Something About Alice Coltrane

Ok, so she's John Coltrane's wife. By that, I mean that I think that if you didn't know anything about her and you came across her records (or just her name, for that matter), you might think, "I didn't know Coltrane had a wife!" Or, "who was this woman married to Coltrane?" Which is probably, in some ways, the perfect question to ask. Who was she? Why did he marry her or she him? What does her music have to do with that marriage? What does the marriage of the higher order spiritual soldier of interstitial (I thank my grad school buddy, Fitz Fitzgerald for that word) spatial species (him) to a master mistress player queen of harp, piano, organ, strings, and divine-ated concept mean (her) for the world of music? Is music greater than the world itself? Is music the most divine expression of the greatest world there will ever have been?

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But, you know, she isn't anyone's wife. Her being a "she" doesn't give anyone the authority to "marry" her off to anyone and have this marriage define the "she" that is her. Or maybe she's a wife but we don't get to know anything about what her wifeliness is because no one but one man - which isn't us -- is married to her. Meaning, the wife part isn't ours to assess, isn't ours to imagine, is only ours to project. So what we then get is the music part, the everything that are her endless sound. But it is interesting, too, because Alice seems to have never presented herself without the "wife" part, and not just by using the name "Coltrane". She seems to have always presented this aspect of herself with pride, this wifeliness, this timelessness that links her to the name "Coltrane", because she and he were family, the familar, and their music is each part of a familial and existent world, a world of the beyond of music, a world of the beyond of spirit where the music they made is the music that seeks the spirit beyond the spirit, the light that shines behind the light that shines, the cloud whose unknowing is that by which what the world has become undone and remade in an image of absolute light, a room inside, a passageway to the immediate melody of the highest of all worlds.

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I am already terrified to write about this subject. Mostly because I don't want to go anywhere besides into the heart of the sunrise that is the music of Alice Coltrane. But the heart of the sunrise (Yes lyrics -- "Love comes to you and you follow / Lose one on to the heart of the sunrise") is where the terror lies, not because love hurts, but because fire hurts, and if love is fire, then love is the fire that burns me with the promise of tomorrow. And the promise of tomorrow is the utter inferno of today.

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It isn't easy to find all of Alice Coltrane's records. Her complete discography is listed here, on her website. I have a few "easy-to-gets" -- A Monastic Trio; Ptah, the El Daoud; Journey in Satchidananda. I have a couple "stumbled-upon-can't-believe-I-founds" -- Huntington Ashram Monastery, Universal Consciousness. I have one "I-have-never-seen-this-before-and-won't-again" -- Lord of Lords. I owned Transfiguration for a time, but the organ solo on "Leo, Part One" and "Leo, Part Two" was so intense I thought that just having the record around would burn my house down, if not a sharpshoot a pure bullet hole of love in my heart, so I sold it back and I hide my eyes when I go to the store and see her face staring off to the side as she sits at the organ on the album cover, not because I am ashamed, but because I know she will have never been ashamed of anything, and that she would speak to me with a soft ecstatic compassion and know that if I didn't ever understand, that my not knowing this would harm nothing but the sun, and not even the sun, but the sum total of my inner image of the sun. (One afternoon, as Leo, Part 1 became Leo, Part 2, the organ that filled the stereo and then the bedroom and then the hallway and the closets and the living room and kitchen and doorways and doorframes and windows all around with the flames of fury, the flames of impossible and essential loss -- one afternoon, I think I learned that it might take me 30 years to hear what I was hearing and beat back against the flames with my own mind. That same afternoon I brought the record back to the record store with a promise to remember my development of that single moment, my mind half-melted and half mettled.) There's a record with Carlos Santana, Illuminations (I won't give a link to it because I protest Carlos in the name of Alice, my contribution to what she contributed to everyone) -- I have never trusted dear Carlos when it comes to improvisation, but that's why I'm me and Alice is Alice. World Galaxy can't be found anywhere (I mean, conveniently or within a reasonable price for a record whose reason transcends that of all musical economies). Perhaps it is lost so that we can imagine it, and only misimagine it. First, though, let's go here to lose what we have so as to rebuild our imagining:

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The thing I always immediately think when I put on Journey in Satchidananda is that that is one deep well of feeling, and at the bottom of the well is where every sound begins, and the sky is where every sound arises, and the sun is where each sound separates, and the All Knowing is where listening creates the sound that begins, that has arisen, that will separate, that will return. The first track of the album begins with a bass figure from the bottom of the earth, a simple figure that you can immediately recognize as part of the known world, and then the otherwordly ancestry spiderweb of the tamboura falls across it, a shaft of piercing light through a window, and then Coltrane's harp comes into the thick, begins the pure thinking that is surrounded by a sea of percussion, sailed upon by a saxophonic melody, a deepest feeling that is the blissful consciousness of satchidananda. We are on the journey within this bliss, and every harp note plucked and picked and rattled by Alice is the sound of this bliss explicitly named and framed before our vanished eyes. We see only what we hear, which is what we feel, which is where we go and how we have gotten there.

