when I arrived on the academic scene. ‘Legitimate’ music, ‘serious’ music. Making an inference that music that wasn’t Western classical music wasn’t serious or wasn’t legitimate. So I have used that term, what they call jazz, I call that a classical music. It’s an American classical music.” 

Jackie McLean (quoted above) is of course correct: in its greatest manifestations, jazz is art music. But it is not always—nor even usually—that, and more importantly, it is not only that. Art Taylor explains below. 

...

 "Art on art" 

(Peter Pullman interviews Arthur Taylor)

PP: Does jazz go through cycles? Is it some precious resource that has to be conserved? I worry about the people who have appointed themselves to "save" jazz.

AT: Well that's related to my theory about people who say to me, "You're a great artist." I'm not an artist. I don't consider myself an artist. Charlie Parker was an artist. Bud Powell was an artist. I'm a drummer and I just play the drums—but people talk about this as an art form. It's not an art form; I used to play for whores and pimps—and I enjoyed playing better for them than I do for the crowd that comes now. Because they were swinging people, everybody was having fun. It wasn't about sitting down and playing, and the people sitting there in a trance, getting some special messages from somewhere that nobody was even delivering. And I've played for the whores and the pimps and when I got off the bandstand it's "Hi, how are you doing? Have a taste with my lady and me."

PP: So you are an entertainer.

AT: Yeah, I'm an entertainer. I believe in entertaining people. But that's a very difficult thing, to just play some instrument and be entertaining. Very few people can do that. A lot of guys are out there playing a whole lot of stuff but it's not entertaining. When you go home you don't even remember what they've played. And you can't hum it either. [Laughs.]

PP: So the guys who not only entertained on an instrument but could also create art... you are talking about only a handful.

AT: Yes, Dizzy, Bud, and Bird—Bird was quite an entertainer. I use all of Dizzy's, Bud's, and Bird's stuff, their mannerisms. And I can put in on and I can really be with it—or I can put myself into it, or I can take it any kind of way.

PP: Some people feel jazz needs an academy, an institution that will protect it—by including what it defines jazz is and excluding what jazz is not. Yet Philly Joe said in your book: "Music changes around and changes around. It takes all kinds of turns but it always comes back to the pure swing."

AT: That's what Taylor's Wailers do. 

PP: "Nothing seems to outlast jazz," he continues. "The real, true, traditional jazz... you can't get away from it. People like to pat their feet and clap their hands."

AT: That's correct, not sit there like a bunch of mummies.

PP: So it's not some solemn art thing, Art?

AT: No, not to me, it's supposed to be a fun thing. I'm trying to play it pure and swing and have fun and make people feel good.

PP: And Philly Joe is saying that has always been the case, that jazz is not endangered?

AT: I don't think it is. Jazz doesn't have cycles; musicians who can play can still play. You either can play or you can't play.

PP: So we don't have to keep some sort of standard for what jazz is and define it all the time lest it gets diluted?

AT: I keep the standard.

PP: But the standard is when you are sitting on the drum stool with the musicians who are out there and you're pushing them, that's where it comes in. It's not an academic thing, is it?

AT: No, it's not an academic thing. If we come off the stage and we are not laughing, nothing happened. If guys are coming off like they've come off some kind of seance, having done some "brilliant" thing... if you are not laughing, it ain't shit. Wasn't shit happening. See how the bands walk off the stage.

PP: So is that tradition dying, is that sense that this is about fun being lost?

AT: I don't know, maybe it's dead but I continue to play in my same manner... They're trying to refine it, but those old brilliant minds in my race came out of this music anyway.

...

The above is excerpted from an interview of Arthur Taylor conducted by Peter Pullman in 1992. It is included in the liner notes to Arthur Taylor's Wailers, Wailin' at the Vanguard. Buy it here. Buy Notes and Tones. Buy Peter Pullman's book, Wail: The Life of Bud Powell. 

"The Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost"

In his book on John Coltrane, Lewis Porter quotes the composer Noel DaCosta suggesting that "The Father the Son and the Holy Ghost" (video above) is derived from the song "Bless This House." DaCosta says: 

John Coltrane’s intensity is extremely moving, and his discoveries with large architecture and sound background show how one can search out and discover. On Meditations he gets involved with the simple song “Bless This House O Lord We Pray” and out comes a major composition (“The Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost”) in which he uses the intervals of this song, particularly the third, to produce a very moving composition. “Bless This House" is not an Afro-American song, but the way in which it is played converts it into an Afro-American piece. 

