UNINTERRUPTEDCONVERSATIONSWITH!OUR!EEGUN

UNINTERRUPTED CONVERSATIONS WITH OUR EEGUN: PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS FOR METHODOLOGICAL

APPROACHES TO THE RESEARCH OF AFRICAN MUSIC AND THE MUSIC OF JOHN COLTRANE

__________________________________________________

A Dissertation Submitted to Temple University’s Graduate Board

___________________________________________________

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree

DOCTOR of PHILOSOPHY ___________________________________________________

By

Aaron B. Love

August 2014

Committee Members: Dr. Nathaniel Norment, Jr., Advisory Chair, African American Studies, Temple University Dr. Abu S. Abarry, African American Studies, Temple University Dr. Wilbert Jenkins, History, Temple University Dr. Greg Kimathi Carr, External Reader, Afro-‐American Studies, Howard University

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©

Copyright 2014

by

Aaron B. Love All Rights Reserved

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ABSTRACT

UNINTERRUPTED CONVERSATIONS WITH OUR EEGUN: PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS FOR METHODOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO THE RESEARCH OF AFRICAN MUSIC AND THE MUSIC OF JOHN COLTRANE

Aaron B. Love

Doctor of Philosophy Temple University, August 2014 Doctoral Committee Chair: Nathaniel Norment, Ph.D.

African music and its musicians from the Pharaonic periods to Mali to the

Mississippi Delta to the South Bronx have contributed some of the most lasting

and influential cultural creations known. The music and musicians of Africa have

been studied as early as the early 18th century. As interest in African music grew so

did the discipline of ethnomusicology. Ethnomusicology has sought to understand,

interpret and catalog the various areas of African music. In the United States

interest in the music as a continuation of African culture was also sought after and

investigated as an important area of research.

The main objective of this project is to help expand the methodological

approaches in the study of African Diasporan musical cultures and their

practitioners. The author undertook a critical examination of the previous works

on the subject made by both Continental and Diasporan African scholars, in

addition to fieldwork in the United States and Africa (Ghana). Through

considering the work songs of Pharaonic Egypt, the cosmogram of the Bantu-‐

Kongo and the life of John Coltrane in particular this proposed work articulates

new methodological tools in the research of African music and musicians.

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IN MEMORY

To those who raised, instructed, and taught me in their own way—with

kindness, patience, humor, love, commitment, and wisdom. My Brother, Javad

Jahi, maa kheru! My Jegna, Dr. Harrison Ridley Jr., maa kheru! Our Matriarch; Our

Rock; My Grandmother, Evelyn Jones, maa kheru!

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DEDICATION

To Maia Zoe Love, my daughter, my firstborn—my reminder that I did

something great, thank you for sharing me with my academic pursuits; to

Christopher H., the son I raised for just a while, but will love eternally; to the child

that chose not to stay; to Coltrane Javad Jahi Pearl-‐Love my first-‐born second who

will be arriving very soon; and to the children yet to come.

Baba loves you all, always.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This has been a long travelled road to type the final period on what is the

end of a formalized part of my life while simultaneously resituating me firmly back

into my real life. This work is a gathering of my many ideas, curiosities, fears,

longings, and queries that for so many years has germinated within me. I offer this

work as a reflection of this wonderment. Any errors within are solely my

responsibility and not reflective of the ancestors, communities, individuals, and

organizations that I acknowledge hereafter. My strength comes from those who

raised me, watched over me, and saw me through. It is to you that I am thankful.

First, I would like to thank the Creator of all things (those things we know

of and those we will never experience), who is called on by many, in many tongues,

and by many names. To the Almighty names that my family bloodline has called

and still call—I say thank you to Jehovah, Jesus, and Allah. And to the name that I

find most appropriate for my time around the cosmograph, I acknowledge and

thank Olódùmarè.

As I am nothing without those who have mdw mkt through their life, love,

sacrifices, and work, I humbly thank those whose examples I aim to follow. To our

most recent pool of ancestors; Amiri Baraka, Mabel Williams, Nelson Mandela,

Chinua Achebe, Donald Byrd, Richie Havens, Albert Murray, Stuart Hall, Chokwe

Lumumba, Vincent Harding, Maya Angelou, K. Kia Bunseki Fu-‐Kiau—MAA

KHERU! As well to our pool of ancestors whose life and work has informed this

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study. John Henrik Clarke, Ortiz Walton, Asa Hilliard, “Kofie” Ghanaba, Jacob

Carruthers, John Coltrane, Alice Coltrane, Freddie Hubbard, Sun Ra, Charlie

Parker, Nina Simone, Abbey Lincoln, Henry Dumas, and Louis Armstrong—MAA

KHERU! As I live I promise to stay committed to the work you all began, to teach

others about your life and work, and to support those much more qualified than I

am who are extending your ideas and legacies. Ase!

That I exist is reflective of my bloodline of eegun whose existence made my

life possible. I honor and thank the Little clan of Georgia and the Love clan of

Philadelphia for all that you’ve given me in whispers, words, action, time, and love.

Ase!

To my extended living family, I honor all of you not just because of the

name or blood we share but instead because of the love that it produces. I promise

that wherever and whenever you call upon me that I will surrender my needs to

the greater good of our collective survival and security.

To my immediate family my entirety of existence I honor you before all who

come across this work. I would be nothing if it were not for your encouragement,

support, LOVE, wisdom, and at times firmness. I thank my parents, Dexter Love

Sr. and Evelina White for bringing me to this plane safe and raising me with love

and an intense, habitual desire for learning. While we have for many years now

not seen eye-‐to-‐eye on many things, I will always be unmoved in my love for you

and in knowing that I am in turn loved by you. To James White, thank you for

being a father to me when I needed one. It was rough during my teen years; thank

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you for being strong enough to support me even when I kept you at a distance. As

I grew I understood the lessons you were teaching me. Thank you!

