I would like to suggest that the attraction of America’s greatest musician, the extraordinary jazz saxophonist John Coltrane, is gaining increasing traction in Russia not just by dint of the greater space taken by jazz in Russia’s musical culture after the Cold War but because of the spirituality or religiosity, an aspiration to wholeness or, in Russian, ‘tselostnost’’ of various kinds, and transcendentalism expressed in Coltrane’s music and life philosophy, which resonate with similar elements in Russian thought and culture.
These qualities have long been impressed on many an American mind since Coltrane’s transformation of jazz and music beginning in the 1960s. American jazz critic Gary Giddins once said: “John Coltrane’s music takes you out of the conventional world,” and “When he died, it was like reading a mystery thriller and the last chapter had been torn out. Where in the hell was he going? Clearly, there was a greater and greater accent on a kind of religious, cosmic, thematic undercurrent.”[1]
This ‘accent’ was more than an ‘undercurrent.’ Coltrane’s pianist in the classic quartet, the monumental pianist of Coltrane’s classic quartet, the similarly religious McCoy Tyner, spoke of Coltrane helping people to “see the light.”[2] Successor to Coltrane’s spiritual approach to jazz and life, his second wifeAlice Coltrane, who was part of Coltrane’s post-classic quartet groups and orchestras, relays that Coltrane “talked about cosmic sounds, higher dimensions, astral levels and other worlds, and realms of music and sound that I could feel.”[3] His band members were as if apostles to their leader. In an article preceding an interview with Coltrane French music critic Jean Clouzet repeats a comment about the Trane “building a ‘cathedral.’”[4] Perhaps not surprisingly then, Coltrane inspired the foundation of a church, the Orthodox Church of John Coltrane, located in San Francisco.[5] The church’s leader describes the first time he heard Coltrane in person: “It was as though he was speaking in tongues and there was fire coming from heaven — a sound baptism… That began the evolutionary, transitional process of us becoming truly born-again believers in that anointed sound that leaped down from the tone of heaven out of the very mind of God, stepped from the very wall of creation and took on a gob of flesh, and we beheld his beauty as one that was called John.” For the John Coltrane Orthodox Church, the magical saxophonist is “more than a saint.”[6]
To be sure, Coltrane was on a religious quest in both his music and life, and music was his life. Beginning in the early 1960s until his untimely death in July 1967, he lived almost as a monk, almost all of his time spent reaching out to God through devotion to music as prayer to a non-sectarian God. Also, Coltrane’s search was a product of what those who knew him best describe as his nearly divine personality. The great polyrhythmic drummer in his ‘classic quartet’, Elvin Jones, said of Coltrane: He was like an angel on earth. He struck me that deeply. This is not an ordinary person, and I am enough of a believer to think very seriously about that.” Coltrane, Jones said, “put spiritual content into everything he did”, and this was “(s)omething everyone could recognize.”[7] Swedish journalist Bjorn Fremer also described Coltrane as “like an angel.”[8] McCoy Turner spoke of “spiritual feelings” between the members of the quartet and said that playing with him was “a spiritual experience every night.”[9] The quartet’s members reminisce about their deceased leader as if apostles or followers of some religious teacher or saint.
Coltrane’s humble nature – a saintly characteristic in the Russian traditions as discussed further below – would have led him to be embarrassed by such worship, but the spiritual phenomenon noted by fellow musicians as well as listeners time and time again and similar if more moderate transformations demonstrates that his goal of inspiring spirituality and devotion to God clearly had a powerful effect on hundreds of thousands in his homeland, speaking to some sort of spiritual aspect in his work.
So why not in Russia and elsewhere? Indeed, it might have been predicted that once the hyper-rationalistic, materialistic communist experiment collapsed in the Soviet Union, Russia would rediscover its religious roots in Russian Orthodox Christianity and its spiritual legacy in other spheres and eagerly imbibe those of other cultures from across the globe, particularly given the world’s greater interconnectedness and Russia’s own universalist responsiveness (obzyvchivost’) as Russia’s most honored poet, the half-African Aleksandr Pushkin intoned. And so it has. A powerful foreign seeker of the spirit such as Coltrane – a truth-seeker or ‘God-seeker’ in twilight Imperial Russian Silver Age religious-philosophical terms – therefore indeed should have broken more forcefully into Russian culture or Russian thinkers’ discourse at least about jazz and music if not creativity, spirituality and much more. And so he has.