This is plausible, especially considering that Mahalia Jackson recorded the song in 1956. The passage that might have inspired "The Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost" is heard at 1:28 in the video below.

That 1-2-3 step-wise contour moving through tonic and subdominant as well as the sacred lyrics to the song show an affinity to "The Father the Son and the Holy Ghost." When I hear the opening melody to "The Father the Son and the Holy Ghost," however, I can't help but notice the resemblance to the incipit of Billy Strayhorn's "Lush Life."

The opening motifs of "Lush Life" and "The Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost" are in the same key, D-flat. Unlike the passage in "Bless This House," both have multiple articulations of the ascending pitches and approach the tonic from the lower dominant. And although "Lush Life" was not a staple in Coltrane's ouvre, he had performed it in Seattle for a live radio broadcast less than two months before recording Meditations, so it would presumably have been in his ear. 

Any connection between "The Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost" and "Lush Life" is tenuous at best and more likely coincidental. But notable in "Lush Life" are the diatonic and chromatic mediant (third) relations and the tripartite form (A-A-B-C1-C2), and since "Lush Life" is already connected in my ear to "The Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost" due to the shared incipits, I'm led to wonder whether the number 3 plays a role in the Coltrane piece. 

In other words, can we find any signs of Trinitarian symbolism in a composition entitled "The Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost?" 

It has been suggested that the third relations in Coltrane's music have numerological significance, and Ravi Coltrane has implied something similar in saying, "It's message music, as if he was saying, 'Don't just listen to it as music alone, there's more here.'" If one were looking for Trinitarian symbolism in "The Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost," the musical surface does yield some evidence, however dubious.

• The piece has a 3-part form (statement-development-return), and the ensemble has 6 members (3 x 2). 

• The piece begins in the tenor saxophone key of E-flat (like the Prelude and Fugue of Bach's Clavier-Übung III), which has 3 flats.

• The piece opens and closes with Coltrane and Sanders playing a multiphonic (3 notes in one; unity in multiplicity). 

• The theme is made up of major triads. The triad is a unity of 3 pitches, and contains the intervals of a major 3rd and a minor 3rd. Here the triads are melodically embellished with a passing tone, highlighting the first 3 scale steps. 

• Coltrane moves the triad motif primarily by minor 3rd transpositions. There are also transpositions by fifths: in the opening statement of the theme, there are 6 (3 x 2) such transpositions, in the closing statement there are 3. 

• The piece transitions seamlessly into "Compassion," which continues the Trinitarian number symbolism. Its meter is 3/4, and its theme is based on the interval of a descending minor 3rd. These minor 3rd dyads, and whole-tone transposed pairs of minor 3rd dyads, are transposed mostly by major 3rd. The closing theme ends with 3 statements of the dyad, E-C-sharp. 

An analysis of Coltrane's improvisation on "The Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost" would likely be additionally illuminating in this regard. 

Lennie Tristano Conceptualizes

"I don't compose anything. See, that's the great difference between jazz and any other kind of music. The music is already in your head, and all you do is let your hands—depending on what instrument you play—reproduce what you hear as you hear it. So that what you come up with is something completely spontaneous. Like when you hear a great Charlie Parker solo, what you actually do is experience somebody in the act of creating beauty." Lennie Tristano 

"Number One" Excerpt

"Every linear progression shows the eternal shape of life—birth to death. The linear progression begins, lives its own existence in the passing tones, ceases when it has reached its goal—all as organic as life itself." Heinrich Schenker, Free Composition 

***

The higher-level voice-leading of the first fifty-two seconds of John Coltrane's "Number One" features an initial step-wise descent followed by a longer step-wise ascent. 

The harmonic content of that initial descent (first staff of the transcription plus the first four notes on the second staff) is ambiguous. The rhythmic emphasis on F and its embellishment with upper and lower neighbors suggests a third-less F (natural) minor at the onset. Hearing F minor is further supported by the subsequent point of rest, albeit fleeting, on C, suggesting the dominant. 

It is also possible to hear the first and most repeated pitch, E♭, as a local pitch-center. The whole-tone segment (D♭ E♭ F G) suggests E♭ dominant seventh. A segment from the complementary whole-tone collection, (C D E), intervenes as a "dissonance," followed by a "consonant" return to and completion of the previous whole-tone collection: (E♭ D♭ B A). All but three pitches, plus the last note, then, belong to WT1. If we consider WT1 as a proxy for E♭ seventh, the entire phrase seems to take on the sound of a dominant to tonic resolution in A♭ minor.

Or, perhaps most convincingly, the first four-note whole-tone subset can sound like a dissonant upbeat to a local resolution on C: (D♭ E♭ F G)→(C D E). The next whole-tone segment is similarly heard as resolving to A♭ minor. In both cases, there is a suggestion of the "tritone substitution" on the dominant: one hears a Phrygian 3-2-1 in C and then again in A♭. This T4 transformation or major-third relation is of course significant in Coltrane's music. 

In any of these harmonic interpretations of this initial phrase, the step-wise and symmetrical descent of a fifth (or possibly a sixth) arriving on A♭ is clear. (This is indicated by upward-pointing stems on the illustrations above.) 

The ascent by step that follows is also clear. Below is an attempt at a voice-leading sketch, beginning with the A♭ on the second line of the above transcription that forms the fulcrum between initial descent and subsequent ascent. Repeated notes have been omitted, and accidentals apply only to the note immediately following. 

What we hear is a mostly chromatic step-wise ascent that ultimately transfers A♭ to the octave above, where now as an upper neighbor-note it resolves to G. The A♭/G resolution is emphasized, heard first in the context of C major, then three times in the context of E♭ major, with the final two instances returned to the original lower register. Note the parallelism between the fifth progressions on the third from last staff. 

At this point Coltrane takes hold of B-flat (as the dominant of E-flat) for a centric pitch, and the improvisation continues in a new direction.  

This step-wise ascent, similar to the one I identified in "Transition," helps to illustrate that even in a very late performance—"Number One" was recorded on March 7, 1967—Coltrane's improvisation exhibits a remarkable degree of high-level voice-leading coherence. "Free jazz" is often associated with the unstructured, random chaos of frenetic (or equally common in the current era, torpid) emotional expression, timbral experimentation, and critical deconstruction of traditional musical qualities. But Coltrane's free improvisation, in addition to its many other superlative characteristics, effable and otherwise, displays the kind of musical logic that has permeated the great monuments of Western music for centuries. 

"Jackie McLean on Mars" Transcript

Jackie McLean on Mars

A documentary by Ken Levis

(Transcript)

Jackie McLean: [Practicing] “My hands, you know. The muscles there just don’t respond. It’s slow building up. One of the things that I should be doing, even when I’m not practicing, from here – there are facial exercises that I’ve just been turned on to. I think, I read an article, Dewey Redman was talking about facial exercises that he does to keep his muscles in shape. And keeping a rubber ball, squeezing that. Because I don’t get it in this hand, my left hand. It’s my right hand that tends to give me some problems. And I notice this, it never bothered me – I laid off for a year and didn’t touch my horn in ’50-something, it didn’t bother me. But now in ’70-something, you know. And I’m approaching my 45^th year. And a 4 and a 5 is a 9, and a 9 is supposed to be everything, so. [Flexing and stretching right hand] This is [inaudible], this is something.”

…

Interlocutor: “Now there you have Jackie McLean. And Jackie McLean is here and my first thought, you know, I’m sitting here and I’m saying to myself, now, I wonder how Jackie feels about being a legend. I don’t know if you feel like a legend, man. How does it happen that you become a legend?”

JM: “I feel like an exploited, poor musician in 1976, if you want to know how I feel. And I also feel like a professor of history at the University of Hartford. If anything, if I feel good about anything, it’s about being able to turn down jobs that are offered to me for scale and below, which I was forced to take at other times. That’s what I feel good about.”

…

JM: [Lecturing] “John Coltrane, in different periods of his playing, he sounded like different people. For instance, in his early, early days when I first heard John, he sounded like a combination of Dexter Gordon and Sonny Stitt, Sonny Stitt playing the tenor saxophone. Then, the next time I heard him he sounded more like, he had a much lighter quality in his sound, and he sounded like he was getting his own thing together. But he sounded like he had listened to Sonny Rollins and appreciated him. But to let Sonny tell you who influenced him, he put an album out once, and on the back of the album Sonny said, ‘I would like to dedicate this album to all the people who influenced me,’ man, and the names filled up the whole back sheet. And my name was on there. And I thought, oh, man, this cat’s being an ambassador, you know.”