To my Aunt Jean, you love me in spite of me not staying in contact as much

as I should. I hope to get better at it. I love you. Thank you for always asking

about me, and never judging me but always “just wanting what’s best for me.”

When I get some money Ima get you that Miami Heat jersey, promise.

To my Aunt Estella, Auntee, Aunts—You told me over 20 years ago that I

would have to someday dig my own wells. I think I have finally fulfilled that

charge. Auntee, you are my constant and my connection to our past. Your

example was a living testimony to the life I wanted to live and the man I wanted to

be. You will never get how impressive your strength, African pride, and unabashed

words were and still are to me. I will never forget when you set me straight about

our people by explaining, “Woodstock? Boy, that wasn’t for Black people. We been

had peace; its white folk who always tryna take it from us.” In that moment the

lines started to became so much clearer. It is an honor to see you stand in

Mummums place. I know she is proud of you too. Thank you for always being

there, for the $loans and all around support. As I live I promise to always honor

and obey you.

To my Uncles, Andre and Odest. Uncle Andre! You were and are the

coolest Black man on the planet to me. You loved and taught me beyond my

abilities to grasp as a child; thank you. You were my real life “Heathcliff Huxtable.”

Thank you for the trips to NY, Reading Terminal, Garland of Letters, introducing

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me to “world musicians” especially Andreas Vollenweider and Youssou N'Dour, as

well as finally giving me that sports coat that I swooned over as a kid. If not for

your love of Black music, and your patience and desire to share the history with

me, I may have never come to know John Coltrane at such an early age like I did.

Thanks for trusting me with your vinyl collection and record player. The times I

spent sitting in that chair listening to; reading the albums and liner notes; and

making tapes allowed me to imagine music beyond just my time. It was the music

that eventually opened the doors to what became my intellectual pursuits—it was

all connected. Thank you for it all! Uncle Odest, as a child you were bigger than

life to me. I wanted to be as athletic as you but soon realized it wasn’t my calling.

Thank you for understanding me and placing me in my lane. I will never forget: us,

two Black folk driving in the middle of the night to fill up gallons of bottles with

spring water straight from the source. Thanks for taking that time out for me and

letting me ride out with you. It was those types of experiences that shaped me as a

child. Medasi.

To my brothers and sisters. To Dexter Love Jr., my brother and at times my

only father. Dex, you were my first hero, never has a little brother wanted to walk

in his older brothers shoes as much as me. You were rough but strong as hell. I

was proud to be called lil’ Dex as a kid. You taught me as a kid so much—at times

more than I needed to know, Ha!—but it was all appreciated and worth it. We

argued like hell, as I got older, about worldviews, religion, politics, etc. You were

reading Diop and others before they were even whispers to me. Thank you for

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holding me accountable and teaching me that, “Our history is more than some

damn February.” I didn’t get it then but I did eventually. It is in part because of

you that I know this work exists. I pray for your peace of mind and spirit. Salute!

To my Older-‐little sister DeVonne Love. Deedee, how can I begin to express my

gratitude to you? You were my second mother and at times my only constant. We

survived our childhood together. For a while the weight of our experiences almost

severed us apart at too young an age. I am glad that we leaned on each other and

pushed away as needed. You were there to brush my hair, feed me, spank me and

snitch, as needed, Ha! I didn’t get it all then, but I know you knew someone had to

do it and for your love and care I will always be indebted. Watching you take all

that was thrust at you and to still be so wise, giving, confident, loving and happy

now is a testimony to your strength. The world should take note of how you did it.

Isaiah and London are blessed to have you as a mother. Thank you for everything!

To my little sisters, Ena and Kimberly. To Ena, the world would say we are

cousins; we say brothers and sisters! You are my hit-‐man on the low, shhh! Your

loyalty to me is amazing. I honor the person that you are. I have watched you all

these years and to see who you are becoming is a beautiful thing. I never thought

that my little sister could school me so much about life and myself. Thank you for

that loannotloan when it was rough. You are a gem filled with talent. I am so

proud of your commitment to finishing your degree; I know you won’t be stopped.

I am most proud of you as a mother—who knew an only child could have so much

love in her heart to share with her children the way you do. Evyr, Cevyn and

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Sekou have you to thank for the wonderful, intelligent people that they are and the

amazing adults that they will become. Medasi! Kimberly you were our collective

daughter. You brought an energy and excitement to this family that was needed. I

have been and will always love and be proud of you. I know that your thirst for

education will guide you to the place you wish to arrive at. As Auntee told me I

tell you now, dig your own wells.

That I lived an African experience even unknown at times is affirmed by the

extended non-‐bloodline families that I have been a part of. I thank you all for your

wisdom, moral direction, love, instruction, and protection. To my earliest families:

Dalkeith Street; The Roxborough and Nicetown/Hunting Park Kingdom Hall of

Jehovah’s Witnesses—thank you! To my public school teachers and instructors

who cared about me more than just the school day. To Ms. Montgomery in

particular, I will never forget your instructions and introductions to our history.

Thank you for not allowing us to read the prescribed literature and forcing DuBois,

Booker T, Ellison, Morrison, and Malcolm X on us. It left an intellectual mark on

me that you will never know. Your strength in the face of the administration on

our behalf will not go unrewarded by me. Your pedagogy will always be front and

center in any class I teach. Lastly to Dr. Akins, you were my first college professor,

thank you for understanding the life and challenges of a first time, 27 year-‐old,

non-‐traditional student. Whatever I thought I knew about African/Black history

you gently let me know that it was so much more to learn. Thank you for walking

me through the process of college life and having high expectations of us at CCP.

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To my Freedom School Family in Oakland and Philadelphia—through you I

believed that anything was possible. And I realized that it was possible, with a truly

committed group of Black folk who are unapologetically African!! Ade, Jason, Sean,

Khalid, Kelli, The Fannie Lou, Ella Baker, and William Still trainers, Medasi!