Of course, some Russian reactions to, and commentaries on Coltrane’s work are rather aesthetic, even functional in orientation, focusing mostly on the artistic beauty and genius of his music and the enormous technical facility and playing energy of the greatest of all saxophonists. For example, in a lecture at Philharmonic Society of St. Petersburg Society Vladimir Feyertag offered high praise: “For those who play the saxophone Coltrane is the main icon, because he discovered all the possibilities for how to use this instrument.”[10] Other Russian commentary similarly give secondary, even tertiary place to the religious aspects and spiritual power of Coltrane’s creations. While addressing the latter in his lectures, Kirill Gladkov leads with Coltrane’s musical genius and discoveries, noting: “Coltrane notonly achieved maximum possibilities in improvisational technique, but also made a ‘breakthrough’ inthe field of new expressive possibilities of the instrument.”[11] However, for most Russian thinkers who have addressed Coltrane and his music, the admiration and kinship are driven by far more than the great Coltrane’s incredible musical prowess. In this article, I hypothesize that Coltrane has entered the post-Soviet Russian universe and most often precisely because of several spiritual and religio-philosophical elements expressed in his music and worldvew.
Russian Responsiveness to Coltrane’s Religio-Philosophical Spiritualism
The weight of Russian thought and admiration for Coltrane and his work emphasizes the spiritual aspect and magnitude of his music and, to some extent, his philosophy of music, life, and humanity’s fate. This corresponded nicely with the Russian attraction to spiritual aspects of life and existence, rooted in good part in its Russian Christian Orthodox traditions and its manifold offshoots, and its thinkers’ nearly obsessive concern for humankind’s fate and salvation.
The Russian Jazz Academy notes: “More than half a century has passed since the death of saxophonist John Coltrane, and no figures of comparable scale have yet been born. Throughout these decades, the pinnacle achievements in jazz improvisation were often measured by the degree of approximation to Coltrane’s level, and not only in playing technique, as it sometimes seems to young musicians — although Coltrane raised the technique of playing the saxophone to unprecedented heights. It’s about the spiritual level, about the ‘extra—musical’ content that cannot be reflected in musical notation, about the mystery that makes music – music, the highest manifestation of the human spirit, and not just an ordered set of sounds.”[12]
Jazz scholar Leonid Auskern, writing in Russia’s journal Jazz-Kvadrat (Jazz Quartet), elaborates: “The ocean is vast, multifaceted, and changeable. Describing the ocean, it is difficult, almost impossible, to cover all forms of manifestation of its vital activity. A hydrologist will talk about water, a navigator will talk about currents and reefs, an ichthyologist will talk about fish, an artist will talk about colors, and so on. John Coltrane is the Ocean.”[13]
A Russian blogger notes: “John Coltrane is a musician of incredibly spiritual power; a man who decidedto know God and Truth through His Majesty Sound, through his own Creation of this most divine sound.And now, listening to his 1964 studio album ‘Crescent’ for the umpteenth time, I’m plunging intonirvana over and over again, in an amazing, exalted state, as if Someone Supreme and Incomprehensibleis talking to you.”[14] The Russian jazz website ‘Jazzpeople.ru’ calls Coltrane the “Holy Saxophonist.”[15]Russian jazz lecturer Kirill Gladkov dubs Coltrane the “High Priest of the Jazz Avantgarde.”[16]
The spiritual compatibility between Coltrane and Russia’s greatest thinkers runs deep, because there is a deep compatibility between Russian thinkers’ and Coltrane’s own spiritual quest. While Dostoevskii delved deeply into the dark mind of humanity and revolutionary utopian aspirations to expose them as the antithesis of the divine, good, truth, and beauty, Coltrane’s music enters the soul and seeks to transform it towards the divine, washing it in beauty. Dostoevskii’s focus on beauty is an offshoot of his and, many would say, his countrymen’s preference for the spiritual over the material, feeling over thinking. Coltrane’s focus on the beauty in music similarly reflects the prioritization of the spiritual over the material. The former, Dostoevskii’s, is the result of Russia’s roots in Orthodox Christianity, which combines beauty with divinity, and of Coltrane’s both Christian and universalistic search for beauty, truth, the good and God. The latter, Coltrane’s, is a search with Christian roots and reminiscent of the late 19th-early 20th century religious and philosophical movement within the Russian Religious renaissance, the God-seeking movement. For Coltrane came to see beauty, particularly in the form of music, as having healing qualities for the soul and humankind, uniting them and in turn them with God.
Whether playing post-bop, Miles Davis’s cool, or smoking hot jazz in the 1950s, his innovations on hardbop in the late 1950s and early 1960s, free jazz, or his spiritual jazz, represented most astoundingly in his monumental ‘A Love Supreme’, John Coltrane shook the soul and the music world and can be regarded as perhaps America’s greatest musical genius. However, in the early and mid-1950s Coltrane was struggling with alcoholism, drug and cigarette addiction, which complicated his relations with Miles Davis, under whose leadership the saxophonist as a force in jazz. After leaving Davis’s famous quintet and immersed in personal crisis, Coltrane said he turned to God to help him make the world happy and even save the world. So he abandoned these vices and strove to purify himself.