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I imagine it must have been strange for her, making her own way, after being so close to the giant that Coltrane always was. But I don't think I can imagine it right, because partly what I can't imagine is Alice herself, with everything she thought about music and everything she heard music to be. The music that is hers is music that can only be heard as its own music. It is jazz because the music she made is meant to deepen the well, sweeten the water that is jazz, but it isn't jazz out of the convenience that instrumental, improvisational, African-American music is jazz. I imagine it must have been strange for her in that she seems estranged from everything but the Lord of Lords, the holy night that is the top of a lonely mountain and the lightning flash that composes the terror of the oldest world we have ever known.

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Universal Consciousness -- first off, how can that be an album title? Sure, they are just words, and words can be the title of anything, but the that begins with the meaning, which is tendered heavily, a price to be part of paying as being part of the universe that encompasses our consciousness. Alice Coltrane's concept of the conscience -- the inner knowledge of -- the thing that makes us us and not us in being beyond us -- shines, radiates, remembers, inculcates, calculates....

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The record begins with something that seems like the sound of what would lie on the outskirts of the world, as if these sounds could only be heard in a very specific place, a place that, paradoxically, one could only get to through hearing these sounds. There are a quartet of violins that squeal a punctual and punctuated melody interspersed with panicked and wracked nerve percussion, like jazz and like what jazz would be if the jazz were religious and sun baked in the religion of a sea-swept world, with only the sea to guide us further away from the universe that drags us, stone-henged, back to the mundane earth.

By the time we get to "Oh Allah" (above), the violins hover over us like a cloud of credible proof that there is something about all of this, a spirit that is the body, a soul that is the flesh. Alice uses this intro to set up one of those organ solos that she makes, over bass, drums, and air and wind -- I don't know how to describe one of her organ solos other than it sounds like wind blowing through stiffer wind, like water flowing through stiller waters, and this doubling of form with another form is the forum that allows her to flow through everything. But her playing, too, aggressively pursues the highest calling, its as if it can only always ascend in a way so as to open the sky and burst through it with the flames that are the meaning of the deepest cracks in the deepest earth.

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Alice Coltrane was as heavy as a bright sky that fills itself with the possibility that you are part of its delicate fabric, the clouds that remember the sea.

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The heaviest of her records is Lord of Lords, a heavy set of heavy-set tracks. "Going Home" (listed here --

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is almost just like "Oh Allah" in that the main content of the 10 minute piece is a wonderfully distended and swelling organ solo, like waves that rise and crash against a set of cragged rocks hundreds of feet tall. Each note that Coltrane plays seems itself hundreds of feet tall, and when there is no organ, there are choruses of strings and voices stretched across the window of the sky, taut and tight and open and emptying everything out of sound but ringing notes notation the triumph of faith over the will. It's hard to describe about this music partly because the form of it is the form of the prayer it seeks to invoke, which is a heavy prayer, a prayer to the heaviness of the One that is All.

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But I think it makes sense to honor the mystery of time and sequence end with something earlier from Alice, from Huntington Ashram Monastery.

This track shares elements with Journey In Satchidananda -- simple, immediate bass floor rumble non-jazz jazz riff, handclap church percussion, and the flurry of harp spider ice dance all atop everything. Huntington was Alice's 2nd solo record, from 1969, and the opening track, which is just her harping her way through every corner of the universe over the simplified rhythm section, is her happiness and hope for all of us, for mankind, even. It's this piece that shows me that the world through her eyes was the world of the Coltrane that he didn't know how to have, that he knew he couldn't have unless he married this world and it became the past of his family, the essence of that something he needed to have, that something about everything that is the piano, the harp, the organ, the strings, the sound of everything shaking the sky and tearing the night into ecstatic harmony.