To my 1300 Dover Road family!!! I wish that those who talk about what

being African in America looks like could come live with us for a while. They

would really see it . . . and get it. I LOVE YOU ALL! Thank you for taking me in as

one of your own over seven years ago. The love, pride, understanding, empathy,

micro-‐economic infrastructure that is in constant motion and always being

reconceptualized on our block is nothing short of beautiful. Ms. Paula, I have

learned and been reminded of what Motherwit and love looks like, how you

balance the love with the firmness with your family and this block is miraculous,

thank you for the garden and making sure the babies have food to eat for the

summer; Mr. and Mrs. Tone and Terri, the two of you have supported me and my

family in ways that are immeasurable, thank you for always checking in on us and

sharing your lives and time with us; Paul, brotha you could write a manual on

raising black boys that we all could benefit from, I admire and salute how you raise

lil Paul and Javier; Lump Lump—you are both gentle and strong, brotha you are

needed here please stay around a bit; Ms. Linda, thank you isn’t enough so I will

always show you what your love means to us; Mecca and Saleem, y’all raise them

babies and keep us all fed without a sweat, the love you have is boundless; Tre’,

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brotha if I could I would show you the beauty in this world and let you have at it, I

pray that the Creator shines down on you and places you on your path.

To my national and Mid-‐Atlantic ASCAC family, thanks to you all. You are

a reminder that the real work of intellectual development takes place within

community. Through you all I have grown and affirmed that deep thought is the

only way to engage the historical memory of African peoples. I thank our Divine

Creator for assembling a cadre of committed Africans that lead and continue to

lead us in the spirit of Djehuti, Seshet, and Maat.

To my brothas thank you all. Ryan Abney, James Tyler, Terrell Allen, Kevin

White, Sedrick Miles, Nkosi Lessey Nate Thompson, and Heru Setepenra Heq-‐m-‐

Ta, you have all supported me in ways that go beyond these pages. Only the walls

know our secrets. What the world thinks they know about Black men would be

extinguished in seconds by spending a day with any of you. I love and admire you

all.

To my sistas, Marsha Besong, Bianca White, Aura Townsend, and Amy

Yeboah, thank you all for undying support and at times your raw honesty when I

needed it. Your tenderness and advice has always been in time. Marsha, your

support and love will always be a part of why this dissertation is complete. Bianca,

I am here because of you. Thank you for getting a depressed young man up and

taking me to the front doors of CCP and shoving me in firmly. I took your advice,

“To never take no from anyone on the other side of those desks” to heart. Your

belief in me was beyond needed during the dark times. Medasi!

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To my students at Lincoln, Drexel, and Temple University, thank you for

allowing me to work through my ideas with you. I know at times I was a lil’

disjointed—I was trying to make sense of my ideas too. Your smiles, questions,

commitment, and fiery passion kept me enthused and always looking forward to

our next class. To the young scholars from Temple in our study group with no

name, Nubia, Elizabeth, Kezia, Ebony, Alaysha, Osbia, Kehmari, Jahlil, Jarred,

Raven, Mr. Pressley, and Autumn, thank you beyond measure for committing to

Baba Carruthers’ Mdw Ntr and Intellectual Warfare—It meant so much to me to

have students who understood that intellectual work happened after hours and

outside the classroom where grades don’t matter. Medasi!!!

To my intellectual family, Joshua Myers—my younger brother but

intellectual old-‐head—continue to humbly set the pace for us; Amy Yeboah—I

know I speak for at least three of us in saying we wouldn’t be graduating without

your push and prayers and personally I couldn’t ask for a closer friend and sister

thank you for all that you are; Heru Setepenra Heq-‐m-‐Ta—thanks for always

talking me and my temper down off the ledge—you’re next! Stephanie Tisdale—

the world has NO idea of your brilliance, maybe we are fortunate to have you all to

ourselves; Akil Parker—brotha watching you grow intellectually the way you have

over the last few years is so encouraging and validating, keep it up; Nate

Thompson—One day your “moment” will come and I hope soon so that you can

return to the chaos of the Western academy and let your brilliance be shown. To

my sister Angela M. Porter, THANK YOU, your support and editorial efforts

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polished all the rough edges on this work. Medasi for your diligence and undying

commitment to the African survival thrust. Sedrick Miles—brotha who knew we

would become the friends that we are, I admire your intellect, artistic abilities and

drive—folk will never know just how horrible our humor is behind closed doors,

love you bro. And all the many others whose work I hope to emulate thank you for

the constant push, second set of eyes, support and believing in me.

To my future academic family at Penn State—Dr. King and the entire ARC

and AFAM staff and community, thank you for welcoming me with open arms and

making my initial transition to the other side of the academy smooth and

nurturing. I look forward to the work we will do together beginning this fall.

To my committee members: Dr. Nathaniel “Pop” Norment—Pop you are

the prototype of character for African men. Thank you for always guiding me

through the academic arena as well as always holding me to a high intellectual

standard. I will never forget the point of a well-‐constructed methodology,

methods, materials and procedures chapter . . . never. Dr. Abu Abarry, my earliest

inspiration for this study came from our conversations in your African Folklore

course. Thank you for believing in the possibility of this study at its infancy stage.

As well, thank you for your support and introductions during my studies in Ghana.

Dr. Jenkins, thank you so much for understanding the seriousness of this work and

committing your time; even while writing on sabbatical. Thank you for your

sincere support, giving me your ear, and feedback. I look forward to reading your

finished work. Finally, to Dr. Greg Kimathi Carr—If I receive my PhD in Africana

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Studies, it is because of you. It is no coincidence to me that I first met you through

a series of serendipitous events on Alex Haley’s farm. You were teaching us about

mdw mkt, and the Bantu-‐Kongo cosmogram, all while using Roberta Flack as a

backdrop to the conversation. I was hooked instantly. It was you who told me

that a Ph.D. in Africana studies was a real degree . . . who knew? Thank you for

ALWAYS being my intellectual stimulate and standard. I know that you represent

your long line of teachers, but you are my Seba and so as I live I work to justify

your existence, always.