From the late 1950s, therefore, Coltrane’s music took a decidedly religious turn following a spiritual awakening that led him to devote his music to God and the betterment of humankind—to save the world. In some sense, this awakening was a religious return or reawakening, since he was brought up in a deeply Christian atmosphere of black North Carolina and both his grandfathers were pastors. In the liner notes of his 1965 magnum opus, ‘A Love Supreme’, Coltrane references his 1957 spiritual awakening: “(B)y the grace of God, a spiritual awakening which was to lead me to a richer, fuller, more productive life. At that time, in gratitude, I humbly asked to be given the means and privilege to make others happy through music. I feel this has been granted through His grace. ALL PRAISE TO GOD”.[17] Coltrane would move beyond the goal of ‘merely’ making people happy, and his search for God would resonate in America, Russia, and beyond. Coltrane’s and Russian religio-philosophic discourse – something that bleeds into the general culture through the Orthodox faith and the spiritual place the arts hold in Russian culture – are compatible in the emphasis they place on artistic beauty and the divine nature of beauty.
Omorphialism: Beauty Will Save the World
Coltrane’s pursuit of beauty in the name of God and humankind resonates with a powerful strand in Russian religious, philosophical, and literary discourse. Russia’s most popular quintessential Christian Orthodox writer, Fyodor Dostoevskii, wrote in a letter: “Christ – 1) beauty, 2) none better…”[18] And, of course, for Dostoevskii, Christ is to save the world. Coltrane wrote in A Love Supreme’s ‘Psalm’: “God is beautiful.”[19]Dostoevskii’s soteriological sense about beauty was a consequence of his deep Russian Orthodox faith. He is said to have stood in the corner of a church in glorious St. Petersburg during services crying over the crucifixion of Christ. The Eastern and Russian Orthodox traditions attribute to beauty a divine quality. Indeed, Russians are said to have been drawn to Eastern Orthodoxy rather than Catholicism, Islam, or Judaism by dint of the beauty of Constantinople’s Orthodox churches, including their musical splendor — “by the aesthetic appeal of its liturgy, not the rational shape of its theology,” according to the great historian of Russian culture, James H. Billington.[20]
Sights, sounds, even fragrances concocted a dizzying sensual experience that enticed the Russian, with musical beauty holding a special place in the liturgy. “Just as the icon was but one element in the pictorial culture that included the fresco, the illuminated holy text, and the illustrated chronicle, so the bell was only part of a torrent of sound provided by interminable chanted church services, popular hymns and ballads, and the secular improvisations of folk singers armed with a variety of stringed instruments. Sights and sounds pointed the way to God, not philosophical speculation or literary subtlety.”[21] Thus, sound’s, music’s role was essential: “There was a hypnotic quality to the cadences of the church chant; and the hollow vaselike indentations (golosniki) in the early Kievan churches produced a lingering resonance which obscured the meaning but deepened the impact of the sung liturgy.”[22]Similarly, the Orthodox Church’s bell traditions raised the people toward God: “The exalted ‘rejoicing of the (blagovestie) of the bells used an overlapping series of sounds similar to that which was used in the many-voiced church chant-producing an effect that was at the same time cacophonous and hypnotic. … The forging and ringing of bells was a sacramental act in Muscovy.”[23] Thus, not just beauty in general but music – the ‘lingering resonance’ of the chanted prayer and the simultaneous ringing of numerous bells — was a key element of beauty drawing Russians to their new religion, to God. Coltrane similarly sought God through ‘torrents of sound’ (called by jazz commentators ‘sheets of sound’ referring to his use of rapid runs and overtones), ‘overlapping series of sounds,’ and tones that were simultaneously both ‘cacophonous and hypnotic.’
In Russian theological and philosophical discourse, beauty, together with good and truth, is seen as emanating from God and the Divine and united in the Russian Orthodox tradition. Recently, a group of Russian scholars dedicated an entire monograph to the unity of good, truth, and beauty in the Russian religio-philosophical tradition.[24] From the Eastern Orthodox-venerated 1st century ‘holy father’ Dionysius Areopagite (converted by St. Paul in Athens and one of the seventy Apostles) to the great 14th century Russian Orthodox missionary St. Sergii Radonezh to the 16th century’s Iosif Volotskii or Joseph of Volokolamsk, a prominent Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) theologian and early ideologist of tsarist autocracy, who led the ROC faction of ‘possessors’ defending monastic landownership in the dispute with the non-possessors (nestazhateli)] to Volotskii’s theological opponent and the non-possessors’ leading light, Nils Sorskii, to Dostoevskii to the numerous late Imperial and Silver Age religious philosophers from to many post-Soviet Russian thinkers – Russian religious teachers have seen Beauty as a reflection, if not an act of God and the divine.[25]
For perhaps Russia’s greatest religious philosopher, Vladimir Solovev (1853-1900), the three absolutes – good, truth, and beauty – were integrated, filled in their entirety by love. “Good is the unity of everything or all.” “Truth is the same as love, i.e. the unity of everything, but already being objectively represented as an ideal unity. Finally, beauty is that same love (that is, the unity of all), but manifested or tangible—this is real unity. In other words, the good is unity in positive possibility, strength, or power (accordingly, the divine will can be designated as an immediately creative or powerful principle), truth is the same unity as necessary (unity), and beauty – it is as real (unity).”[26]For another religious philosopher Father Pavel Florenskii (1882-1937), discussed in more detail below, Truth, Good, and Beauty were metaphysically one process, originating from one source: God.[27] The great Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevskii thought Beauty in the form of Christ will save the world. As we shall see in several places below, Coltrane also saw beauty in music to be much like divine love, as a ‘force for good’ and the unification of the universe.
