I have found another reason to admire John Coltrane. Inside the booklet that comes with “The Complete 1961 Village Vanguard Recordings” is a picture of Coltrane reading a book, the pages open near the end. The title is The Opium of the Intellectuals, Raymond Aron’s trenchant study of the left-wing mind, best exemplified by Sartre. (Aron’s question: “Why is it that the left-wing intellect holds liberal democracies to the standards of the Kingdom of Heaven, while it excuses and overlooks the greatest crimes of totalitarian governments”?)
No surprise, though. By 1961, Coltrane was heading deeper into ponderous musings upon form and spirit and inspiration, a heady mix of abstraction and feeling. The music was getting more meditative, brooding, and experimental, and lots of people didn’t like the drift. That didn’t matter to Coltrane -- or at least if it did, he didn’t alter his direction. The agenda went on, Coltrane reading, thinking, studying, praying, and practicing practicing practicing, sometimes eight or nine hours a day.
In late October of that year, he arrived at the Village Vanguard for live performances, some of which would be recorded by Rudy van Gelder. Van Gelder captured four nights, Nov. 1, 2, 3, and 5, and they stand as a monumental occasion in the story of jazz (which is why I included the Nov 1 version of “Spiritual” on my list of jazz songs that qualify as high art). They are, one can tell, the result of an uncompromising vision, an anti-sentimental, brutal aesthetic of intensity, challenge, and overcoming.
I listen to them over and over, but one has to wonder about the influence of the Village Vanguard sessions and much of Coltrane music for the rest of his short life. Did too many younger jazz musicians hear them and not only admire the music but adopt the identity? Coltrane aimed not to entertain, but to illuminate and uplift and inspire. He wanted to evoke a religious experience in listeners, and he spoke easily of good and evil forces. He invested his performances with high-stakes seriousness. How many rising jazz musicians wanted to do the same?
Terry Teachout’s column two weeks ago in The Wall Street Journal suggests a lot of them. He writes that jazz musicians today “regard themselves as artists, not entertainers, masters of a musical language that is comparable in seriousness to classical music.” That goes with my experience attending several jazz performances in the 1990s and finding the headliners a serious lot who seemed more interested in their own playing than in the audience before them.
During the 80s, I caught Horace Silver, Dizzy Gillespie, and Art Blakey, and they were different. Each one kept up a stirring current of fun throughout the occasion even as they played hi-octane hard-bop classics. I haven’t attended any performances in several years, and I presume that hundreds of performers instill the spirit of entertainment in their acts. But in most people’s minds, jazz still signifies a cerebral, cutting-edge, challenging art form, and it is one of the things that prevent jazz from coming back as a popular form.
The problem is that an art form can’t thrive if its extreme figures, such as Coltrane, become a model for the rest. They shoot too high and far, and while others may repeat the motions of extremity, they don’t achieve the magic or beauty or genius -- whatever is it that carries it into the realm of high art. The extremists secure an audience for themselves, but their many votaries do not.