Lastly, to my best-‐friend, wife, and partner, Shivon Pearl-‐Love. My dear

heart we met in an intellectual space—talking about Coltrane . . . what a surprise,

maybe it was meant to be. It has been a wonderful and rocky ride ever since; I

wouldn’t change any of it. I don’t know what price I will have to pay in the next

life to deserve you now but it is worth the cost. Thank you for loving and teaching

me with kindness. Your support, especially in these last months, will never be

taken for granted or forgotten. As much as I talk, I never kid myself— I know that

you are the wise one in this family. Thank you for showing me the intellectual and

softer side of love—it’s such a wonderful smelling odor. Watching you in this

moment carrying our son is a testament to your strength and the strength of all

the women and men that you descend from—I honor and thank you, your family,

and your eegun for it all, Ase! I pray that our family continues to grow strong and

that you continue to love, support, and keep us safe. I willingly walk the sweetness

of this life with you until this life is through.

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I end here. I take nothing for granted because this walk has not been

without pain, tears, insecurities, over-‐drafted accounts, lost friendships and loves. I

would change none of it . . . for what I have lost I have gained tenfold and predict

that gifts without price will continue to pile up. Mother Africa’s people and her

music have given me life and there is no sweeter sound than a found purpose. I

embrace the good work reward uttered into existence by Baba Jacob Carruthers,

and echoed into our community’s permanent ethos by Greg Kimathi Carr, that

“the reward for good work is more work.” I pray to never look up and realize I

have not been entrusted with more work. Ase, Ase, Aseeee!

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

PAGE

ABSTRACT......................................................................................................... iii

IN MEMORY...................................................................................................... iv

DEDICATION.................................................................................................... v

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.................................................................................... vi

LIST OF TABLES.................................................................................................. xxi

LIST OF FIGURES............................................................................................... xxii

EPIGRAPHS........................................................................................................ xxiii

PREFACE: THE INTELLECTUAL CHALLENGE SET FORTH........................ xxiv

CHAPTER

1. INTRODUCTION: THE SIGNALING OF SOMETHING NEW................. 1

Otito: Statement Of The Problem............................................. 9 Purpose Of Study And Research Questions........................ 13

Significance (Necessity) Of The Study...................................... 17 Limitations Of The Study............................................................. 18 Definitions Of Key Terms.............................................................. 19 Chapter Summaries........................................................................ 20

2. LITERATURE REVIEW .............................................................................. 23

African Music Research: An Introduction....................... 26

Africa Speaks . . .” ............................................................................ 28

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“ . . . America Answers.................................................................... 41

3. RITUALIZING THE PROCESS: AFRICAN MUSIC AS A DEPARTURE FOR ANALYSIS IN UNINTERRUPTED CONVERSATIONS ................... 49

Of The Sacred And Secular In Egyptian Music: Inscriptions Of The Draughtsman, Painters, And Sculptors.............................................................................................. 56 Work Songs, Secular Songs, The Divine And Initiations................... 62

Our Chronological Homework: (Re)Inscribing the Framework For Interpretation............................................................................ 73

4. RESEARCH APPROACH: AN AFRICAN-‐CENTERED PERSPECTIVE..... 78 Framing The Study............................................................................ 80

The Insider’s Approach.................................................................... 82

African Conceptual Ways Of Knowing.................................. 85

Rationale For Use.............................................................................. 87

The Methods...................................................................................... 90

The Bantu-‐Kongo Cosmology As A Methodological Device............ 93 Materials And Procedures.......................................................... 97

5. WHM MSW: BREAKING THE CONTRACT: A RETURN TO OUR FOUNDATIONS........................................................................................... 99 Motherwit: Reclaiming Our Languages—Reframing Our Aesthetic Values............................................................ 105 Radicalized Traditions: A Recoding Of Our Aesthetic Values 115 The Germination Of Music From Words......................................... 120 Of The Use And Roles Of Proverbs........................................... 123 The Vee Of The Bantu-‐Kongo And African Musical Genealogy........... 129

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6. JOHN WILLIAM COLTRANE’S FIRST TWO MOMENTS OF THE SUN................................................................................................................ 139 John Coltrane’s Musoni: “The Go Order”............................................... 144 Improvisational Developments: Form Over Function............................ 150 The Vaika Stage: John Coltrane’s Early Rise........................................... 156 7. THE VANGA: JOHN COLTRANE STANDS UP STRAIGHT IN HIS VEE................................................................................................. 162 Proverbial Retentions Within The Music................................................ 170

Coded Language Of African Music.......................................................... 173

Proverbial And Coded Language In Coltrane’s Compositions.............. 175 The Vunda Stage: Coltrane’s Decline Into Mukulu............................. 179

8. CONCLUSION............................................................................................ 185 BIBLIOGRAPHY......................................................................................... 189 APPENDIX................................................................................................. 196

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LIST OF TABLES

TABLE PAGE

Table 1: Africana Conceptual Categories..................................................... 88 Table 2: Materials and Procedures................................................................. 98 Table 3: Akan/Coltrane: Proverbs Comparisons......................................... 178

Table 4: Portia Maultsby’s Map of Music........................................................ 196

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LIST OF FIGURES FIGURE PAGE Figure 1: Tomb of Niankhkhnum & Khnumhotep at Saqqara..................... 59 Figure 2: Relief from Akhenaten at el-‐Amarna............................................. 67 Figure 3: Bantu-‐Kongo Cosmogram................................................................ 95 Figure 4: Longo Cosmograph........................................................................... 131 Figure 5: Muntu Cosmograph.......................................................................... 132 Figure 6: Vanga: The Third Vee Stage............................................................. 134 Figure 7: 16th Street Baptist Church Eulogy................................................ 197 Figure 8: Love Supreme Poem............................................................................ 199

