Physicist and saxophonist Stephon Alexander has argued in his many public lectures and his guide The Jazz of Physics that Albert Einstein and John Coltrane had fairly so much in common. Alexander in particular attracts our attention to the so-called “Coltrane circle,” which resembles what any musician will recognize because the “Circle of Fifths,” however incorpocharges Coltrane’s personal innovations. Coltrane gave the drawing to saxophonist and professionalfessor Yusef Lateef in 1967, who included it in his seminal textual content, Repository of Scales and Melodic Patterns. The place Lateef, as he writes in his autobiography, sees Coltrane’s track as a “spiritual journey” that “embraced the concerns of a wealthy tradition of vehiclephysiopsysublime track,” Alexander sees “the similar geometric principle that motivated Einstein’s” quantum theory.
Neither description turns out misplaced. Musician and weblogger Roel Hollander notes, “Thelonious Monk as soon as stated ‘All musicians are subconsciously mathematicians.’ Musicians like John Coltrane although were very a lot acutely aware of the mathsematics of track and consciously implemented it to his works.”
Coltrane was once additionally very a lot acutely aware of Einstein’s paintings and preferred to speak about it frequently. Musician David Amram remembers the Large Steps genius telling him he “was once check outing to perform a littlefactor like that during track.”
Hollander carefully dissects Coltrane’s mathematics in two theory-heavy essays, one generally on Coltrane’s “Music & Geometry” and one specifically on his “Tone Circle.” Coltrane himself had little to mention publicly concerning the intensive theoretical paintings in the back of his most famed compositions, probably as a result of he’d reasonably they talk for themselves. He preferred to precise himself philosophically and mystically, drawing equivalently on his fascination with science and with spiritual traditions of a wide variety. Coltrane’s poetic manner of talking has left his musical interpreters with a large variety of how to have a look at his Circle, as jazz musician Corey Mwamba discovered when he informally polled several other players on Faceguide. Clarinetist Arun Ghosh, for examinationple, noticed in Coltrane’s “mathematical principles” a “musical system that connected with The Divine.” It’s a system, he opined, that “feels fairly Islamic to me.”
Lateef agreed, and there is also few who underneathstood Coltrane’s way guesster than he did. He studied shutly with Coltrane for years, and has been remembered since his loss of life in 2013 as a peer or even a malestor, especially in his eumenical include of theory and track from all over the world. Lateef even argued that Coltrane’s late-in-life masterpiece A Love Ideal might have been titled “Allah Supreme” have been it no longer for concern of “political againlash.” Some would possibly to find the declare tendentious, however what we see in the big variety of responses to Coltrane’s musical theory, so smartly encapsulated within the drawing above, is that his recognition, as Lateef writes, of the “structures of track” was once as a lot for him about scientific discovery because it was once a religious experience. Each for him have been intuitive procedurees that “got here into existence,” writes Lateef, “within the thoughts of the musician via abstraction from experience.”
Observe: An earlier version of this publish gave the impression on our website online in 2017.
Related Content:
Saint John Coltrane: The San Francisco Church Constructed On A Love Ideal
The Secret Hyperlink Between Jazz and Physics: How Einstein & Coltrane Shared Improvisation and Intuition in Common
John Coltrane’s Handwritten Outline for His Masterpiece A Love Ideal
Josh Jones is a author and musician primarily based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
