Yesterday I watched Chasing Trane, a documentary on jazz luminary John Coltrane. (I mentioned Coltrane my introduction to Coltrane in my tribute to Dr. Ray Smith.)
The documentary is a perfectly acceptable review of a fascinating life. And what really struck me was Coltrane’s spirituality. He was a religious seeker and, like Bach, he sought to elevate his listeners through his music, to bring us closer to the transcendent and the Divine.
And his approach toward religious transcendence is nowhere as explicit as in his suite “A Love Supreme.” (Jason K. wrote about “A Love Supreme” in a Mormon Lectionary Project post seven years ago.)
“A Love Supreme” is a different approach to religion than we as Mormons usually take, in our music or in our rhetoric. Our hymns are generally composed in four-part harmony with classic voice-leading. The lyrics comfort. The harmonies and melodies are familiar and comfortable. Any dissonance ultimately resolves.
“A Love Supreme,” by contrast, is yearning, seeking. It’s not messy, but it’s definitely not clean. Coltrane’s saxophone sooths and then it screams. He chants, he runs scales and patterns, he comes back to a melody, he leaves it again. He’s trying to find God and reveal God and live God. He and his band feed us questions without pretending to give answers, other than the sheer existence of a love supreme.
Anecdotally, my Mormon experience hasn’t been comfortable with the spaces Coltrane opens up. We want resolution, not only in our music, but in our questions. We want answers, which means we don’t ask the questions we can’t answer. We don’t explore, we don’t push further into the frontier of religiosity, we don’t truly challenge.
But we could! We originated with a young man asking questions he couldn’t answer! And we, too, can afford to push ourselves, push our understanding of the Divine, and sometimes live in the space between, where truth swirls, soothing and screaming. We can, in other words, sometimes live in Cotrane’s Love Supreme.
Muncharelli, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons