What happens when an unstoppable force meets and immovable object? A John Coltrane solo, at the end of its possibilities. In July of 1966, Coltrane took his band to Japan, and the crowd was electric. Coltrane opened with a familiar “Afro Blue,†a Latin blues by Mongo SantamarÃa that he had adapted as a core piece of his musical repertoire. Known for his deep blues idiom, Coltrane gestured at the melody once through and then embarked on a remarkable, frustrating, stunning, and altogether finite solo.
At this point in his career, Coltrane’s style was expansive. Moving out from Love Supreme, his sound took on an increasing complexity—not only in the sheer quantity of notes that Coltrane was pushing through his horn, but also a new complexity of sound. He began to explore a more abrasive tone, with intense ruptures in his melodic lines given to upper register wails (listen to “One Down, One Up†from New Thing at Newport). His interest seemed to go two ways at once, toward simplicity and complexity. His song concepts, he toned down. His playing, he ramped up. But even here, he seems to ramp up in a very simple way, if you could say this. At this stage in his career, you still have Coltrane’s blistering lines. You still have an overwhelming crash of musical phrases into the same line. But altogether they’re given a different force, and maybe a singular direction. And that direction for Coltrane seems direction seems to lie outside the music. He’s yearning, you can feel, to get outside any one piece of music, and it no longer seems to be inside the piece of music that his creative energy is directed.
Take one of his hallmark pieces, “Giant Steps.†In this piece, Coltrane throws a ton at us. He runs through a circular group of chords, and leaves us feeling like we’re spiraling up and down, up and down, as we move elliptically through the song. Coltrane masterfully ties these chords together. When Coltrane plays this song, he’s adding a great deal into the lines to make the chords sing, but ultimately the direction of the solo is toward the music. He’s worried about connecting this Bmajor7 chord to this D dominant chord, and that chord to another. There’s a unity and a musicality to this piece, and the solo sounds like he’s just skipping along the top of the drums, piano, and bass. It’s a remarkable example of technique, musicality, and creativity.
If, right after “Giant Steps,†we listened to “Afro Blue†from Japan in 1966 we’d feel like something had really gone wrong, or that this was not the same music, or that we were lost. We don’t know what he’s aiming at anymore, and suddenly the backdrop of the song doesn’t seem to provide the same immediate context for what we can expect from the soloist. At one level, the music is simpler. Coltrane’s wife, Alice Coltrane, doesn’t play a circular set of chords on piano. She doesn’t really even play chords at all. At times she simply runs up and down the piano, outlining nothing more than a basic mood. The rhythm of the song rests on a kind of rustling sound made up of Rashied Ali’s shuffling drums and Pharaoh Sanders’ shuffling tambourine. A few minutes in, we might have even forgotten what the original tune sounded like.
But we can still detect that basic driving energy to Coltrane’s playing. It’s heading some-where. but you never get the sense that he arrives anywhere definitive. At about 10:31 minutes, we hear Coltrane completely trapped. It’s a shocking sound that Coltrane lets out. It’s a sound that is full of technique (listen for the ways that he blends all sorts of different notes and tones together), but mostly it’s a sound that is full of effort. It’s a sound of an immense struggle happening between Coltrane and his horn, a sound of yearning hitting an impasse. At this point in the performance, he sounds like a horse in a stall during a storm, or someone locked in a house frantically checking every door. He sounds stuffed and altogether hemmed in by his horn, with no intelligible sound to give to us but his yearning. That is, he seems to have come to the end of his road. Gone are the descending chromatic movements, the cascades. Gone are the wails, the soaring lines that lead right into another blues riff. There is just this sense of a voice yelling through a closed mouth.
What ought to strike us about this solo, I think, is not anything like a lack of creativity. Coltrane’s playing doesn’t have the same sudden distress of a musician who can’t tell what musical options are in front of them. You get the sense that Coltrane has really explored the end of music, and that’s what seems to be so remarkable about it the entire performance. While the piano moves up and down the same scales, and the bass rockets notes out into the room, and the drums rustle around, they’re all in a song together, even if the feeling we have is that they’re hacking their way through remote territory. But Coltrane—he has seemingly reached some the end of that territory. He’s hit the wall—not of creativity or technique—but of something more fundamentally human than that. With a wailing and yearning, there is nothing left in his sound but an anticipation of an elsewhere that is phenomenologically out of reach for him. You listen and just sense: he has “reached Z,â€[1] so to speak, and can’t jump the gulf to anywhere else.
But there’s a deeper sense, too, that what Coltrane has exposed is not just his own finitude in music, but has exposed us to our finitude too. Simply by Coltrane’s remarkable sound of yearning, we hear our own life of wants and desires given expression. But because they never really lead anywhere in his solo, we’re pressed with the fact that the human life simply does have its limits. My question, then when I hear him sound so trapped, is this: Does Christian theology have anything to say to that sense of being stuck where we are? Do we have any resources, in our tradition of reflection about our life in God, to resolve the tension between longing and the limits within which we express our longing? Can we get to the place that Coltrane is trying to go? Yes and no. I’ll start with the no.
