The terror and the beauty of spiritual jazz

In the 'New Blue Sun' moment, it's worth looking back at the still-bracing extremity of what came before

Quick prologue:

Welcome to anyone reading!

I once had a fairly active blog; now, though I’m a bit late to this particular party, it seems prudent to launch a Substack as a home for any words I might feel compelled to put down that may fall outside the scope of my more traditional freelance work. I make no forecasts or promises re: the frequency of my engagement with this platform, and as of now, I plan to keep it fully free, but I hope you’ll follow along and see where it goes!

***

Earlier this week, I published a piece via NPR Music that reflected on André 3000’s New Blue Sun era, and the cultural currents that informed it. One theme I touched on there was what I called the spiritual-jazz-aissance, the ongoing cultural resurgence and well-deserved lionization of Alice Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders and the general zone of mid-’60s-through-mid-’70s sounds and approaches that they represent, of course populated by dozens of less-well-known but equally brilliant visionaries (including Billy Harper, Horace Tapscott and Phil Cohran, to name just a few). I’ve been going back to some of that music, and it made me think about how the process of canonization — or more specifically, the way a rich artistic movement can get shoehorned into a catchy buzzword — can have a sort of glossing-over effect, smoothing down the rougher, rawer edges.

I still have years’ worth of delving to do on this music, especially once you widen the frame to include, say, the Black Jazz catalog, the more obscure corners of the Strata-East universe and innumerable private-press gems, but even in casually revisiting some treasured classics in recent days, I was struck by something. And I realize this is no great news flash, but I think it’s worth reiterating during the New Blue Sun moment, when we’re sometimes seeing this area of music reduced, with all the best of intentions, to a kind of lifestyle accoutrement: Spiritual jazz is, at times, extremely gnarly shit.

If you haven’t in a while, cue up, as I recently did “Hum Allah Hum Allah Hum Allah,” the opening track to Pharoah’s Jewels of Thought, which I believe is the third installment of his supernova Impulse! run that stretched from ’66 to ’73. It would be hard to find a more emblematic example of so-called spiritual jazz: the bells, shakers and handclap percussion; the rock-solid, inviting-as-a-campfire Cecil McBee bass vamp (was McBee in some ways the unsung hero of this movement, given that he also played the iconic and indelible vamp from Alice Coltrane’s “Journey in Satchidananda”?), accompanied by Lonnie Liston Smith’s rolling chord progression; the loving melodic bear hug of Sanders’ opening solo; the uplifting Leon Thomas monologue (“We want you to join us this evening in this universal prayer, this universal prayer for peace, for every man / All you got to do is clap your hands: one, two, three; one, two, three…”), followed by a sung theme statement and yodel-accented riffing. This is the kind of musical passage you want to live in forever — cyclical, seemingly infinitely so, and pop-catchy, it goes through my head constantly. It is, as they say, a vibe, conforming to the general sense of this wing of music as a soothing balm, a kind of aural incense.

But there’s a bit of a dam-break moment around 10:30, when — after a swell of drums and cymbals from, I believe, Idris Muhammad, who’s credited on the track along with Roy Haynes, though it can be hard to make out two distinct drum parts in the mix — Sanders reenters on tenor after laying out for minutes on end. His sound is pure sandpaper, a serrated scrape on the sonic field, a spray of sparks and prominent squeaks, opening up around 10:50 into that full-throated Coltrane-gone-nuclear dragon’s roar that is of course one of Sanders’ signatures and, for those of us who swear by this stuff, an absolute electrifying delight. The drums rise up to bash alongside him, with McBee and Smith swelling in turn, but after only about a minute, we ramp down gently from boil to low simmer and the track heads into a leisurely theme statement and coda. Explosion and aftermath, both essential to the overall effect.

When I reflect on this kind of juxtaposition, how effective and moving it is, and how essentially to the appeal of so much music for me, not just “spiritual jazz” or any kind of jazz (Slint’s “Good Morning, Captain,” anyone?), my thoughts turn immediately (as they often do!) to Sonny Sharrock, and a classic 1991 New York Times feature on him by Mark Dery. At the conclusion of that piece is a passage I’ve cited in other writings on Sonny but that seems worth resurfacing.

"In the last few years,” he says, “I've been trying to find a way for the terror and the beauty to live together in one song. I know it's possible. I remember seeing John Coltrane standing there, his saxophone screaming, hearing the Flamingos sing at the Apollo. All that pretty music! I hope I'm as greedy as those musicians were. I want the sweetness and the brutality, and I want to go to the very end of each of those feelings."

