Acknowledgment/Pursuance
by NIA I'MAN SMITH
in Fall 2021
Bakari Akinyele, Beating Feet, 2021, Movement Series, 38x43.5, cotton canvas dyed with natural indigo
There’s just Something about John Coltrane.
Let Alice tell it. Let McCoy tell it. Let Elvin tell it. Let Rasheid tell it. Let Jimmy tell it. Let Archie tell it. Let Pharoah tell it.
Let my Momma tell it.
How every Sunday morning she—with coffee in one hand and her heart in the other—greets the morning and her ancestors with “Welcome.” When “Welcome” ends, she plays A Love Supreme in its entirety.
Her kitchen. Her Sony boombox. Her Sundays. Her Coltrane.
Her church.
Let me tell it. How she (and Spike Lee) pass Trane to me.
How Crescent lulled me to sleep each night during the years when nothing else would; how in violet and red room, I too, would have called Indigo and Clarke by the wrong names saying, “I thought your name was Tunji” or how the first time I heard “Welcome” I knew there had to be something beyond this world and to hear it now is to know that wherever that beyond is my Aunt Essie is there sitting in her immaculate white house of linens, lace, and lemons just like she used to.
There’s just Something about John Coltrane.
That gathers us here today through sickness and in health for this ritual of remembering⸺this act of ancestor veneration honoring what Trane means to the continuum of Black music, and therefore what he means to us.
Since his “...going on to Enlightenment” as Alice described it in a 2005 interview with Pacifica Radio,[1]
John Coltrane has been musically venerated as partner, peer, and master teacher by his contemporaries and musical descendants. We begin with his partner in life and music, Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda, and the posthumous release of their collaborative albums, Cosmic Music and the aptly titled, Infinity.
To listen to these albums with a cross-continental understanding of African cosmology--where the earthly realm and ancestral realm operate in coexistence and codependence with one another is to hear Alice commune with her husband. On Cosmic Music, she pairs two of Trane’s previously recorded compositions, “King” and “Manifestation,” (both feature her on piano) with two of her own, “The Sun” and “Lord, Help Me to Be.”[2] On “The Sun,” Alice invokes Trane as a living presence—not only through his horn but also through his voice. First, we hear him duet with Pharoah Sanders repeating the mantra, “May there be peace and love and perfection throughout all creation, oh God” to open the song; then his lone voice calls out to her on the coda (“Alice?”). On Infinity, Alice invites us to hear the unseen—a “Living Space” not bounded by constructs of physical or non-physical where she and Trane call and respond to each other through overdubs of herself playing piano, harp, and vibraphone on the album’s four songs, “Leo,” “Peace on Earth,” “Joy,” and “Living Space.” Throughout the rest of her recording career, Alice continued to commune with her husband, creating ancestral tributes that took the form of songs dedicated to him such as “One for the Father” from the live album, Transfiguration, and reinterpretations of his compositions such as “Crescent” from her final studio-recorded album, Translinear Light. As she explained in the recently revived Black Journal segment from 1970, “It's a feeling that I get from playing his music, it’s sort of a sharing, you know, with him. It’s sort of a being with him on a mental plane or a spiritual plane.”[3]
Each chord, a reminder to herself and to us: He is here.
He
is
here.
In each of their own sweet ways, his brothers followed suit. McCoy, in dedication to a man he described as, “a friend, a teacher” eulogizes Trane on his 1972 solo album, Echoes of a Friend. [4] He blues’ Trane a tribute alongside Pharaoh on 1987’s Blues for Coltrane: A Tribute to John Coltrane,and almost 40 years later fills the air of the Village Vanguard with Trane’s music just as they had done together in 1962. Elvin offers Trane a libation via the album title, Brother John, and three months after Trane goes on to enlightenment, Jimmy and Archie play “One For The Trane Part I and II”at the Donaueschingen Music Festival in Germany sounding their love for him into the cosmos from all the way across the ocean that Amiri Baraka told us is a “railroad made of human bones.” Rashied kickdrum snares Trane a suite encomium, Touchin’ on Trane, three years after an interview where he describes Trane’s continual visits to him, saying:
“I dream about Coltrane, vivid dreams, like live dreams... the dreams were real and every now and then I dream a real dream about Coltrane and it’s such a real dream until I wake up and I have to really lay there and get it together to make sure that I’m back.” [5]
And how can I forget about Clifford Jordan? Or Sonny Fortune? Or the New York Bass Violin Choir? Or Gary Bartz? Or Lonnie Liston Smith? Or Rahsaan Roland Kirk? Or Jayne Cortez and Richard Davis? Or Gil Scott- Heron?
And all those who taught us to remember so that Trane is venerated in the here and now.
So that
Guru can tell it.
Madlib can tell it.
Black Thought can tell it.
Chuck D can tell it.
Talib Kweli and Yasiin Bey can tell it.
Chaka Khan can tell it.
Kenny Garrett can tell it.
Brandee Younger and Dezron Douglass can tell it.
Lakecia Benjamin can tell it.
So my momma can tell it.
So that I can tell it.
There’s just Something about John Coltrane.
This essay was originally presented at the Second John Coltrane Symposium in Philadelphia on September 25, 2021.
References
[1] Africa World NowProject, The Praxis of John Coltrane through Alice Coltrane https://soundcloud.com/africaworldnowproject/the-praxis-of-john-coltrane-through-alice-coltrane
[2] Ashley Kahn, The House that Trane Built (New York: Norton, 2007), 186-87.
[3]Alice Coltrane (Black Journal segment) https://nmaahc.si.edu/object/nmaahc_2012.79.1.16.1a
[4] McCoy Tyner, Echoes of a Friend (JVC, 1972), back cover.
[5] Howard Mandel, “Rashied Ali (1935 – 2009), multi-directional drummer speaks” Arts Journal, August 13, 2009, https://www.artsjournal.com/jazzbeyondjazz/2009/08/rashied_ali_1935_-_2009_multi.html
daughter to Linda Ann Smith & Anthony Charles Smith. sister to Malik Yusef Nealy & Hasan Atiba Lyons. granddaughter to Coleen Mae Smith & Levy C. & Minnie Nealy. great-granddaughter to Mama Louisa "Lou" & Papa Dennis Nealy. great-niece to Essie Nealy Manning. creator of the multi-platform THE BLACK CONNECTION & SONIC BLACKNUSS, a podcast at the intersection of Black music and memory. Oni Ṣàngó. lover of Black music & all things Black. sometimes poet. current Ethnomusicology Ph.D. student.