…

JM: [With students] “I know how he plays, I’m just getting to – I know how Lee plays, because I’ve been listening to Lee play for a few years. I know how David plays. I’m beginning to learn how some of you other guys play better. But, learn them changes. Take this opportunity [to let] Paul [Jeffrey] help you build that repertoire so you can learn how to do that.”

…

JM: “John [Coltrane] wore that out, man. Played it all kinds of ways, inverted.”

Jaki Byard: “That’s right, yeah.”

JM: “Because when you look at his solo, like if you look at ‘Giant Steps’ or ‘Countdown’ and you see just the simple, simple academic thing that he made sound so great.”

…

JM: [Teaching a lesson] “Bee da bi da boo, bee da bi da boo, ba ba. The wrong way –” 

Student: “Isn’t that what I played?”

JM: “No, in the beginning you played it right. Then the last two times you played, ‘Bee da bi da boo, bee da bi da boo, bip bip.’”

…

JM: “Do you know what a half step is? OK, would you explain to me, what is a half step?”

…

Interlocutor: “When do you get a chance to practice, man?”

JM: “I don’t get a chance to practice.”

I: “That’s a serious sacrifice.”

JM: “It is a serious sacrifice. But at this point, man, you know, I don’t get a chance to practice. I don’t have the energy to practice after I get up and do all the things that I have to do in the course of a day. And that’s a problem that I’m constantly fighting. And every time I get through playing and get back to a certain place playing, I always say, ‘Well, man, I’m not going to let this go. When I get back to Hartford I’m going to get up every day, at least practice an hour so that I can keep myself in shape. But I always get back and always let a day go by, and a couple of days, and then it’s a week, and, then I don’t play.”

…

JM: [To students] “If you can play ‘Giant Steps’ and ‘Countdown’ and begin to play them slowly – I play it slow, man, it took me six months to learn ‘Giant Steps’ and I was in jail. And no place to go, I studied all day. But I should have taken care of that when I was 16, 17 years old. Here I was 24, 25, playing scales that I wasn’t really tight with, and learning how to move from one chord change to the other.”

…

JM: “The student in the university will avail himself to many other facets of music that I didn’t even consider when I was playing. For instance, playing different instruments. Learning how to read, and read in a manner that would enable him to play in a classical situation, Western classical situation, and an Afro-American classical situation. We have to get into these terms now. You notice I’m using these terms because these were the terms that were thrown at me when I arrived on the academic scene. ‘Legitimate’ music, ‘serious’ music. Making an inference that music that wasn’t Western classical music wasn’t serious or wasn’t legitimate. So I have used that term, what they call jazz, I call that a classical music. It’s an American classical music.”

…

JM: “Even though the atmosphere is different, it’s not a bar, and there are not hustlers on the scene, and it isn’t the nightlife, the music is there. And the kids have to learn it in more of a sterile environment. And I guess it might have some influence on their concept of improvisation. But that’s getting into it a little too heavy, man. I find that that’s what the Western society does, man, they dissect and get into everything so much so as to explain the why of everything. And I’ve heard musicians that came out of a university setting that sound good, and play well. And the rest of what they weren’t exposed to in college they will be exposed to when they go into the big cities to play. Because certainly the clubs are still there, and the hustlers are still there. And they’re going to be there as long as this government continues to be a hustling government.”

…

JM: [Lecturing] “Learn to, to – to see. Ants come crawling out on the ground, and they’re not just there to be stepped on.”

…

JM: “You see, if I was a young, young cat – when I say ‘young, young’ I mean a guy not as old as I am – I would think that it would not be a good place for me to be because I would want to get out there and make a name for myself in the music business and whatnot.”

…

JM: “But I have been through several levels of the music business. I came out and went through the ’50s and made whatever name I have, and in the ’60s. And it’s just the same thing out there now, man, you’re just either playing or you’re not playing. And when you’re not playing, then you’ve got to worry about how you’re going to pay your bills and a lot of things. And I don’t want to go through that anymore, man. Personally, I see a little security at the university.