Rock S(l)obster

I'm dedicating this to honesty. The kind that is the truth of a song. Because songs are true. The truth of a song is its truth. Because you can trust it to tell you the truth of spirit, of life, of the clarity that is thinking your way through life, of joining with the words in song that would be your words to sing if you had your own song to sing. The truth of a song is the trust you place in it to present the truth in all its simplicity. Songs may exist solely to be placed in the mouths of listeners and displace their minds with the sentiments of the singing sung; songs may exist to erase the minds of listeners and replace their mouths with the sentience of the sung sentence.

 

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I never really wanted anyone to sing anything for me, or to sing anything that I would have wanted to sing, or even sing anything I would have wanted to have be sung. All of that always seemed to me to be pointless, really, because if they were singing it, and I wasn't, that seemed to be the end of everything, and the beginning of the future that is me and not you and you and not me. Perhaps this silenced crash of point and pointless was the ultimate meaning, though, where what we end off with is a beautiful moment where meaning, suspended in the animation of one lullabying another in the lie of the next moment, becomes what one is and is to become.

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What do we mean when we say that a piece of music or song is "devastating"? On first thought, it would seem we are referring to the emotional effect this piece has upon us, that its content or the presentation of its content reduces us internally to some doubled over position of pain, of pure suffering. Interesting, though, that in this equation, we are not calling ourselves, by default, masochists for suffering as a result of connecting with this music; rather, we are saying that we are powerless to react in any other way to this piece, that the emotional pain it brings out in us (as opposed to causes us) is the means through which we are devastated. What about us is "stated" in this devastation? What pain is already stationed within us such that it can be devolved through (a) sound(s)?

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I'm also aware, rereading the paragraph above the above paragraph, how arrogant this all sounds, that I would refuse any words in any voice that touched me or that I could relate to. And it is totally untrue. I wanted to be Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley and sing with their confidence and righteousness. I wanted to be Paul McCartney and John Lennon and know that everyone around me was touched by the canopy of my gigantic heart. I wanted my heart to expand with the words that the voice that wasn't mine had given me, I wanted to be inflated with a meaning that lay beyond me.

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I notice how much easier it is to write around music than about it, to write near it than through it.

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Monster Magnet's Powertrip is a cross between what my buddy Josh calls "Scuzzball Rock" and what is often known as "Cock Rock". The former means that beer has been poured over everything and mildewed its way into the seat cushions and speakers out of which the rock sizzles; the former means that the singer has poured beer down the front of his pants and dares you to enter the front door where the (c)rock sizzles. In either case, there is a slob at the door, a lobster on the floor, and everything is too loud for anything but psychedelic thinking. For the record, I have always liked Powertrip, although I don't care about it, or the rockslob aesthetic, or anything with relation to beer or pants or doors or sizzling. Within the "slob" is the "sob" who weeps for humanity, whose songs are the songs of the end of times that are the end of men.

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Powertrip is embedded with a dark reality that seems to invoke the darkness that rock-dick-death-excess won't ever have reckoned with. This dark reality is that there is a truth to evil, and its truth is that evil is what becomes what you are when you are willing to court it and let it live inside you. Heavy, isn't it? There are 2 poles of this reality. The first begins with the last song on side 1 (this record, even though released in the pure CD era, is here as proof that albums created the narrative space for recorded music to wax/wane/ascend/descend, and each side of the record perfectly ends in a clouded doom), "Baby Götterdämmerung". (First, listen, but don't just listen. Play the track and read below while it is playing. It's ok if the words of the song get mixed up with the words on the screen; this mix up is part of the listening that should be in the head that this song will blow up.)

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I don't care about lyrics. I've said that in a previous post, and I will repeat it every time I talk about "songs". They don't matter only because you need to "know" them, and "knowing" them is not the same as "hearing" them, which may mean never "understanding" them. I'm going to "never understand" them in order to hear what they are -- a voice singing inside the music to convey the music as much as anything else within the music conveys them.

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"Baby Götterdämmerung" is a pulse, the sound of a guitar plus-ing and minus-ing in a total repetition of one clean, whitewashed chord that disappears between each beat. There's a perfect way this is being created from the perspective of making sausages, but from the perspective of listening, it sounds like each second is divided in half, and that the second half of the second is the half where the power plug has been pulled from the floor. There's a voice that comes in over this pulse as the verse, this plus, and it is a deep, convicted voice, disturbed enough to never exceed or embellish the bi-phrasal melody. The song being sung seems to be a song of death -- and when the chorus comes, and the music's urgency ascends, and the voice gains in gain and turns ever more urgent -- the death is sung with the first refrain -- "I looked in the mirror / and somebody blew up".  The "and somebody blew up" repeats to end each chorused phrase, a repetition of the recurring annihilation that is the death that is this song. While I have repeatedly ignored the meaning of the lyrics to this song, I can't my turn my mind off to the point of completely whiting out the semiotics of memory -- the song is about forgetting, about the limits of remembering, about the demand to destroy the contents of your mind chambers in order to free space for additional content. The song is about "picking which (brain) plugs to pull" and pulling them, which is why each moment of noise is followed by, or preceded by, absolute silence. The absolute silence that is the silence of each and every death of each and every thought.