Coltrane, a Christian who was interested in philosophy at the beginning of his musical life, shares Christian roots and its soteriological aspirations with Russians. This commonality forms a key foundation for Russians’ attraction to Coltrane. Coltrane’s first religious spark that music could be offered to “make others happy” was the kernel of his eventual belief that music – beauty – could change, if not save the world. He noted in a 1966 interview that “music is an instrument. It can create the initial, just, the thought patterns, that can create the changes, you see, in the thinking of the people.”[28] Thus, in both the Russians’ and Coltrane’s religious world there was a common devotion to ‘omorphialism’ or a belief in the value of beauty, including musical beauty, as divine element that can heal, better and purify humankind.
Coltrane expressed his belief that beauty could improve, save, and/or unite the world numerous times. He noted in one interview, he wanted “to produce beautiful music, music that does things to people that they need. Music that will uplift and make them happy.”[29] In a later interview, he noted: “It’s more than beauty that I feel in music—that I think musicians feel in music. What we know we feel we’d like to convey to the listener. … But, overall, I think the main thing a musician would like to do is give a picture to the listener of the many wonderful things he knows of and senses in the universe. That’s what music is to me—it’s just another way of saying this is a big, beautiful universe we live in, that’s been given to us, and here’s an example of just how magnificent and encompassing it is. That’s what I would like to do.” [30] In another he expressed again his desire to uplift people by way of music: “To inspire them to realize more and more of their capabilities for living meaningful lives. Because there certainly is meaning in life. … There is never any end. There are always new sounds to imagine, new feelings to get at. And always, there is the need to keep purifying these feelings and sounds so that we can really see what we’ve discovered in its pure state. So that we can see more and more clearly what we are. In that way, we can give to those who listen the essence, the best of what we are. But to do that at each stage, we have to keep on cleaning the mirror.”[31]
And just as Russian thinkers have seen unity between good, beauty, and the truth, we find them united in Coltrane’s philosophical proclamations. A year before his untimely death, Coltrane noted: “I want to be a force for real good. I know that there are bad forces. You know, I know there are forces out here that bring suffering to others and misery to the world, but I want to be the opposite force. I want to be a force that is truly for good.”[32] And early on, even before his spiritual reawakening, he talked of his own developing interest in philosophy and his and other jazz musicians’ search for the truth: “I think the majority of musicians are interested in truth…because a thing, a musical thing is a truth. If you play and make a statement, a musical statement, and it’s a valid statement, that’s a truth right there in itself…, and all the musicians are striving to get as near perfection as they can get. That’s truth there, you know. So in order to play those kind of things, to play truth, you’ve got to live with as much truth as you possibly can, you know.”[33] Later, in 1965, he noted that he would “continue to look for truth in music as I see it, and I’ll draw on all the sources of music I can, all the areas of music, all the things there are in the world around us to inspire me.”[34] Playing music is devoted to creating beauty as well as well as truth in support of the ‘force for good,’ so Good, Beauty, and Truth are united in Coltrane as they are in Russian intellectual, especially religious and religious-philosophical discourse.
One of many examples from Russian discourse is found in God-seeker, Father Pavel Florenskii, who emphasized the “Light of the Truth” as evidence of the divine in various miracles. He devoted an entire chapter or ‘Letter’ to this subject in his groundbreaking philosophical-theological work The Pillar and the Ground of Truth (Stolp i utverzhdenie Istiny).[35] The light of truth is like Coltrane’s Truth and Beauty, shining a light into men’s souls to bring good. But Coltrane’s search for Good, Beauty, and Truth comprise just one of many links between Russian thinkers and Coltrane. A hint can be gleaned from Coltrane’s reference noted above to ‘all the sources of music, all the areas of music, all the things there are in the world around us.’