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EPIGRAPHS What, with this focus on historical truth, might cultural workers contribute to the construction of an African identity? Our contribution to the future might begin with a hard-‐eyed look at the shaping of structures we inhabit. It is possible to date these structures. It is necessary that they be acknowledged as dated. Beyond that, we need to think of the nature of human movement on this continent before it was divided up into the slave pens Europeans called colonies then, and unimaginative Africans are urged to call nations now, to our constant detriment. The first step is to get out of the slave boxes we call our national identities. Then we can begin thinking as Africans. That is the message from the ancestors we cannot see, though they are around us, and from the unborn, equally invisible to us, though they are in us. We can hear it if we care to listen to the griots and to read the scribes.

—Ayi Kwei Armah, Eloquence of the Scribes I believe that men are here to grow themselves into the full into the best good that they can be. At least, this is what I want to do. You know? This is my belief that we are supposed to—I am supposed to grow to the best good that I can get to. And as I’m going there, becoming this, and what I become, if I ever become, this will just come out of the horn. So whatever that’s gonna be, that’s what it will be. I’m not so much interested in trying to say what it’s gonna be; I don’t know. But I just hope, and I realize that good can only bring good.

—John William Coltrane, July 1966

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An examination of modern African thinking about African thought is long overdue, because in the final analysis what Africans think about Africa in particular will determine the future of Africans. The task before the Africans both at home and abroad is to restore to their memory what slavery and colonialism made them forget.1 —John Henrik Clarke

This essay is presented in the spirit of disagreement, challenging critically ongoing activities in various university communities. Furthermore it is precisely because political, cultural, military, and technological problems are inter-‐connected that any aesthetic principle, any work of art, any cultural manifestation or any intellectual discourse will have political and philosophical implications.2

—Acklyn Lynch

PREFACE

THE INTELLECTUAL CHALLENGE SET FORTH

Our Seba,3 Jacob Carruthers, wrote in the introduction to the Preliminary

Challenge of The Association for the Study of Classical African Civilization’s

(ASCAC) African World History Project4 that, “the main design of the text was to

provoke African-‐centered scholars to develop a basic tool for the liberation of the

1 John Henrik Clarke, foreword to Mdw Ntr: A Historiographical Reflection of African Deep Thought 2 Acklyn Lynch, Nightmare Overhanging Darky: Essays on Black Culture and Resistance (Chicago: Third World Press, 1993), 96.

3 Seba within the Egyptian language of Mdw Ntr is translated into “teacher” or “instructor.” Throughout this work, when possible, African linguistic terms will be used to ground ideas within their cultural traditions. See note 26.

4 Jacob Carruthers, introduction to The Preliminary Challenge: African World History Project, eds. Jacob Carruthers and Leon C. Harris (Los Angeles: Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations, 1997).

xxv

African mind.”5 The challenge that Carruthers issued—built upon the pillars of

African intellectual thinkers—which sought to “construct an African-‐centered

historiography” for the liberation of Africans, came in part from the liberation

theorist David Walker. Walker in 1829 stated:

When we take a retrospective view of the arts and sciences—the wise legislators—the Pyramids, and other magnificent buildings—the turning of the channel of the Nile, by the sons of Africa or of Ham, among whom learning originated, and was carried thence into Greece. . . .I say, when I view retrospectively, the renown of that once mighty people, the children of our great progenitor I am indeed cheered.6

This dissertation is an acceptance of the challenge issued by Carruthers and

a contribution to the existing intellectual pillars. This work will explore the

themes of identity in the musical productions of Africans7 from the perspective of

what the Ghanaian-‐born scholar Ayi Kwei Armah has called the African view.8

5 Ibid., 1. 6 David Walker, David Walker’s Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1965), 48. (emphasis added).

7 Throughout this study, the author will use the terms African, African American, and Black interchangeably to refer to people of African descent as well as their attendant cultural practices. “Black” will not be used as a marker of color or race but instead as a nationality. See John Henrik Clarke, “Africana Studies: A Decade of Change, Challenge and Conflict,” in The Next Decade: Theoretical and Research Issues in Africana Studies, ed. James E. Turner, (Ithaca, NY: Africana Studies and Research Center, 1984), 31-‐45. In delineating the clear distinction between the use of Africana or Black Studies, Clarke states, “that he preferred the former because while Black is an honorable word it has limitations.” Black, Clarke suggests, “only tells you how you look without telling you who you are, whereas Africa, or Africana, relates you to land, history and culture.” He concludes his observation by suggesting that “no people are spiritually and culturally secure until it answers only to a name of its choosing, a name that instantaneously relates that people to the past, present, and future.” See also Michael Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 11.

8 Ayi Kwei Armah, The Eloquence of the Scribes: A Memoir on the Sources and Resources of African Literature (Senegal: Per Ankh Publishing, 2006), 227-‐29.

xxvi

Like Armah, and Walker, whom considered it a waste of time lingering over

European assumptions of the impossibility of making connections between ancient

Egyptians and Africa, this study will not seek to prove that there exists a deep

thought9 of African intellectual work and cultural continuity between the music

produced on the continent of Africa and of that found in the Americas, primarily

North America. It is a racist view to consider it otherwise. Research that belabors

in attempts to invalidate racist views is intellectual regression.

This work also does not seek to create a hierarchy of cultural productions.