We would be off course to interpret Coltrane’s yearning as problem that could be “solved†by Christian faith, a tension theology could simply resolve. The first temptation we ought to ward off would be a kind of well-meaning apologetics: in Coltrane we hear a spiritual searching that can come to an end in Christ. We might be tempted to read Coltrane’s “stuckness†as a kind symptom of a secular life whose desires never find their proper end because they aren’t properly directed toward God. In this sense, we would read the sound of Coltrane’s solo as a kind of spiritual allegory for the life that doesn’t yet know God, and so doesn’t know where to put all of its hopes and dreams. Without God, we might say, everything we chase after winds up in a dead-end.
But it’s difficult to make this argument about Coltrane. Plenty of writers have noted Coltrane’s theological mind at work in his music.[2] Simply looking at his album titles and track titles tells us that Coltrane has more than just saxophone on his mind. At about the same time Coltrane plays “Afro Blue†in Japan, he’s issuing “Compassion,†Ascension,†“Offering,†“To Be,†and even a very pointed “Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.†All these follow a massive theological suite, A Love Supreme, which ends in “Psalm.†So, the playing that Coltrane forces us to face in Japan isn’t by any means the kind of playing that we could call “secular,†or even non-Christian, for that matter. Coltrane’s playing is already taking up—in a highly abstract form—the fact of yearning within a life that is also situated in an awareness of God. His Christian heart is driving the kinds of sounds that he throws out into the world, and his solo at a basic level is a frank reminder that even as Christians, “we cannot get out of our skin,â€[3] as Rowan Williams says. He hits the wall, not as a failure, but as a basic fact of life.
Thus the more seductive argument would be to suggest that all of these wants will be resolved once we get where we’re going, that is, heaven or the Resurrection. The wall is temporary, and the Christian life is one which instructs us in certain types of longing that cannot be resolved yet.[4] A thought here would be like the desire for justice we have, and hold onto throughout our lives, hoping that when we are raised we will not want justice in the way we want it here. We will have found it. But Coltrane doesn’t let us off that easily either. It’s unclear if that’s exactly what Coltrane wants here—an escape—or if he is suggesting to us something more significant about human desire I suspect, however, that this overwhelming sense of unresolved desire is not all bad.
Meaning, when we listen to a desperate solo like this, we ought to sense that there is something deeply Christian about it, without needing it to find its resting place. There trapped in the horn is a want, and this want itself, even though trapped, is a positive portrait of the Christian life, which will never come to the end of its longing for God. There is a yearning for God in the Christian life that never really reaches its end, but which likewise is still a sign of God’s presence and not a sign of God’s absence. That this wanting does not reach its end is, in fact, a great blessing. So there’s a vision of the Christian life that knows itself frustratedly full of desire for God, with nothing to do with that yearning than to go on expressing it. And we’ve got every reason to believe that a yearning of that sort will go on even into eternity.
Second, I think there is a vision Coltrane pitches us in which our heart can fill up our lives so much that we are simply alive with the love of God. If Coltrane’s sound is his heart and his saxophone is his body, then Coltrane’s theological move here is to show us a body full of nothing other than desire for God. Augustine would have wanted us to know that this desire comes from God himself: “it is God the Holy Spirit who fires man to the love of God and his neighbor when he has been given to him.â€[5] Augustine even spoke of this act of God as the Spirit blowing through the pipes of the heart[6] Reading Coltrane this way, we have a great image of our spiritual life in this overfull solo.[7] For a few brief moments, nothing other than that love for God seems to come through Coltrane’s horn, a love which needs to go nowhere else. Here he even reveals an image of Spirit of God in us—not just there for our attention and devotion, but an active agent of love in the depth of our heart. I think this is what Coltrane knows in this solo—that there is a Christian life which is nothing other than love, and that this love can find no rest, and that this love, when God is present in us through the Holy Spirit, can fill up the whole of who we are, even if we can never come to the end of it.
[1] A train of thought from the ponderous character Mr. Ramsay in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse leads the man to assert that “If thought…like the alphabet is arranged in twenty-six letters all in order…He had reached Q…[But] Z is only reached by one man in a generation.†See, Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers, 1981), 33-34.
[2] Jamie Howison, God’s Mind in that Music (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2012).
[3] Rowan Williams, Christ on Trial: How the Gospel Unsettles Our Judgment (London: Fount, 200), 83.
[4] A musical parallel here would be the preacher-ly style of Billy Harper on an album like Trying to Make Heaven My Home.
[5] Saint Augustine, The Trinity, trans. Edmund Hill (Hyde Park: New City Press, 2015), 424.
[6] Saint Augustine, Homilies on the First Epistle of John, trans. Boniface Ramsey (Hyde Park: New City Press, 2008), Â Â Â 142.
[7] Newly emergent Immanuel Wilkins reads his own saxophone playing the same way. See this lovely interview on Jazz Times: https://jazztimes.com/features/profiles/immanuel-wilkins-the-7th-hand/.
The Rev. Garrett Ayers is a Guest Writer. He serves as Assistant Rector of St. John's Episcopal Church, Columbia, SC.