Coltrane and the Russian God-Seekers
Coltrane’s search for truth and beauty quickly evolved into a search for God, various forms of unity, and transcendence of various limits both in music, life, and existence. In this, he had much in common with the late Imperial Russian Silver Age’s and Russian Religious Renaissance’s religious-philosophical ‘God-seekers.’ Perhaps Russia’s greatest thinker, Nikolai Berdyaev, emphasized the penchant for utopian transcendence or ‘God-seeking’ among the Russian educated classes or ‘intelligentsia’, which he saw not just as prevalent in religious circles but also as one of the drivers of Russia’s revolutionaries in the late Imperial era.[36]
The God-seeking movement, which encompassed not just many of the religious figures and philosophers but also spread across various trends in poetry, prose, painting, and music and most notably in the Symbolist movement, prominent particularly in Russian poetry at the time. God-seeking was steeped in religiosity, spiritualism, mysticism, the imminence of the divine world, and the aspiration to tselostnost’, wholeness or unity in Russian, between the divine and material, in humankind, and in social and even political life (see below).
Russian religious thought was re-invigorated with new energy in the directions of theology and religious philosophy and mysticism by the God-seekers’ (Vladimir Solovev, Pavel Florenskii, Sergei Bulgakov, among others) and in philosophy by the ‘intuitivists’, most notably Nikolai Losskii and Semyon Frank. The ideas regarding ‘all-unity’ (vseedinstvo) put forward in the religio-philosophical work of Solovev, the ‘father’ of the God-seeking trend, refashioned and even reified the ideas of Heaven-earth, God-humankind, spirit-matter integrality in 19th century Russian discourse, while promoting tselostnost’ for humankind, social organization, and national political life. Theosophists such as Yelena Blavatskaya, traditionalist theologians such as Georgii Florovskii and Georgii Fedotov, and liberal Christians like Fyodor Stepun and Pyotr Struve also issued monist, universalist, communalist, and national solidarist forms of tselostnost’. Symbolism in poetry and prose – most notably, Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, Zinaida Gippius, Andrei Bely and Aleksandr Blok – displayed much God-seeking. Even Russia’s perhaps greatest thinker, Nikolai Berdyaev, could be considered to have been a part of this movement, if on its margins. An advancing Russian scientific tradition mixed with these mystical theologies and idealist philosophies to produce a distinctive Russian cosmism in Nikolai Fyodorov, who also articulated tselostnost’ in several forms. His universalist project envisioned uniting mankind in projects to master and deploy nature for mankind’s benefit and to overcome death in an immortalist utopia, presaging today’s transhumanist movement. Earlier, Russia’s greatest writers from Alexander Pushkin and Nikolai Gogol’ to Lev Tolstoy and most of all Dostoevskii, as well as composers such as Alexander Scriabin articulated in poetry, prose, and music a longing for, or faith in monism, universalism, communalism, wholenes and solidarism with a Russian face.
A signature figure of the trend might be considered to be the genius priest, Father Pavel Florenskii (1882-1937). Florenskii, perhaps more than Russia’s 18th century scientist Mikhail Lomonosov deserves the moniker—Russia’s Leonardo da Vinci. Also, called the ‘Theologian of the Silver Age,’ Florenskii was the author of groundbreaking theological-philosophical works, a symbolist poet of Russia’s Silver Age, a professor a Moscow Theological Academy, an astronomist, a mathematician, a physicist, an electrical engineer, author of a history of art, a musician, an inventor, and multilingual (Latin, ancient Greek, a majority of the European languages, and languages of the Caucasus, Iran, and India). Florenskii circulated in many of the mystic religious and artistic circles that made the Silver Age: the God-seekers, the Religious Philosophical Society, the Moscow Mathematical Philosophical Society, the Christian Brotherhood for Struggle, the journal Balans (The Balance), the Symbolists, Mir Isskustva, and the Circle of Seekers of Christian Knowledge.
Florenskii’s theology reflected a complex, nuanced monism and cosmological integrality. Vseedinstvo or tselostnost’ was everywhere he looked, held together by God’s Love. The “diversity of the universe, enclosed in unity, indicates a united, free, creative Will.” [37] The source of Truth is unity: “If there is Truth, then it is real rationality and rational reality; it is finite infinity and infinite finiteness, or, – to put it mathematically, – actual infinity; infinite, conceivable as an integral Unity, as a single, complete Subject in itself.”[38] For Florenskii, Truth (Istina) was action serving God or others, leads to unity, and sin and the absence of truth lead to disunity.[39] Unity could be found only in Love and divine salvation, not reason: “True love is the renunciation of reason.”[40] Except for Florenskii’s focus on defining the separation between Heaven and Earth, his Christian metaphysics and epistomology are imbued with monist tselostnost’. This is nowhere more evident than in his landmark theological and philosophical study Stolp i utverzhdenie Istiny (The Pillar and Ground of Truth). For Florenskii and for much of Russian and Eastern religion and philosophy, from which Coltrane also learned, “a basic and characteristic proposition” is that cognition is a two-way and all-integrating act.[41] Florenskii regarded the perception or representation, symbol, even the name of an object or entity to be that object or entity in different form, a view he derived from Orthodoxy’s belief about icons.[42] The perception of objects therefore became direct intuition or “direct contemplation of living reality as it is in itself.”[43] This reminds one of Coltrane’s view of the role of music reflecting all that is or ‘is happening.’ Coltrane would have had much to talk and agree about with Florenskii, who is being put forward for canonization by the ROC, having been executed by the Bolsheviks in 1937 for his faith.