Because I was interested in getting out of just playing every night. I wanted to go somewhere where I could perpetuate some concepts from another vantage point, and not always just on the bandstand.

I won’t put myself out there to be exploited. Not anymore.”

…

JM: [Playing pool] “I hope the Afro-American music department keeps flowing up here because I’d hate to go back to this for a living, man.

I think that instead of being on the bandstand it’s more important for me to be somewhere where I can rub shoulders with somebody like [pointing] Carl Clay or rub shoulders with somebody like Tommy or Keith or Lance. Because, man, or any of the students that I come in contact [with] here that are trying to get their thing together. And I don’t think that everybody here, I mean, you know, why are we still in this country? You know, why don’t we leave the United States then? If, because the environment is a reflection of the place that we live in. So, I mean, why, I’m still here on this campus because y’all are still here in the United States. And when you all go, I’ll have to [‘moving’ gesture]. I mean, [inaudible] I’m not going to be left with the dregs.”

…

JM: “Like I told my class at the University of Hartford, we started, one night I made the subject matter the death of John F. Kennedy. And one of my bright students raised his hand, he wanted to talk about Earth, Wind & Fire or the Weather Report or John Coltrane or somebody, and he said, well, he can’t see where this was relevant to my subject matter. And I explained to him that the government and what it perpetuates is a reflection of what the art form is. And surely when, in Nazi Germany they didn’t have any John Coltranes, because they outlawed certain art forms and burned certain books and that was it. You know, and I saw the death of John F. Kennedy as being very relevant, man, to where the art was going in this country.”

Dollie McLean: “As a matter of fact, on the night that he was assassinated, he [Jackie] had a concert.”

JM: “I didn’t, we didn’t play. The curtain came back and we looked out in the audience, and there was such a feeling that we just, we started a tune and then we decided that we would ask them to give the people their money back. We weren’t going to play. It had nothing to do with our allegiance to the government or our love for John F. Kennedy. It was a vibration that was very strong, and nobody knew what it was. So we didn’t hit.”

DM: “Probably of bad things to come.”

JM: “Yeah, it was a bad omen that night.”

…

JM: “There were drugs on the scene surely since the ’20s. But the government, and its cooperation with the underworld, allowed, there was an alliance that came together there that allowed them to bring drugs into the country, and that’s where I feel that people like myself and Fats Navarro and other people that used drugs became the people that were plagued with this sickness. Because the drugs came in and immediately went into the urban areas, man, where black people were. And it didn’t go into the outskirts. I mean, it would look like a definite plan when you could have drugs on 116^th Street and 8^th Avenue, and straight up and down all of the Harlem streets, and you didn’t have it out in Long Island, and you didn’t have it in the areas where they wanted to more or less protect those communities. And it was rampant, man. I could walk out of my house when I was – because I lived a very sheltered life coming up in Harlem, but, I guess I was as sheltered as anybody. But, when drugs came on the scene it made me become devious. It made me begin to lie and scheme to get away from my family’s protection so that I could get out there to do what I needed to do because I was already sick. You know, I couldn’t tell my mother, ‘Look, I’ve got to go cop because I’m sick.’ She didn’t even know what it was, you know. But it was there, and it was cheap enough for everybody to afford. It was a dollar, man, for a cap.”

…

JM: “I really got busted in ’57 and that was when I lost my [cabaret] card. And I couldn’t work anywhere. And then The Connection, I think Freddie Redd called me and asked me would I be interested in playing with him in a play. And even though I was burning up a lot of money because of my habit, still it was a big, significant boost for us, for that period.”

…

JM: “When I lost my cabaret card it was very difficult for me. I couldn’t work because I couldn’t play in any clubs under my name. There were a few times that I used an alias, when I worked with Mingus and a couple of other jobs. I used the name John Lenwood. But this sort of put me on another course.

There was a program on the lower east side that was one of the programs to come out of the Kennedy administration, and in fact I think it was Robert’s baby, it was called ‘Mobilization for Youth.’ This was the first job that I had in town that I liked a little bit. You know, I worked with kids two or three afternoons a week and I got a salary for it.

It was really the cabaret card that gave me the time to get involved with this, with young people.”

JM: [To a group of kids] “You see what I mean? You could go to art. You could go to music, which, you’ve already gone to music. You could go to dance –”

JM: “So I think that what I’m, what I’m doing up there is important, [or] I wouldn’t be there.”

