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Jazz and the Ambiguity of Influence, Pt. 19: On the Spiritual in Jazz

Spirituality is a vague, catch-all word, but like the Justice said about another phenomenon, you tend to know it when you see it. And so it was, when I was watching a jazz documentary -- I think it might have been "A Great Day in Harlem" -- and Dizzy Gillespie enters a room where his fellow jazz artists are gathered, and he was wearing a dashiki with a small bag of amulets around his neck, and the vibe of warmth and humor with which he greeted everyone just struck me as signifying so much about what goes into jazz beyond the music itself. We've been through so much together, it said. And we lived to tell about it! A band of brothers, I guess. But what was the battle? And what makes it spiritual?

Spirituality in jazz is a lot of things, some explicit and others implicit. Let's start with the implicit part, which is the part I think I was alluding to above. What I'm saying is that if even if we're just considering good time jazz of the swing and groove variety there are elements of the human spirit in play. It's music that's good for the soul. Or, as John Trudell put it, there's something good in feeling good. Especially, we might add, when your body is included. And if we say that increased body connection is a contribution, a gift even, from the cultures that evolved among the Africans brought here not by choice we are not damning with faint praise, since, as the thinking might go, the body is somehow lower than the mind. No. The mind is not somehow more elevated. The mind is in the body and the body is in the mind. And further, the spirit is in the body, and the spirit is in the mind, and the best situation is when these elements are melded. 

The meaning and etymology of the word jazz is perennially debated. One version connects jazz with West African words relating to semen and sexual ejaculation. This take frequently is rejected because of its uncouth connotations, which are felt to lower or debase the art form. Yet the hallmark of early New Orleans jazz was the ecstatic out choruses at the end of each song with all the instruments improvising together, which in person no doubt would take the room higher and higher. If you read news clips about the phenomenon from the time, the writers are always scandalized at what they perceive as the crass lack of inhibition exhibited during bouts of frenzied dancing. But seen another way, what we are describing is "the ecstatic," a time honored aspect of all the religions, from the Sufis to the Sanctified. 

So, there can be a great amount of joy in music, all of which can take on a ritual feel, and which I am contending here is a mode of spirituality. It is both mentally and physically vibrational, and can elevate our experience in mysterious ways, conjuring spirits and shifting consciousness in a manner far superior to the didactic modes of communication that dominate more pedestrian experience. Now, I'm not claiming secular musical spirituality just for jazz. There undoubtedly is a mode of spiritual joy manifested in the giant pop concerts such as a Taylor Swift show. But I am claiming jazz does something different. Pop music enables the realization of communal solidarity and the collective recapitulation of strong emotions associated with favorite numbers. Jazz does something more complex and esoteric, which brings joy of a kind that can't really be experienced on a mass scale. So something is lost and something is gained.

Loving complex things is like mountain climbing. When you get up there the air is fresher, the view is better, and there are way, way fewer people, which surely is alluring in a world overcrowded not just with human beings but also with idiotic or overly-reductive ideas. Thus, the world's greatest jazz club, the Village Vanguard, holds a mere 120 or so patrons. 

The spirituality of jazz manifests in two different ways, or, functions at two interrelated levels. The first is the phenomenon I alluded to at the top and which grows from jazz's status as a minority pursuit. Put simply, the jazz life is a hard life. Maybe it's less difficult now, with so much jazz associated with universities, but is still a road less traveled. One can still labor in obscurity, and one's motivation must be intrinsic, not extrinsic. You need to be doing it for your art and for yourself, and whatever acclaim or attention comes is pure gravy. Jazz isn't the only pursuit in which this is operative principle of course. Indeed anywhere this dynamic is found, spirituality is also found, for it reveals something deep about what it means to be human, what makes life worth living. 

My recent reading of the Dexter Gordon bio, Sophisticated Giant, really drove home the point for me. Dexter came up in the Los Angeles music scene of the immediate postwar years. Revered in the jazz community there (which was really happenin' on legendary Central Avenue), like all mid-century jazz musicians Dexter nevertheless had to struggle to be accorded the respect that is the due of the serious artist in societies that are at all sane, which, um, was not the United States of the time. The obstacles were two-fold. The first was rank philistinism. Jazz musician were treated as just part of "the help," both in terms of pay and status. Frankly, it was insulting, but jazzers, like all artists, were and are motivated by love and community, and so they carry on. The other, of course, was racism. Sure, the popular musicians like Armstrong and Ellington crossed over to popular society, but it was insufficiently understood that jazz, a fundamentally black mode of expression, was high art that is not merely equal to any other art form in the US but that it is the greatest art form this country has produced. To musically communicate the fullness of one's humanity in an environment that explicitly denies it, and to express it with an open heart in an aesthetically complex manner, as the great jazzers did: such is the hero's journey and a triumph of the human spirit.

Now let us turn to the second mode, and look at how spirituality manifests in the music itself. Anything to do with "spirituality" is slippery, so I thought I would attempt to categorize the question and present a taxonomy that hints at how the phenomenon is expressed and experienced in performance.