Coltrane the ‘God-Seeker’
Today, many Russian philosophers and other Russian thinkers, again steeped in pre-Soviet thought again after the Marxist experiment, must see or feel in Coltrane something very similar to aspects of Russia’s 19th century God-seekers. Thus, Coltrane’s personal qualities resonate well with Russian religious-philosophical and artistic sensibilities in general as well as with the God-seeking trend diffused throughout much of Russian intellectual, artistic, and spiritual discourse. At the least, his life and music unconsciously resonate with the reflection of Russian religious mystics like many of the God-seekers in this greatest of American musicians and, indeed, men. Auskern wrote that like the African Orthodox Church in California that his music had inspired, Coltrane “strived through the universal language of music to heal the body and soul and bring them into harmony with God.”[44]
In an interview during his 1966 tour of Japan, Coltrane himself said: “I want to be a saint.”[45]Despite the laughing, including Coltrane’s own, that greeted this assertion, one must take him seriously in the sense that he might have understood it at the time as how a saint or Russian monk might live: with humility, modesty, kindness, and devotion to God. One can hear all these qualities in his interviews and his rare writings as well as in the testimonies of those who knew him well. His sensibility and lifestyle of seemingly ceaseless practicing, playing, composing, and thinking music is reminiscent of monastic life in constant prayer and labor in service of God. Humility is a cornerstone of proper living in Russian Orthodox monasteries and of the very Orthodox Dostoevskii’s writing. Perhaps the world’s greatest Coltrane expert, Lewis Porter, argues against taking Coltrane’s expressed desire to be a saint, reasoning that it is precisely Coltrane’s humility that precludes the possibility that the great saxophonist could take himself that seriously: “That would be way out of character. … Coltrane was a truly humble person. Most people know that one ‘should’ say humble things, but he really was humble, and he always spoke frankly of what he saw as his shortcomings.”[46]
Those who knew Coltrane from a closer relationship with him attest to the same. In addition to Elvin Jones’ seriously considering Coltrane to have been “an angel,” he noted that he “never saw him do anything bad to anyone.” [47] Coltrane’s first music teacher, Isadore Granoff, apparently of Russian origins, saw in her young student a boy, who was a “humble fellow” and “wouldn’t go out of his way to show off his talent.”[48] Alice Coltrane, who was with John when he died, spoke of “a profound inner, kind of ground that he always appeared to be in.”[49] Jazz writer Barbara Gardner noted Coltrane’s “unembarrassed humility” and “honest love” in his relation to music.[50] Jazz observer Michael Hennessey saw in Coltrane “great inner peace and serenity.”[51]Others noted a monk-like asceticism: the “total self-denial this exceptional being communicates.”[52]
Besides being a model of humility, Coltrane preached the need for humility to his listeners. In a 1964 letter to some he said about his spiritual awakening: “I humbly asked (God) to be given the means and privilege to make others happy through music.”[53] Coltrane wrote in 1964 in a letter to his listeners, telling of a “humble prayer to God.” In his liner notes to A Love Supreme, he called the work a “humble offering” in thankfulness to God.[54] To understand something, he said in his last years, one must “go humbly to it.” [55]
It seems quite likely that it is this Russian aspiration to seeking God, unity, truth, some transcendental reality (e.g., utopia), experience, existence or being that makes Coltrane so attractive to segments of the culture beyond the small Russian jazz community. The pairing of Christian religiosity and mystical spirituality brings Coltrane and intelligent Russian thinkers together.
Auskern described Coltrane essentially as a God-seeker: “John Coltrane is everything. This is openness to one’s listeners and to one’s colleagues, these are new paths in jazz, this is both reason andfeeling, but besides this it is a constant, albeit uneven rise, creative and human, this, unlike [saxophonist Charlie] Parker, is a victory over the evil within oneself, constant spiritual and creative self-improvement. And one more thing: Coltrane’s music (to clarify: mature Coltrane) is no longer just a conversation with the listener and not only high art, it’s not just a story about your feelings, but an appealto God. With his music, John Coltrane speaks to God about his love for people. And his self-expression,unlike Parker’s, is a search for contact with higher realms, a search for answers to the questions that tormented him. And in this sense, some of Coltrane’s works, most notably the famous ‘A LoveSupreme’, are no less spiritual music than the music of Bach, Purcell or Bortnyansky.”[56] Auskern might have added liturgical or other religious music, Russian and otherwise.
Indeed, in a 1966 interview, Coltrane acknowledged: “My goal is to live the truly religious life and express it in my music. … My music is the spiritual expression of what I am—my faith, my knowledge, my being.”[57] In a 1962 Down Beat interview he averred that music is “a reflection of the universe.” [58] Coltrane also stated that he wanted to “to show people the divine in a musical language that transcends words. I want to talk to their souls.”[59]
Coltrane’s God-seeking is perhaps most evident in a poem or “Psalm” he wrote for the liner notes to his revolutionary, seminal, and transcendent magnum opus ‘A Love Supreme’ (1965). In his Psalm, Coltrane directly calls upon us to seek God: “Keep your eye on God.” … “Seek Him everyday. In all ways seek God everyday.”[60] His liner notes in the same album, following a salutation, begin: “Let us pursue Him in the righteous path. Yes, it is true, ‘seek and ye shall find’.” [61]
As Alice Coltrane noted, ‘John’s idea’ was that playing music was proper only in pursuit and praise of God. The call in Coltrane’s Psalm “All is God” along with the aforementioned unity of beauty, truth, and good reflect another element present in both the Russian intellectual and religious traditions as well as Coltrane’s religious and spiritual yearnings and rooted in Christianity: the aspiration to or belief in ‘integrality’ or wholeness— tselostnost’ in Russian.
FOOTNOTES
[1] www.jerryjazzmusician.com/mccoy-tyner-talks-about-john-coltrane-and-the-recording-of-a-love-supreme/ and www.jerryjazzmusician.com/conversations-with-gary-giddins-on-john-coltrane/.
[2] www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJVYRcJGpMU.
[3] Ashley Kahn, The House That Trane Built: The Story of Impulse Records (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), p. 187.
[4] Chris DeVito, ed. Coltrane on Coltrane: The Coltrane Interviews (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2010), p. 171.
[5] www.nytimes.com/2021/12/03/t-magazine/john-coltrane-church.html and www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAgJ-igwuSQ.
[6] www.nytimes.com/2021/12/03/t-magazine/john-coltrane-church.html.
[7] www.dailymotion.com/video/xes2qq.
[8] DeVito, ed. Coltrane on Coltrane, p. 61.
[10] www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0vzRW3omJE&list=RDt0vzRW3omJE&start_radio=1&t=228s.
[11] https://magisteria.ru/jazz-history/john-coltrane-in-search-of-higher-love-high-priest-of-jazz-avant-garde?ysclid=meyf41wllc145974321; for a similar example, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDwP8Te4uSw.
[12] www.jazzacademy.ru/_info/541576.
[13] Leonid Aushkern, “Bog, Lyubov’, Muzika” (God, Love, and Music), Jazz-Kvadrat, Nos. 3-4, 2000, https://jazzquad.ru/index.pl?act=PRODUCT&id=55.
[14] https://vladimirdar.livejournal.com/341705.html?ysclid=mf5sqlr46u29412305.
[15] https://jazzpeople.ru/jazz-in-faces/svyatoy-saksofonist-dzhon-koltreyn/?ysclid=meyf4n6h7j773579662.
[17] DeVito, ed. Coltrane on Coltrane, p. 225.
[18] V. V. Dudin, “’Iz slavy v slavu’: Esteticheskaya stoeriologiya F. M. Dostoevskogo (na materiale Romanov ‘Prestuplenie i nakazanie’ i ‘Besy’,” in N. K. Syundyukov, ed. Edinstvo dobra, istiny i krasoty v russkoi religio-filosofskoi traditsii (Saint Petersburg: RKhGA, 2023), pp. 78-88, at p. 85).
[19] The Psalm’s text can be found on the A Love Supreme album jacket and here: https://toutelaculture.com/musique/a-love-supreme-john-coltrane-et-la-religion/. From here on cited as: Coltrane, ‘Psalm’.
[20] James H. Billington, The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture(New York: Vintage Books, 1970), p. 9.
[21] Billington, The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture, p. 38.
[22] Billington, The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture, p. 8.
[23] Billington, The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture, p. 39.
[24] Syundyukov, Edinstvo dobra, istiny i krasoty v russkoi religio-filosofskoi traditsii.
[25] A. V. Malyshev, “Bogoslovie krasoty Prp. Iosifa Volotskogo kak katafaticheskoe bogoslovie: K postanovke problemy,” in Syundyukov, Edinstvo dobra, istiny i krasoty v russkoi religio-filosofskoi traditsii), pp. 89-101.
[26] Solovev, Chtenie o Bogochelovechestve in Solovev and Radlov, Sobranie sochineniiVladimira Sergeevicha Solov’eva, Tom III, p. 110.
[27] Pavel Florenskii, Stolp i utverzhdenie Istiny: Opyta pravoslavnoi teoditsiei v dvadtsati pis’makh (The Pillar and Ground of Truth) (Moscow: Put’, 1914), p. 56.