JM: [To kids] “– you can take all of them if you want to. Plus –”

JM: “But then again you lose, again, you lose on the artistic side.”

…

JM: [Playing with student saxophonists] “Very good. As I had you two playing and I joined you, I found out that my intonation, mine, after 30 years of playing the saxophone, is off, for only two reasons. One, that I haven’t been playing the saxophone. So like lifting weights or anything else that keeps a muscle in shape, these muscles [touching face] have relaxed now. And they’re waiting to be worked with, and the only way you can work with them is to play the horn every day. So now, if I played these exercises like I gave you, if I play them, this is what I’m going to have to play today, tomorrow, and every day now until I open in the club, these muscles will tighten up, and so that the notes will then begin to sound in tune.”

…

JM: “What I’ll be doing now, for the next week or two, is being very critical of everything I do. And getting my mouth, as soon as my mouth can handle notes and play, then I’ll start thinking about what I’m going to play. Then I’ll start working on that.”

JM: [In rehearsal] “We don’t have the same thing. Oh yeah? OK, let’s 

go.”

JM: “So that by the time I open in the club, I’ll be ready to just play what I have in front of me, and try and just do that.”

JM: [In rehearsal] “Hold up, hold up. Now, I’ve got an F-sharp. Hold it. Victor, is my note supposed to be in unison with them? I’ve got an F-sharp, and it looks like a G-sharp too.”

Victor: “Yeah it should be unison.”

JM: “OK, so it’s a different – let me mark my – OK, I know what it is. It looks like F-sharp here. [Plays] That’s the note? OK.”

JM: “And as the nights go on, and I work every day, then it’ll start to loosen up, and I’ll start to move out a little further. So you keep going like that, until, when two weeks are up, you know, you’ll be like, do anything, play anything. Because you’ve been working for two weeks and you’re back into it. And just when that happens, that’s when I come back up here, go back to school, put my saxophone in the closet, you know.”

JM: [In rehearsal] “Let’s run it down, then we’ll work the chords out, on the bandstand.”

…

JM: “So, this turned out to be the very last night of the Five Spot. The owner there said that it was just becoming possible for him to keep up with the trend. See, it all gets back to the media. Until the media begins to kind of scatter its blows a little bit and play some other kinds of music. I think if the media begins to play more of the musicians that play acoustical instruments I think they’ll get an audience, you know. People relate to what they hear and see.”

…

JM: “Let me get into this, man. Why don’t they give the art form the recognition? Because it’s a black art form. I saw a kiddie show, Captain Kangaroo, one morning, we were eating breakfast. And they had a show on ragtime. And Max Morath is a friend of mine, and I like Max very much. But Captain Kangaroo said, ‘Mr. Morath, will you please play some of your music?’ And he started playing ‘The Entertainer.’ Then he played ‘Maple Leaf Rag.’ And not once did they mention Scott Joplin’s name, not in the first twenty minutes of the show. Or even show a picture of that man. And that’s a program for young children to educate them about something. So those children will come away from that program, and every time they hear ‘The Entertainer’ or any ragtime, they’re going to associate it with Max Morath. You see? And it’s racist, man, that’s all it is. That’s why you know who Gregg Allman is and Alice Cooper, and you don’t know who Thelonious Monk is. And the kids don’t know who he is in the north end of Hartford, and they don’t know who he is across this country.”

…

JM: [Lecturing] “So jazz flourishes in with all the other music in Europe, and Japan. This is the country where it doesn’t flourish. Because they’ve got no audience for it, because everybody is a Big Mac mentally. I mean that, man. And you don’t believe me. And they shot that man’s head off, and you don’t even believe me.”

Melvin, a student: “Don’t, wait a minute now, wait, wait, wait, wait.”

JM: “OK then, you do believe me. And if you do believe me that means that you’re going to be one of the people to do something about it. Don’t wait until they tell you, ‘Hey Melvin, go ahead and play some of Sun Ra’s music, Jim, because that’s going to be it.’ And you jump out there because you’re getting a lot of play from, Hollywood’s talking about it, television’s talking about it, K & D’s talking about it, got to be happening. And you can’t wait for that, man. You can’t wait for them to tune you into it. You’ve got to listen to what I’m telling you, man. And go ahead on, since you’re going to be on the radio, and deal with the music. And don’t stop playing Lou Donaldson Hot Dog, but tell them something else about Lou. Tell the audience that you know that Lou Donaldson is one of the world’s great alto saxophone players in jazz, but here he is playing Hot Dog.”

M: “Yeah, I understand.”

JM: “Donald Byrd is wearing big buttons and all of that because he has to in order to be in with the cats, and to be in with that whole thing that he’s perpetuating, the commercialism. He’s not smiling, man, because he’s happy with what he’s doing musically, because he’s not. He can’t be.”

M: “Mary Lou Williams was talking about, that the only way jazz was going to come back into focus is that they need to start, the radio stations need to start playing it more and people need to start talking about it more.”

JM: “They ain’t going to let you do it. They won’t let you do it, Melvin.”

M: “Why?”

JM: “Simply because they have got to perpetuate the music that the system wants to perpetuate. Now, this will take the rest of the class for me to tell you about it. I’m serious, man. This gets back to John Kennedy’s head being blown off, and I don’t want to talk about that tonight.”

M: “OK, I understand –”

JM: “You can’t do that, man. You get on that radio station and play – unless you’re going to be here at the University of Hartford station. But if you’re talking about going into a commercial station and lining your pockets with some money, you’d better keep on practicing saying, [radio DJ voice] ‘Hey, jam, here we go with the Top 10’ and all of that, because that’s what they’re perpetuating.”

M: “Yeah I can see that to a point but I –”

JM: “The only jazz stations that are doing anything, man, are losing their jobs in New York City, man. These guys [pointing] from NYU, they’re not from up here on Mars with all of us, they’ll tell you, man. We’re on, don’t talk, we’re on Mars, man. You don’t know any, you can’t talk about it, Melvin, because you don’t understand it. The only thing you understand, man, is that commercialism is the thing that’s successful here on Mars, and there’s no place else to go and look because if it don’t happen at the Civic Center and it don’t happen right here in town, it ain’t real. You know, like for instance, like Sun Ra. I’ve been saying that word to you for all semester. Have you listened to one Sun Ra record?”

M: “Yeah.”

JM: “You have? Do you like his music?”

M: “It’s kind of far out.”

JM: “I’m hip. But do you think it’s worthwhile listening to because I told you to, and I know about what I’m talking about?”

Another student: “I saw Sun Ra last Saturday night in New York. And he played, his band played for a long time and they played, you know, really good music and everything. But why does he have to walk out with capes on and pretend he’s from Saturn?”

JM: “[Inaudible] It’s the same reason that they’re blowing blue smoke up. And only difference about, only thing about Sun Ra is he’s been wearing those blue capes and playing electronic music since 1957. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell all of you, man. He’s the master of it, and the personifier of all that crap you’re listening to.”

S: “[Inaudible] the music that he was playing. But it was when he’d walk out like, you know, they have a big setup and he had a lot of musicians and they were playing good rhythms. And he’d come walk out, like walk up and down in front of everybody like, smiling like he’s a king or something like that.”

JM: “He is a king, man. Can’t he be a god and a king? The man’s 60. He’s been out here starving all these years. Can’t he be a god and a king? Can’t he be, man? Let him be.”

M: “[Inaudible] you’re losing me, you’re losing me.”

JM: “I’m losing you, look – I’m talking about, he’s smiling because, he’s not smiling because he’s getting $50,000 a week to be a hamburger. He’s smiling because the music he writes is being played, and artistically he’s being fulfilled. And he puts on a cape and plays his electronic piano and walks up and smiles and lives with his musicians and they have a commune. He’s a teacher and a great, great artist, man. And he is not accepted commercially. So he ain’t smiling because somebody from CBS or CTI is out there getting ready to give him a big contract and a worldwide tour. He’s smiling because he’s a king and he’s in heaven. Can’t somebody smile?”

