Smashing the Idol of Trane

            I suppose I should begin with an apology, to those faithful who have been baptised in the waves of timbre St John blessed this Earth with some decades past. John Coltrane was probably the first jazz artist I came to dig, back in high school, and the first time I heard Coltrane, I mean really heard him, from my record player when I was fifteen years old, stoned and eating strawberries with the lights out in my room I saw such blue and green swarming in the dark; I have never quite had an experience like that before or since. I have in fact heard of almost identical experiences, from Carlos Santana, and in a song on Tribal Jazz, by John Densmore, original drummer of rock group The Doors.

            It was in fact The Doors who influenced me to dig Trane and Miles, specifically Ray Manczarek, in his autobiography “Light My Fire”. Many white rock groups of the 60’s and 70’s were highly influenced by Miles Davis and John Coltrane, particularly their modal period. While this is all a good thing, I have since discovered how much public opinion of jazz had been shaped by the supposed authority of white people, critics and academics as well as performers and businessmen.

            Of course, it would be transcendentally ridiculous to claim that Coltrane’s music was in any sense ‘white’ – while he drew inspiration from all cultures and every source, John consciously sought to advance, and purify, the medium of Black American Music, and his stature is colossal (no offence, Sonny) upon black culture, as both an artist and a symbol of defiant freedom to the ongoing struggle for civil rights and human dignity.

            Still, much of the academic and critical focus on Coltrane has been dictated by an elitist white collegiate culture, which is far removed from the source of Black America, even if it has drawn a large influence from it. As a white man myself, with a bit of pomposity to boot, perhaps my own aesthetic prejudices are not worth pondering too deeply: on the whole, I am more drawn to his work on the soprano saxophone, and my favorite tenor moments of his are with Miles and right after leaving the 2^nd time, when he was still utilizing Davis’ incredible rhythm section, particularly the immortal Red Garland. He was also unbelievable with both Monk and Duke.

            So why the hell would anyone want to overthrow such a rich artistsic legacy? The fact is that once Coltrane had already taken both the soprano and tenor saxophones beyond the limits of Earthly perfection, he kept seeking, and while his seeking was by no means in vain, those who have attempted to follow in his Footsteps (Shorter excluded, for sure) have for the most part been stumbling blindly, and the plethora of formless forms engendered by imitators who lacked the grounding in bop, rhythm and blues, and the guiding signal of past tenor greats like Dex and Prez, and soprano Sidney Bechet, have contributed greatly to the disunity that characterized jazz music through the rest of the 20^th century.

            But just as the Catholic Church helped to preserve the wisdom of the ‘pagan’ Greek philosophers of Asia Minor and Sicily, Trane can serve to function not only as the beginning of post-modernism in jazz, but as a wonderful culmination and apotheosis of the history of this great music that travelled from New Orleans to New York over the course of a century, and in so doing transformed the world forever.

Smash that!

Kool Keith: Critic par Excellence

The question as to the value of art is of the greatest significance to our society. Great men over the millennia have known this, and sought to shape our view of truth and beauty according to their own agendas, which were often as misguided as their judgments were wrong and their writing style weak and lame. For wisdom, listen not to me but to the word of Kool Keith, Chief…you been out two weeks, while he has been following this discussion since before Black Man created Civilization itself, and, while prone to going off on fascinatingly bizarre tangents, he has nonetheless hit on the truth.

A brief summary of the aesthetic prejudices he has had to overthrow, before we turn to the monument of his achievement:

From the foggy origins of Western art criticism, amid the homoerotic decadence of Athenian empire, arise the proto-iconoclastic illusions of Plato and the stale faulty rationalism of Aristotle. These will get us nowhere. It took over a thousand years for European artists to melt asunder the shackles of Hellenistic dogma that Alexander unwittingly let loose on the ancient world. (And just briefly, if I may address those of you who have already written me off as some sort of priggish homophobe, the Renaissance returned a more pure, luminous homoerotic focus to European art that had flourished in archaic Greece but was abused by self-serving pederasts until Plato, perhaps a little sore from Socrates’ aggressive instruction, tried to wipe it out!)

But at that time Western artists were still dependent upon the Catholic Church and wealthy, aristocratic patrons for their livelihood, and basically the taste of these employers were what prevailed, without much academic devotion to the theory, rather than practice, of art (which was why their painting was so damn good.)

Humanism in Italy appeared as antidote to this situation, although the corruption from Lutheran iconoclasm and Dutch morbidity cancelled out whatever gains may have been made at this time. Slightly later, the famed figures of the “Enlightenment” were to completely misunderstand the value of art, just what we should expect from such pompous, bourgeois plebians! Somebody get these eggheads a woman!