[28] DeVito, ed. Coltrane on Coltrane, p. 287.
[29] DeVito, ed. Coltrane on Coltrane: The Coltrane Interviews, p. 118.
[30] DeVito, ed. Coltrane on Coltrane: The Coltrane Interviews, p. 152.
[31] DeVito, ed., Coltrane on Coltrane, pp. 263-4.
[32] De Vito, ed., Coltrane on Coltrane, p. 311.
[33] De Vito, ed., Coltrane on Coltrane, pp. 14-15.
[34] De Vito, ed., Coltrane on Coltrane, p. 336.
[35] Florenskii, Stolp i utverzhdenie Istiny, pp. 53-79.
[36] Nikolai Berdyaev, “Russkie bogoiskateli,” in Nikolai Berdyaev, Dukhovnyi krizis intelligentsia: Stati po obshchestvennoi i religioznoi psikhologii, 1907-1909 (Saint Petersburg, 1910), http://www.odinblago.ru/berd_rus_bogoisk.
[37] Florenskii, Stolp i utverzhdenie Istiny, p. 281.
[38] Florenskii, Stolp i utverzhdenie Istiny, p. 43.
[39] Florenskii, Stolp i utverzhdenie Istiny, p. 159.
[40] Florenskii, Stolp i utverzhdenie Istiny, p. 168.
[41] “Cognition is the real emergence of the knower from himself or, what is the same, – the real entry of that which is cognized (known) into that which cognizes (the knower), – the real union of the cognizer and the cognized.” Florenskii, Stolp i utverzhdenie Istiny, p. 73.
[42] Florenskii, Stolp i utverzhdenie Istiny, pp. 74-5 and 324-6.
[43] Florenskii, Stolp i utverzhdenie Istiny, p. 75.
[44] Auskern, “Bog, Lyubov’, Muzika.”
[45] De Vito, ed., Coltrane on Coltrane, pp. 269-70 and www.wildmusic-jazz.com/jcr_interviews.htm#jcr660709saint.
[46]https://lewisporter.substack.com/p/coltrane-did-not-want-to-be-a-saint.
[47] www.dailymotion.com/video/xes2qq.
[48] De Vito, ed., Coltrane on Coltrane, p. 374.
[49] www.detroitartistsworkshop.com/alice-coltrane-enduring-love/.
[50] De Vito, ed., Coltrane on Coltrane, p. 146.
[51] De Vito, ed., Coltrane on Coltrane, p. 237.
[52] De Vito, ed., Coltrane on Coltrane, p. 242.
[53] www.johncoltrane.com/biography.
[54] De Vito, ed., Coltrane on Coltrane, p. 226.
[55] De Vito, ed., Coltrane on Coltrane, p. 314.
[56] Leonid Auskern, “Bog, Lyubov’, Muzika,” (God, Love, Music), Jazz-Kvadrat, Nos. 3-4, 2000, https://jazzquad.ru/index.pl?act=PRODUCT&id=55.
[57] De Vito, ed., Coltrane on Coltrane, p. 337.
[58] De Vito, ed., Coltrane on Coltrane, p. 155.
[59] https://toutelaculture.com/musique/a-love-supreme-john-coltrane-et-la-religion/.
[60] De Vito, ed., Coltrane on Coltrane, pp. 227-8. See also https://toutelaculture.com/musique/a-love-supreme-john-coltrane-et-la-religion/ or https://www.lionsroar.com/awakening-with-a-love-supreme/.
[61] De Vito, ed., Coltrane on Coltrane, p. 225.
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About the Author –
Gordon M. Hahn, Ph.D., is an Expert Analyst at Corr Analytics, www.canalyt.com. Websites: Russian and Eurasian Politics, gordonhahn.com and gordonhahn.academia.edu
Dr. Hahn is the author of the new book: Russian Tselostnost’: Wholeness in Russian Thought, Culture, History, and Politics (Europe Books, 2022). He has authored five previous, well-received books: The Russian Dilemma: Security, Vigilance, and Relations with the West from Ivan III to Putin (McFarland, 2021); Ukraine Over the Edge: Russia, the West, and the “New Cold War” (McFarland, 2018); The Caucasus Emirate Mujahedin: Global Jihadism in Russia’s North Caucasus and Beyond (McFarland, 2014), Russia’s Islamic Threat (Yale University Press, 2007), and Russia’s Revolution From Above: Reform, Transition and Revolution in the Fall of the Soviet Communist Regime, 1985-2000 (Transaction, 2002). He also has published numerous think tank reports, academic articles, analyses, and commentaries in both English and Russian language media.
Dr. Hahn taught at Boston, American, Stanford, San Jose State, and San Francisco State Universities and as a Fulbright Scholar at Saint Petersburg State University, Russia and was a senior associate and visiting fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Kennan Institute in Washington DC, the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and the Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies (CETIS), Akribis Group.