Alto Genealogy

Rudy Williams, Charles Mingus’s cousin, with Tadd Dameron’s band at the Royal Roost in 1948 — a precursor to Eric Dolphy? 

Pete La Roca's (Old) Boom Bap

Every time I listen to John Coltrane Quartet's "Liberia," recorded live at the Jazz Gallery in (June of?) 1960, I am a bit surprised to hear what Pete La Roca plays from 4:55 to 5:09. It always strikes me as wonderfully anachronistic, not quite of its time. (Perhaps one could say the same thing about most of what is played here by Coltrane and the quartet generally.)

Those better versed in the musical history of the drumset are invited to comment and disabuse me of my misapprehension. 

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