            Finally it was the Romantics who began to set things right again. Heinrich Heine, perhaps Germany’s finest poet, wrote competently on Delacroix, advocating the importance of meaning in art. The countervailing trend against romanticism manifested in many ways, for example the 19^th Century Frenchman Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s Social-Rationalist gibberish, in which he essentially utilizes criticism as theft of intellectual property, which remained largely the norm into the 1960’s.

            Fellow countryman and near-contemporary, Charles Baudelaire, in his ‘What is the Good of Criticism?’ put us back on a better track. (Notice the [probably accidental] similarity of the opening question, and title, of Baudelaire’s tract, with dGabe Evau’s 2018 pamphlet ‘Prejudices of Rock Critics’.) Baudelaire had a direct influence on the greatest art critic/aesthetician prior to the 20^th Century, Friedrich W. Nietzsche. Nietzsche may not have been the first thinker to take aesthetics seriously (see the intellectual poverty, in this matter at least, of Burke and Hegel.) He was, however, the first man since the days of the Reformation to recognize the religious significance of art, and in fact the first since those Athenian fools we mentioned earlier to relate it to the Olympian and mystery religions of Ancient Greece. Which brings us quite close to the subject of this article.

Then all the DaDa, DooDoo, overall degeneration of Art in the 20^th Century. There were still pockets of brilliancy, above all the contributions of African Americans to the highest Kultur attained thus far by humanity. Music, of course being the highest art, we move past the primal lament of the blues, the jubilation of early jass and the sensuality of swing (sometimes watered, or white-ered, down; always retaining the erotic buoyancy of the rhythm) and the cult of rock n’ roll to the most philosophical of all the arts: Hip-Hop.

Initial efforts were primitive, to say the least. In the words of the Master:

They use a simple back-and-forth, the same old rhythm

that a baby could pick up and join right with ‘em.

This from the debut recording by Keith’s original group Ultramagnetic MCs, appropriately entitled Critical Beatdown. In the 90s Keith went solo as Dr. Octagon, patenting a unique blend of off-color verbal humour, cartoonish horror-core and turn-of-the-millennium individualistic sexual liberty, all while sharpening his axe against the grindstone of homogenous rap-star clones dancing around on MTV and BET in shiny jumpsuits at this time, this last phenomena though a complete atrophy of hip-hop culture at the same time introducing much of the world to rap music, this author included. Some of us went further to learn the Four Pillars of Hip-Hop, but never refuse the head cornerstone, the Boogie Down Bronx, where a young Keith Matthew Thornton witnessed and participated in this final Testament of the Kreators.

Rap moves on to the year 3000…

           

            Under a variety of pseudonyms Keith has continued to attack the mainstream of rap poetry, offering cutting polemic as Dr. Dooom – 

Look in the mirror, kid: your shit is wack.

– satire of bloated white rockstardom as Black Elvis, a hilarious reversal of the white boy’s appropriation of the stylings of black innovators such as Little Richard and Bo Diddley – while still continuing to degrade the juvenile pretenders in the rap game:

I’ll be the man, watch your backpack,

pen and pencil, school today:

Grown man, I don’t play…

Of course, there were still a few other incredibly powerful artists with commercial success at this time in the late 90s, who were both creative and relevant, but to those who were truly listening Keith put them all to shame with the preternatural lyrical brilliance of his near-flawless record Matthew.

The (respected?!) music journal Rolling Stone, commonly used for wiping shit and jissom, once upon a time published a good piece, albeit an imbedded half-column at the bottom of the page, back in I believe it was 2003 or thereabouts, giving Kool Keith a chance to review three new albums, each with just two or three sentences. I no longer ‘live at home with my Mom’ where the article was taped to my bedroom wall, but I will try to remember those sharp, penetrating analyses, honed to perfect aphorisms.

            Of a release by The Used, Keith muses, “This group is called The Used? They sound used and over-abused. What are they so unhappy about?” What a sad truth about the emasculation of white rock since the early 90s – to go back and quote Dr. Octagon once again,

Kurt Cobain was here

but Doc Oc has Novocain.

One of the other two artists Keith reviewed was some young white female pop singer, I can’t recall which one or tell you if she has faded to oblivion or found new employment on some reality TV show, but I do remember Keith quipping, “in mock valley-girl voice” that he totally loved this music and could see himself taking out the trash to it.

Apologies if I have misquoted a lyric, my only reference source was, naturally, my memory.