Wonder, Mindlessness and A Love Supreme
John Coltrane - A Love Supreme, Part IV - Psalm (Live In Seattle, 1965)
Dear friends,
Creation is the move from chaos to order that is often obscured by darkness. Like most things in this universe, we can’t see it happening. It’s like the communication between trees, the realization reached by the person next to us on the subway, or the perfect, disjointed unison of a Jazz quartet.
“I never have to tell them anything,” said John Coltrane of his three collaborators, McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones shortly after they completed one of the greatest Jazz albums in history, A Love Supreme. “They always know what they’re supposed to do and are constantly inspired. I know that I can always count on them. And that gives me confidence. There is a perfect musical communion between us that doesn’t take human values into account.”
So goes creation. No human values. A logic far deeper is at play when, for example a seed sprouts in the earth.
“Even in the case of A Love Supreme," continued Coltrane, "without discussion, I don’t go any further than to set the layout of the work.“
Not to compare a professed servant of God to God, but it seems that Coltrane followed in the image of the divine, as described in Genesis:
“And the earth was formless and empty
and darkness was over the surface of the deep,
and the spirit of God was hovering over the waters.
And God said ‘Let there be light,’
and there was light.”
The holy phrase תהו ובהו, translated above as “formless and empty” is worth pausing over in this musical context. While the phrase is not exactly logical, more linguistic or poetic, possibly even onomatopoeiac, תהו comes from תהה meaning to wonder, and בהו from בהה meaning to mindlessly stare, or zone out. The chaotic raw materials of creation are mindfulness and mindlessness. These are often the two elements that lead to something new. The wondering, a type of thinking that implies curiosity and inquiry is the active element. And the blank staring is a type of passive emptiness without which, in my own experience new ideas don’t come. We need both the search and the rest, the waking and the sleep for newness to appear.
Consider this statement from Coltrane: “For me, when I go from a calm moment to extreme tension, it’s only the emotional factors that drive me, to the exclusion of all musical considerations.”
What rises in him while he’s blowing his horn is divorced from the musical structure of the piece. The moment of creation, as we might call it, when a musician is truly connected, and allows their instrument to be a vessel of the soul, is a moment of chaos and freedom, which can only come about within the structure held by the other members of the ensemble. While he’s in תהו, wonder, the rest of the quartet is in בהו, mindlessness. When they hold the wonder - he can inhabit the emptiness.
With the frame of melody, chord progression and improvisation, Jazz combines structure and freedom, intention and emptiness, prayer and meditation. This is especially true of the Spiritual Jazz out of which was born A Love Supreme, a blast of inspiration shot into the world in 1964, from a musician who called music his “way of giving Thanks to God.”
Tonight we will be gathering at the National Jazz Museum in Harlem to experience the overlap between music and faith that drove Coltrane, through the Jewish Jazz of our musical guru Frank London, and his ensemble. I hope to see you there.
We see the chaos in the world. We tremble at its empty formlessness. What we cannot yet see is the new light being created out of it. Perhaps we will catch a glimpse of it this evening.
There is a structure to the universe. Some have heard it called a love supreme.
Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Misha