Neither does it seek to explore European cultural intersections throughout Africa

or in the music produced by Africans in the Americas. My approach to this work is

to show the continuity of cultural patterns that existed in intentional African

communities.10 I will “let the ancestors speak” as Théophile Obenga encouraged,

9 “Deep Thought/thinkers” here refers to the corpus of African ideas that have originated from ancient African foundations, with regards to what the West has termed “philosophical” questions. Jacob Carruthers and other Africana thinkers prefer this particular term because it speaks to a distinctly African way of approaching knowledge, while stripping away conceptual confusion around the term, “philosophy.” See Jacob Carruthers, Mdw Ntr: Divine Speech: A Historiographical Reflection of African Deep Thought from the Time of the Pharaohs to the Present (London: Karnak House, 1995).

10 My use of community here borrows directly from Michael Gomez’s concept of community. Gomez puts forward that, “community conveys the concept of a collection of individuals and families who share a common and identifiable network of sociocultural communications (for example, kinship, dietary patterns, labor conventions, artistic expressions, language) that have their origin in either a particular geographic area and period of time or a unique system of beliefs and rationalization. The size of the community can be broadly or narrowly defined by either expanding or contracting the area of origin in question or by adjusting the criteria by which a belief system is determined as such.” Thus, Gomez continues, “it is possible to speak of both an African and an Igbo community concurrently; it is also permissible to propose the existence of a Muslim community, as the latter refers to a shared tradition of faith. However, the use of the term does not necessarily imply conscious affinities; that is, those members of varying backgrounds who are described as comprising an African community in America or who are subsequently included in the emergent African American community may not have so viewed themselves. Indeed, that they may not have shared such a perspective speaks to the very means by which the African American identity was

xxvii

so as to convey an awareness of African culture at a deeper level.11 It answers

Obenga’s intellectual rally cry for African scholars to move beyond the limits of

Western historiography and to, “follow Edward Wilmot Blyden simple injunction:

[that] The African must advance by methods of his own.”12 This proposed work

postures itself in the normative understandings of the relationships of intellectual

developments and cultural productions. In particular it attempts to concretize the

relationships between African scholars, African music, and its producers. The

necessity is not simply a matter of addressing the absurdities hovering around the

research, analysis, application and methodological approaches to African music;

primarily in the academic fields of music history and ethnomusicology, but

specifically is a matter of addressing the pressing need to develop methodologies

in the research of African intellectual work, including its musical contributions. It

also seeks to add to the long list of conversations of African deep thinkers, both in

the distant past and contemporary thinkers who have engaged the idea of who

they are in relation to the Creator, the universe, all creation and their ancestors,

and expressed those ideas through various intellectual endeavors—including

music.

formed, namely, through a series of related but at times contradictory processes, developing from both within and without the African collective.” See Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks, 6.

11 Théophile Obenga, “Who Am I? Interpretation in African Historiography,” in The Preliminary Challenge: African World History Project, 31.

12 Ibid., 32.

1

Elvin Jones leans to his left and striking a Chinese gong opens the album with an ethereal, exotic splash. “It’s the signaling of something different,” remarks Ravi Coltrane.” You don’t hear that instrument anywhere else on any John Coltrane recording. He never had one on a gig before.” In one stroke, the hammered metal’s distinctive shimmer clears the air of standard jazz practice.

—Ashley Kahn13

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION: THE SIGNALING OF SOMETHING NEW

John William Coltrane's (September 23, 1926 -‐ July 17, 1967) perpetual search

for meaning through his intellectual work as a musician, the case study of which

provides a subject for applying this dissertation's theoretical architecture, was

enabled by his first distancing himself from received musical traditions, by first

"clearing the air." Accordingly, in order to study his or any other similarly engaged

cultural work in its grounding context, there must first be the creation of new14

approaches—to clear the air—for the writing, researching, and analyses of the

13 Ashley Kahn, A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane’s Signature Album (New York: Viking, 2002), 97.

14 It must be noted that my use of the idea new here—and throughout this work—where applicable does not imply the notion of something completely original. This position is contrary to the Western Academy’s insistence upon the new/original work structure of the PhD dissertation. While in the academy, I remain not of the academy. My allegiance is to what scholars in the category referred to by St. Clair Drake as "vindicationists" have called "the African way." As such, I take my charge from Dr. Jacob Carruthers—a defender of the African way—who instructed African thinkers that their job “is not to produce knowledge but to reproduce it. The ideas generated from the systematic study of the past are a part of the collective African heritage and the job of the [African World History Project] is to apprehend those ideas, add a new context, and reinstate the African vision.” See Greg Carr and Valethia Watkins, “Appendix 1—Inaugural Meeting of the African World History Project,” in The Preliminary Challenge: African World History Project, 348-‐49. (emphasis added)

2

African musical15 traditions. The gathering of prior effective models and writings

will be wedded to and used as intellectual foundation for the ideas introduced and

materials explored and analyzed throughout this dissertation. I am not seeking to

divorce this work from the fundamental foundations of writers and deep thinkers

that understood—or at least made it their attempts to understand—the origins,

power, rhythm and role of music in Black life. This role was beyond the

recreational/spectator/entertainer exclusivity that so many outside(r) writers and

researchers knowingly or unknowingly have too often rested their bevy

instrumental and vocal musical contributions into. Although I consider

relationships between that which allows for a sensory response to music—in

particular the four major psychological components of sound: pitch, loudness,

time and timbre—and its listener, I will not engage in an in-‐depth analysis of these

threshold functions.16 While not discounting this process in music research, what

is needed is a cementing of African music within the context of intellectual

productions, or what Baba Jacob Carruthers commonly refers to as African Deep

Thought.17

15 African music is understood in the entirety of this work as music of an African origin produced by Africans wherever they may find themselves. For the idea of cultural continuity in African music, see Kwabena Nketia, “The Study of African and Afro-‐American Music,” The Black Perspectives in Music, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Spring 1973): 7-‐15. For African cultural continuity as a whole, see Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), chap. 1. Also see Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks, 1-‐10.

