There Stands the Glass

I recently attended a free, outdoor jazz concert at which solos were traded in a conventional post-bop style. The musicians were superb, and while I enjoyed their low-stakes performance, I’m mystified by the dominance of a format that seems exceedingly stale in 2022.

The unhealthy and unnecessary status quo is repeatedly denounced in Beyond a Love Supreme: John Coltrane and the Legacy of an Album, a 2013 study by Tony Whyton. The debate about what jazz is and what it should be rages 58 years after the release of A Love Supreme. The academic jargon employed by the author makes me want to gouge my eyes out, but his subject and the correspondingly fascinating ideas he explores are magnificent.

What is the true significance of the 1964 recording A Love Supreme? And what’s to be made of the subsequent albums Ascension, Interstellar Space and The Olatunji Concert? And why, in spite of the vital innovations documented on these late-career Coltrane works, does the jazz establishment continue to promote tiresome- and yes, boring- forms of the music?

Whyton addresses each of these questions thoroughly. My unfairly simplistic summation of his answers: most fans and scholars are uncomfortable with the notion(s) of God, black nationalism, experimental sound, complicated narratives and democratic approaches to art.

A pal loaned me his copy of Whyton’s 160-page book knowing I’d be triggered by the contents. As the tone of this screed suggests, the shameful dismissal of Coltrane’s post-A Love Supreme work makes me livid. Yet I’m eager to discuss one of the most esoteric of the book’s topics with my friend.

Did, as McCoy Tyner once suggested, God speak to us through Charlie Parker and John Coltrane? And did a divine power, as my friend insisted that night, reach out to us during a performance by the spiritual jazz practitioner Nduduzo Makhathini at the Blue Room two weeks ago? As Coltrane wrote in his liner notes for A Love Supreme, “all praise to God.”