1. Incantation and Invocation
This strand of jazz performance is what is often meant by the phrase "spiritual jazz." Think Albert Ayler. Think Pharaoh Sanders. The skronking, overtone-rich squalling of instruments, often tenor sax, but not only, moves us past strict tonality and the normal understanding of music into a sonic zone or energy field in which the spirits of the ancestors or other modes of consciousness can express themselves. I had direct experience of this at the VisionFest at Brooklyn's Roulette venue many years ago and wrote about in a piece called "Positive Knowledge, Henry Grimes, and the River." Voices emerged from the cacophony, insisting on their cohabitation of our space, the timelessness of their essence.

2. Mantra meditation 
The other main strand of what people normally mean when they say "spiritual jazz" is based on droning and chanting musical figures, emulating the role of mantras in meditation. John Coltrane made this explicit in A Love Supreme, where the first movement opens with a bass figure based on the syllables of the title phrase, and ends with literal chanting of it. In fact, the whole album serves as a thematic and spiritual elaboration of this chant. In mantra meditation, as you repeat the phrase in your head, it often starts changing shape and also feels like it has moved a foot or two above your head. That's what Coltrane's improvisations feel like to me.

3. Residing in irresolution
Closely related to the mantra mode, is the mode of improvisation that keeps stretching us out, and then out further. The improvisation unspools past any expected point of resolution, expanding consciousness in the process. To grasp after resolution is among our most innate instincts yet also a prime source of our dissatisfaction. To stay there for the length of a solo or group improvisation is to reside in a rare, sacred place. This is the mode defined Ornette Coleman's take on spiritual jazz. This is also Jerry Garcia's aesthetic strategy. Over and over he refused to "give them what they want" in any simplistic sense. Of course, the Deadheads were willing and eager to go along for the ride. Fun fact: Jerry performed on Ornette's masterpiece of 1988, Virgin Beauty.

4. Joyous epiphany 
Sometimes the path of irresolution does arrive at a place where all the tensions seem to find some specific identity and thus harness a higher level of power. I wrote about this in an earlier installment of this series called "Getting to That Place," which centers on a solo I heard Jason Moran create while performing with the Charles Lloyd Quartet. Deadheads know when the band has gotten to that sacred pace as well. More common, or perhaps more fundamental, in jazz is the state of joyous epiphany when the whole band gets to swinging so hard the room seems to levitate. This would be one of the strongest inheritances from gospel music. When the gospel band gets to that place they call it the presence of the Holy Spirit. Is it the same spirit that visits the jazz nightclub?  

5. Mind-body merger
In this life we primarily reside in duality. It's the nature of the beast. When Adam and Eve screwed up they were expelled from the place of nonduality and became conscious of good and evil and sexual difference. So a big part of spirituality is to, whenever possible, manifest or perceive nonduality in the here and now, thus temporarily revisiting the Garden. (People who identify as nonbinary intuit this, though I wonder if this is something that can be systematized or whether one can reside perpetually in this state.) We also need to be on the lookout for false dichotomies, chief among them the mind-body duality. A big achievement of jazz is its unparalleled ability to make the mind-body connection explicit. This is a hallmark of Latin jazz. Last year I experienced this at a concert in South Beach by the legendary percussionist Sammy Figueroa. The rhythms simultaneously were immensely complicated while at the same time generating a groove that hit the body hard.

6. Balancing the individual and the collective 
Wynton Marsalis is big on this point, emphasizing that jazz's ability to simultaneously grant full expression to both the individual and the group presents a microcosm of how democracy can thrive as a humanist or spiritual endeavor. It's right there in the Preamble to the Declaration: to "promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty." The jazz soloist makes an individual statement that simultaneously shapes the direction of the rhythm section and is influenced by it. It's a metaphysical feat taking place in real time. You can't notate it. Its like a blur of hyperlinks turned inside out and then outside in. So it's like life itself, the complexity of which defies our efforts to define or classify it, though we, or should I say "I," feel compelled to try. Certainly the experience of both listening to and playing jazz reconstitutes your molecules in novel ways.

7. Non-personal manifestation 
Ultimately we sense that something is happening in the room during a jazz performance that transcends the limitations or boundaries of what each individual is able to perceive or generate on the own. Even just sitting in the audience prior to a performance staring at the instruments arrayed on the stage I sense that something bigger than ourselves is about to take place. It's a magical zone of anticipatory being. And I wonder if the intentionality of all involved is what really creates that zone, that space. Have you ever noticed that if you are at a performance and someone near you is just not into it, the music somehow sounds worse to you? There is non-personal manifestation of attitude and vibration that fills the air, and our expectations are a big part of it.    

Ultimately, I think that each jazz musician is on a spiritual mission. The heroic expression of individuality in a world that seems to edge inexorably in the direction of mass conformity, even as we believe we are each becoming more unique, is a vitally precious thing. To build sound worlds without tearing anything down except our limiting preconceptions, well, that's something I'm continually grateful to experience.


 


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