16 For an in-‐depth scientific treatise on music as a sensory engagement, see Carl E. Seashore’s Psychology of Music (New York: Dover Publications, 1967). As well see Daniel J. Levithin’s exploration into music as science, nostalgia, and enjoyment in his text, This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of Human Obsession (New York: Plume Printing, 2007). Lastly, see David Byrne’s recent work, How Music Works (San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2012).

17 Jacob Carruthers, in one of his many scholarly contributions, suggests that modern African Deep Thought developed in the context of argumentation about getting out of the predicament in which

3

Our departure into Black music should not begin with the episodic

challenges of colonization, enslavement, or white supremacy. Instead it should, as

suggested by Obenga, engage the most ancient of philosophies from the Pharaonic

periods and move forward, both spatially and temporally, as Africans left the

borders of their homeland—be it chosen or forced.18 Movements did not divorce

its people from their music. Music is a cultural production of African history and

its people and thusly avails itself of:

…all ideas about why to do things, how to do things, the language required to convey those ideas, and the tools and techniques involved in doing them. Although a major task in and of itself, it is not enough to describe African culture and stop there. Although ideas of description and explanation flow rather naturally into one another, they are distinct, yet overlapping processes in historical explanation.19

Obenga broadens his inquiry of the essential question “who am I?” beyond the

elementary, suggesting that the answer to this question at once raises and teases

out within the African context of culture multidimensional, complex and

philosophical dimensions.20 This daunting panorama speaks to the need to

Africans have been during the course of modern history. The predicament, he states, started with the massive slave industry established by the Europeans. And onto this biological onslaught was grafted the master stroke of the philosophically-‐grounded doctrine of white supremacy in the 18th century. See Carruthers, Mdw Ntr: Divine Speech, 7.

18 In explaining the concept and origins of what he calls philosophy, Obenga suggests “that if the object of philosophy remains the human effort to discover ordered thought . . . then it is irrefutable that Pharaonic Egypt was the very cradle of philosophical speculation as we know it.” While Obenga does not use the term Deep Thought, Carruthers suggest that the two ideas; philosophy and deep thought, are aligned. It is through this lens that the writer suggests African music should be seen and by extension an examination of African music should thus begin from the Pharaonic periods. See Théophile Obenga, African Philosophy of the Pharaonic Period (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1989).

19 Obenga, African Philosophy of the Pharaonic Period, 31. 20 Ibid.

4

develop new approaches to examine African musical functions. These functions

are found in the interrelationship of cultural norms within African traditions and

rituals that intersect in material and ephemeral aesthetic productions. Essentially,

we must engage the idea of historical cultural memory as it informed African

identities and cultural inquiries. Ayi Kwei Armah considers identity to be

paramount to efficient group cooperation that can lead to long-‐term cooperative

action and efficient group behaviors toward a chosen goal. Culture in his

estimation is the “medium that prepares a society for that kind of efficient

behavior. Identity is its basic product.”21 Musical ideas and expressions that are

passed on are among the oldest mediums of identity transmissions. Leonard

Brown states:

One of the oldest human methods of passing the music on is the oral/aural tradition, in which musical knowledge and performance practice is carried on through a people’s memory and history. In North American musical cultures, this tradition is shared between certain old indigenous civilizations and the relatively new Black American culture.22

As Africans faced the challenges of cultural infringement from the north and east

from Arab invasion and from the West primarily from European invaders, the

means and methods of their musical productions were altered or, as Kenyan born-‐

21 Armah, Eloquence of the Scribes, 234-‐35. 22 Leonard Brown, ed., “You Have to Be Invited: Reflections on Music Making and Musicians Creation in Black American Culture,” in John Coltrane and Black America’s Quest for Freedom: Spirituality and the Music (Oxford University Press, 2010), 3.

5

writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o would state, “dismembered.”23 This dismemberment of

Africa, Thiong’o suggests:

. . . occurred in two stages. During the first of these, the African personhood was divided into two halves: the continent and its diaspora. The requirement of the slave plantation demanded the physical removal of human resources from the continent to work on land stolen from other subject peoples, mainly native Caribbeans and Native Americans. The result was an additional dismemberment of the diasporic African, who was now separated not only from his continent and his labor but also from his very sovereign being. The subsequent colonial plantations on the African continent have led to the same result: division of the African from his land, body, and mind.24

The challenge then became one of developing processes of remembering,

techniques for preserving this state of bringing back to ones' mind an awareness of

things that has been known, done or experienced in the past. When dealing with

the relationship of memory to group/national identities Dr. Greg Carr asks:

What happens when memory is interrupted, more correctly, radically intersected by an alien experience, or uprooted from its familiar existential context and repositioned in a hostile and potentially fatal environment?25

Carr begins the process of answering this question when he references Paget

Henry’s contemplation of the appearance of the phenomenology of "blackness"

and a survival and resistance response whereby:

. . . African people adapted their worldview to fit the challenges posed by the burdens of this experience. He

23 Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Something Torn And New: An African Renaissance (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2009), 5.

24 Ibid. 25 Greg E. Kimathi Carr, “The African-‐Centered Philosophy of History: An Exploratory Essay on the Genealogy of Foundationalist Historical Thought and African Nationalist Identity Construction,” in The Preliminary Challenge: African World History Project, 294.

6

[Henry] argues that the immediate and ongoing challenge of resisting the annihilation of African existence shaped African attitudes in a way that introduced two, theretofore, unexisting, challenges to non-‐being: the possibility of damnation represented by the Christian tradition; and the negation of cultural, spiritual and possibly physical existence represented by race.26

Acknowledging this pragmatic journey of survival and resistance without naming

it as such, the African-‐Louisianan composer Louis Armstrong once stated, “what

we play is life.”27 If the music produced by some of our earliest composers in

modern history was linked to their existence, their lived experiences, their

narratives, and their reasons for living, then it behooves us to not only peel back

the layers of musicians' lives but also to connect the intellectual genealogy of the

culture that produced them and that they use as bulwarks against personal and

group assault. I contend that researchers must ask fundamental questions that

will propose answers that give us greater insight into the functions of Black music

to extend the idea of African community and continuity.