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Side 2 of Powertrip -- and it is important that this track is the end of the album, as well as the second side -- finishes with the descent of man into a pit of snakes -- a pit of lies, "Your Lies Become You".

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I'm trying to cultivate the art of listening without hearing, hearing without interpreting, interpreting without judging, judging without knowing, knowing without listening....

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I can't think of anything more terrifying than that phrase, "Your Lies Become You". There are other words in the song, all sung with an earnest seriousness, like the moment you look in the face of the devil and realize he's no longer a dream or a wish, that what makes him real is that he is there, before you, and he is going to take you down to the bowels of the earth and have his way with eternity. The music is pristine, the sound production -- the bass, the guitar, the drums, the voice over all of them -- is like a crystal mountain lake whose chill is the chill of your bones and the thing that chills them, too. But your lies do become that "I" that is "you", don't they? What else could they do, being the words you spin, the songs you sing? Where else could you put them but inside you because you hurl them outside you? This is why the song must sound like it does, like a dark country road, like an attic set on fire, like an ancient amulet that shimmers on the mantle, like the fireplace whose embers crackle and set sparks flying in the empty room, sparks which glow and flicker and cease.

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Bob Dylan's "The Ballad of Hollis Brown" is a song about a farmer whose farm produces death, whose children starve and cry and scream, who ends it all with seven shotgun blasts. The song devastates, Dylan's voice devastates, Dylan's guitar devastates, too, and everything is reduced to "Seven shots ring out / Like the ocean's pounding roar," even though, later, "there's seven new people born." (Dylan was always too concerned with the words themselves to leave them at the feet of the devil, so he picks them up and scatters them into the heart of the wind.) Nazareth were a Scottish rock "almost" metal band from the 70's (they exist past the 70's, yes, but not in any meaningful way, although meaningful, I know, is as subjective as clouds in your coffee...) Nazareth take "The Ballad of Hollis Brown" and they rockslob it and dirgeslow it into the death of time, the death of wind, the death of your bleeding brain.

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The singer seems to be tearing at the words with his teeth and bones and blood, as if each word were the next moment of sanity gone past, and to tear open a vein is to tear open life itself and hope for an additional external moment,. The melody is too high for him, as it should be, since the death of a family on the outside of town, a family outside everything that is society and the world of society that is so close to them, is the death of everything that could be human on earth, which is earth because it is the home of humanity. And this lost humanity is abominable snowman, is ancient banshee wail. There is a guitar or bass or fuzz or force in this song that spreads out across the ground that is the head pounding, drums making roaring tiger headache. I don't know quite how to describe it, it feels like the feeling that happens when, in Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining", the elevators open and spill a sea of slow motion blood onto the floor. The spreading fuzz sound is a giant bloodstain that sweeps across the swooping plain of the flat earth, it is the end of everything that never ends, but it expands, it explains the meaning of death without ever explaining the meaning of dying. That meaning is outside anything any song could bring us to, but the song could point us towards this wind.

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I'm trying to think without words, to judge without thought...I'm thinking, but I want to let the forewarned arm me for the future, where there are only always songs to avoid and meanings to dodge, and killers to get close enough to that we can look in their eyes and see nothing but frozen fire.

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Perhaps beneath it all, there are songs that are meant to reveal a kind of truth that we can only take in in moments, perhaps there are songs that are hidden at either ends of albums that are the deepest expression of the truth of the singers, of the songs, of the players, of the audience. Perhaps these songs take everything away from the original experience of singing and dancing, perhaps they are there to silence everything but the truth of the moment in which the song exists and you expand to fit into the space around the song, you are there to contain what the song sings and to be changed by the depth of it, to let the devastation reach you and restate you, to feel the deviation between these songs and all the others that surround them. Perhaps the rockslobs are not what they seem, perhaps they are the demons of truth couched in denim and leather and mirrored shades, and perhaps the truth they champion is only as valuable as it is because it is hidden, because what you expect are cars and girls and fights and beer, and what you get, when this has all been razed to the ground, is a skeleton, a body stripped of all flesh, a skull whose emptied eyes are the eyes of time.