Sharrock cites Coltrane, but of course he also was a direct acolyte, and frequent collaborator, of Pharoah Sanders. And that “terror and beauty living together in one song” thing, which would become a foundational principle of Sharrock’s own music (for my money, realized most beautifully on Guitar, probably one of my, say, five favorite albums of all time, which I wrote about here at some length), was already fully evident on Tauhid, the Sanders album where Sharrock made his recorded debut: that same “hellacious tenor screaming over a tuneful, clap-along vamp” is right there at the end of opening track “Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt,” with Sharrock playing rhythm guitar, and which Sharrock would later jam out on, in 1990, on the excellent, underrated Highlife. (This version grafts on “Venus,” another Tauhid theme, that Sharrock would revisit once again on Faith Moves, his rewarding 1991 album with Nicky Skopelitis.) Sonny himself would provide the terror in brief moments on Tauhid as well as on Izipho Zam, where he brings the fury in a breathtaking way on the volcanic climax of the lengthy title track. Skip to around 23:00 here and buckle up tight!

Obviously Pharoah inherited this general mode from Coltrane (see “Spiritual,” which, with its stirring rubato opening that settles into a flowing vamp, clearly presages a track like “The Creator Has a Master Plan.”) But Sanders was the one who perfected it, who really doubled down on both the terrifying and beautiful aspects of this aesthetic and forced you to consider what their juxtaposition might signify. If you haven’t revisited “The Creator Has a Master Plan” in a while, it’s worth going back and reminding yourself just how utterly apocalyptic the climaxes of this tune are (skip to around the 20:50 mark to get right into the thick of it).

These sections pair so beautifully with the more anodyne expanses of the track, and each is vitally important to the overall effect. Other roughly contemporary examples of this juxtaposition that come to mind would be “Truth Is Marching In” from Albert Ayler’s 1966–’67 Greenwich Village sessions, with its collision of hymn-like uplift and fire-and-brimstone eruption, or Alice Coltrane’s “Something About John Coltrane,” which sets bits of the patented Sanders Scream, this time on soprano sax, against a tranquil blues-goes-to-India stroll.

I also think about the spiritual sacrifices that Alice described making around the time of Journey in Satchidananda, which she later described in harrowing terms:

“…there were demands made, definite demands made which took me away from the world. And at one point almost away from everything — music, family, and all — because the sacrifice had to be within an inch of my life, almost literally.”

In other words, Alice’s journey (for more on that, see this deep-dive Rolling Stone podcast on Journey), Pharoah’s quest, the seekings of Ayler and all the rest, this wasn’t some sort of Beatles-go-to-India hippie foray; this was, to nod to the great Val Wilmer, and her source McCoy Tyner, a pursuit as serious as your life.

In my piece on New Blue Sun, I stated in passing a point I perhaps could have made more forcefully and explicitly, which is that, though it draws clear inspiration from the spiritual-jazz canon, André 3000’s album ultimately sounds nothing like the work of Pharoah Sanders, Alice Coltrane et al. And that’s not simply because of the ex-OutKast-er’s avowed lack of technique on his various woodwinds; it’s also because the music simply isn’t built that way. What we hear on New Blue Sun are deliberately meandering improvised soundscapes — as many have eloquently pointed out, much closer to ambient and New Age music than to anything resembling jazz. What we hear on the pieces cited above (“Hum Allah…” and so forth) are of course compositions, accented with improvisation in a way that creates that thrilling effect I’ve discussed, where somehow the terror only makes the beauty feel that much more poignant, and the beauty only makes the terror feel that much more fearsome.

I don’t intend to suggest that the spiritual-jazz-aissance has glossed over the “terror” side of this music entirely, but I do feel that, as the term has become familiar shorthand, and nods to Pharoah, Alice and others have become almost rote, it’s become easier to lose sight of the true profundity of this great art, and why it still has the power to make you both tremble in fear or well up with tears, sometimes at the very same moment. (I should point out that Irreversible Entanglements, jaimie branch and others who have drawn in different ways on this tradition in the forging of their own unique 21st century jazz are clearly cognizant of the importance of covering this entire spectrum of texture and emotion.)

I unequivocally celebrate this New Blue Sun moment, and the practice of basking in the “vibier” side of these traditions and the fruitful echoes of those textures in the work of André 3000 and others. But I also feel like it’s given me a new appreciation for the uncompromising truth of what came before, that signature rub of dark and light handed down from the Coltranes, Pharoah and later Sonny Sharrock and many others, that still feels so magnetic and incandescent today.

***

Thanks for reading! And stay tuned to see where this outlet goes, and if you enjoyed this piece, please consider telling a friend about this Substack.

Wanted to give a shout-out to three recent André 3000 pieces that I enjoyed, all highlighting different aspects than the ones I zeroed in on, by, respectively, Brad Farberman (Tidal), Jon Caramanica (New York Times) and Andre Gee (Rolling Stone). I’m a big fan of these moments when, because of some high-profile release or happening, we get to look at a cultural phenomenon from all sides.