…

JM: “But in France, like, one day I was there and Bud Powell lived in a street and he would leave his house and be walking, and sort of looking like he was a million miles away. I always said that Monk and Bud are in a state of grace all the time. You know, they’re beyond things earthly. And when Bud – the traffic in Paris, you know, is like a race. And the cop would see him coming, the policeman. And he’d dash to the middle of the street and stop the traffic so that Bud could cross the street. And Bud didn’t have to signal him or stop and wait at the curb. The minute Bud reached that curb and his foot stepped off, the traffic had stopped. And he would cross the street, not running, just at his same pace. And when he was well up on the other side and heading down the street, traffic would start up again, man. And I just said to myself, God, man, look at that. And it’s over here in Paris, man. And they don’t do that for anybody. You know, they, this man did it because he knew Bud. And would see him, knew who he was, a great artist. And even when I got off the boat in Paris, and gave my passport. The guy was stamping passports, you know, and he opened mine and looked down, and the first thing he said was, ‘Ah, jazz musician. Artiste.’ You know, stamped it. You know, it made me feel, feel good, man. Yeah, I felt – I mean, what do you want? Somebody might say, ‘Oh man, this cat’s got to have somebody telling him he’s a jazz m—, you know, he’s an artist.’ Yeah, you’ve got to have somebody sometime to tell you that you’re an artist, man. You’ve got to have somebody recognize the fact that you are in an exclusive kind of art form, that’s something special.”

…

JM: [Practicing] “I’ve got to do this every day. Because if you don’t, man, if you lay off as long as I’ve been laying off –”

……

Andrew White on Voice-Leading

"We have so much prejudice in jazz against classical music that the prejudice encompasses the whole spectrum of classical music, including the theory of music. The whole theory of common practice has been rejected by many jazz players because of the stigma of the bow-tie. Now when that happens, the rules and procedures that can make a jazz performance either successful or a failure are ignored.

The C chord that Beethoven used is the same C chord that Charlie Parker used. Some [jazzmen] don't want to admit that. The 6/4 chord is a C triad with the G on the bottom. When you write it as 6/4, that indicates how it will be resolved, and may indicate how it will be approached. But if we go over here now, you will see this chord indicated by the alphabetical letter of C with a line under it and a G, and that is very bad nomenclature. [That symbol] does not show the function: it does not say anything about placement, the approach, or the departure. But this is what most people are dealing with now. So we are dealing with a vertical sense of music, hearing vertically, playing vertically. What is interpreted as a symbol doesn't have anything to do with what is coming after it or what came before. 

Tension and release---none of those rules mean anything anymore. The whole thing is gone. That's the lack of discipline in jazz. There are certain things that happen in jazz that don't happen in any other place, but they are not totally divorced from European [musical] culture. I don't know why jazz musicians hate the word 'European'; so many Americans hate the word European. What difference does it make where the rules come from? If they are functional, we should use them." [Italics added.]

Andrew White, 1984

A classically trained oboist and the publisher of more transcriptions of Coltrane solos than most people have heard, Andrew White also played bass with Stevie Wonder and saxophone with Elvin Jones. Listen to him play tenor saxophone here.  

Jackie McLean, Tone, Intonation

In a previous post, I excerpted a bit of Lee Konitz talking with Dan Tepfer about Jackie McLean and playing sharp. (The full transcript of that interview is now here.)

Jackie McLean's unique tone and intonation on the saxophone are frequently commented upon. His approach especially with regard to intonation was surely part of an intentional evolution: in his earliest work with Miles Davis, McLean plays more or less as well in tune as any other saxophonist of the period. So what's the explanation?

In this interview from 1996, McLean offers some insight:

"...even though I never really sounded like Bird, even my first recordings, as hard as I tried to play like him, I still had another quality to my tone that I still have today, which is kind of original - it's mine, you know. And that's another great thing about this music: it's very democratic, everybody can have their own sound, you know. A classical saxophone player, most of the time, they have to get a pitch that is tuned up perfectly to the piano and up to where the piano's A is, and they have to play at a particular intonation to keep it that way. But, and many, and, and many of the, the, the popular saxophone players of today sound alike. I can't tell the difference in all these guys, these current guys and I, it's not that they're playing anything that's so difficult, or so technically different, it's just that all of their tone, the qualities are the same and many of their ideas are the same, you know, very syrupy, sweet tone that they're producing today..."

UPDATE: Saxophonist Nick Biello puts it aptly: "JMac's intonation, even on early recordings, varies from record to record. And on some later records, it's 'in tune.' In an interview (I think it was from Jackie McLean on Mars) he says that he's always struggled with intonation. So I'm not sure if his sharpness was a conscious choice, or if he accepted it and thus made it an organic extension of his sound."