Monument Eternal, page 18
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 This quote is taken from an unpublished interview with Lars Bjorn and used with his permission.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.
2. Manifestation
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.
3. Universal Consciousness
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.
4. Glorious Chants
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.
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