Ellington & Coltrane

Duke Ellington’s music also had, from early on, a deep element of the spiritual, of the relationship between God and Ellington and between God and the African-American in particular. Of course, Ellington eventually chose, starting in 1965, to express his spiritual and religious feelings directly in his series of concerts of sacred music. "The message Duke wanted to deliver consisted of his own beliefs about God, which were rooted in Christian doctrine but idiosyncratically selected and interpreted," writes Rev. Janna Tull Steed in her book Duke Ellington: A Spiritual Biography. "The medium was his music, often paired with lyrics of his own making, and enhanced by dance and narrative." These concerts were performed hundreds of times in the last ten years of Ellington’s life. They were not merely a diversionary project for him; he came to see them as central to his legacy. In addition, Ellington’s sacred music, while sometimes disparaged by jazz listeners and critics, is not just music written to convey a spiritual or religious agenda, it is, first and foremost, good music in itself. Listening to the four tracks included on the 3CD Highlights from the Duke Ellington Centennial Edition from the sacred concerts, one is struck by the way that the music is so purely Ellington and so deeply rooted in African American musical traditions yet so universal. “Come Sunday” and “A Christmas Surprise,” both hymns from the First Concert of Sacred Music performed on December 26, 1965 are stately and magnificent, and both sound like spirituals as old as the waters of the Mississippi River. Delivered, respectively, by Ester Marrow and Lena Horne, they do not fail to uplift. Ellington’s piano solo from the same concert, “New World A-Comin’” manages to combine elements of jazz piano such as stride and the piano fantasias of James P. Johnson and Willie “The Lion” Smith with a blues and gospel underpinning. “Ain’t Nobody Nowhere Nothin’ Without God” from the Third Sacred Concert, performed in Westminster Abbey in 1973 is a straight ahead swinging, gospel inflected blues that emphasizes the ecstatic nature of the spiritual life.

In 1965, the same time that Ellington’s sacred music was first being performed, John Coltrane reached what some consider to be the pinnacle of his career with the recording of A Love Supreme, a statement that is every bit as much spiritual as musical. To this day the album is a touchstone, a doorway into both the world of modern jazz and to personal spirituality. For Coltrane that search meant fusing his Christian American roots and upbringing with elements, both musical and spiritual, from Asia and the Indian subcontinent as well as from Africa. Using the modal jazz pioneered by Miles Davis as a springboard, its few chord changes echoing the use of drone in Indian music, Coltrane began to incorporate elements of Indian and African music, as well as instruments like the oud and African drums, in his work. Following this path, Coltrane’s music continually became freer and more like meditation. It could be disconcerting for those who heard the saxophonist live to hear him subject relatively simple thematic material through a variety of rhythmic and harmonic variations for long periods of time, but it really was an attempt to allow both the listener and the musicians to quiet their thoughts by concentrating on the music’s ebb and flow, as those in meditation concentrate on their breaths.

In the few short years that fell between the release of A Love Supreme and the end of Coltrane’s life he recorded a number of albums with a variety of musicians who were in a similarly searching mode. Saxophonist Pharoah Sanders played on such later Coltrane recordings as Acsension and Meditations, and continued to play music that he described as “cosmic” after Coltrane’s death. He was considered by many to be Coltrane’s heir, but his music is very often less dense and makes more use of space than Trane’s. His 1969 album Karma delivers a sense of contentedness that is rarely heard in Coltrane’s late music, with the thirty-minute “Creator Has a Master Plan” offering the mantra “The Creator has a master plan/Peace and happiness for every man.” Sanders followed this up with the similar vibe on Jewels of Thought. Though the influence of Coltrane is still apparent in Sanders’ sound and technique, he has developed his own complete style and vocabulary. He has, however, continued to address social and spiritual elements in his music, even though the sound palette he uses is generally more subdued than his earlier work, a fact that have led many in the jazz community to denigrate the later work.

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