Currently these insights are lacking—primarily because of flawed

methodologies— in the disciplines’ of ethnomusicology and, unfortunately but

predictably, Africana studies. Ethnomusicology is the dominant voice in the field

of “world” music. The rise in recent years of African contributors to the field of

Ethnomusicology is producing effective changes in methodologies. However, this

has yet to properly frame the study of Black musicians within the cultural context

and scope of a larger African cultural constellation, and as a result is reaffirming

26 Ibid. 27 Louis Armstrong (source unknown).

7

flawed foundational research methods in Black musicians' narratives as a whole

and African derived music in particular. Ashenafi Kebede observes that:

For the past decade, research in the area of music change has been an important branch of ethnomusicology, a young discipline that is often described as an objective study of music in culture. However, the field has not kept pace with the overwhelming changes in music that are taking place in this fast-‐moving world of mass communication. Although the number of Africans, Asians, and Afro-‐Americans in the Society of Ethnomusicology is growing, and their contributions increasing, the society is still dominated by Caucasian scholars. With a few outstanding exceptions, European and American ethnomusicologists and educators still approach the study of African music with the erroneous but common assumption that all non-‐European traditions form an inferior stage of development to that of European music.28

As my interests are primarily rooted in the discipline of Africana studies, this

dissertation hopes to contribute to the field and “establish an intellectual space to

develop alternative” methods and methodologies in the research of African

music.29

Much of the research in ethnomusicology utilizes the comparative method.

The comparative method has been applied to show the cultural connections of

African music to African American music. Call and response, for instance, is often

times referenced to demonstrate the continuance of cultural forms from West

African communal drum performance; to the southern plantation work songs of

the enslaved; to the South Bronx in live rap performances. This approach, much

28 Ashenafi Kebede, Roots of Black Music: The Vocal, Instrumental, and Dance Heritage of Africa and Black America (New Jersey: Prentice-‐Hall, 1982), 117, 122.

29 Valethia Watkins, “Black Feminist Gender Discourse (1970-‐Present): A Critique.” PhD diss., Temple University, 1998, p. 5.

8

like other areas of comparative studies, has led to some answers and ideally many

more questions, but it has not effectively connected the "why?" and/or "to what

purpose?" functions that music serves in the global African community.

Conversely, while questions of scales and musical structure are of tangential

importance to this study, analytical questions rather than descriptive inquiries are

paramount to the discourse. What is long overdue is the cultivation and

concretization of an intellectual frame for the research of African music and its

musicians within what Carr has characterized as long-‐view genealogy grounded in

African cultural foundations. This is a prerequisite to connect traditional African

musical productions with present day music forms and narrate the genealogy of

what the Ewe of Ghana refer to as the adanu30 of music.

30 Essential to this work is language reclamation. When possible the author will use terms, words, and phrases from the surplus of African linguistic choices to express and convey key ideas, concepts and traditional philosophy. For an explanation of the Ewe’s use of adanu (art) and adanudcwclawo (artist), see Nissio Fiagbedzi, An Essay on the Nature of the Aesthetic in The African Musical Arts (Ghana: Royal Crown Press, 2005). See note 1.

9

Books on Afro-‐American music rarely attempt to place this music within the general framework of American society and within the specific structure of the music industry. This is not so much a history of black music as it is a sociological study of its development, its use and misuse. —Ortiz Walton31

Otito: Statement Of The Problem32

The genealogical narrative approach to exploring traditional musical arts

within the narrative of African meaning making is an endeavor that is both

exhaustive and dense. Ortiz Walton aptly asserts that, if approached correctly, the

writing of Black music should focus on its foundational developments; its purposes

and functions; and how writings about Black musicians and Black music have been

ineffective in its approaches. The multitude of regional, ethnic, and varying nation

group’s approaches to music making, the array of batteries of instruments;

spiritual beliefs; folklore and many other aspects of adanu makes the undertaking

a lifetime of endeavors. Michael Gomez states:

Given advances in the study of Africa, it is possible to push beyond perfunctory discussions of great Sudanic empires (read Ghana, Mali, and Songhay) in the attempt to say something about the African past. We can now discuss with greater accuracy the origins of subject African populations and the specific forms of their cultural and political accouterments. For although there are striking similarities of culture and social and political organization in the various regions

31 Ortiz Walton, Music: Black, White & Blue—A Sociological Survey of the Use and Misuse of Afro-‐American Music (New York: William Morrow & Company, 1972), vi.

32 Otitio is a Yoruba word, which among many other meanings conveys the idea of truth. See M.T. Drewal, Yoruba Ritual—Performers, Play, Agency (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 204; Oyekan Owomoyela, Yoruba Proverbs (University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 252. See note 29.

10

of Africa, there are also important differences. The key to understanding the process by which these diverse groups of immigrants attempted to fashion a sociocultural coherency is an appreciation of the nature of these differences.33

While many researchers and scholars have contributed to this conversation, much

more research is needed to connect traditional African adanu and the musical

productions of Africans in the Diaspora as part of a continuous creative process; a

cultural process that experienced interruptions because of episodic challenges.

This research should push beyond loose connections and instead focus its queries

into how the music created in the Americas not only has music-‐to-‐music

connection but also is a part of a larger intellectual and philosophical historical

cultural narrative. Noted Ghanaian scholar, Kwabena Nketia34 challenges the

researcher as such:

Considerable progress has already been made in descriptive studies of African and Afro-‐American music as single cultures . . . . It is undoubtedly in the field of comparative music research African and Afro-‐American scholars can make their distinctive contribution to the kind of integrated study that we now seek. We need to go beyond the present emphasis on random comparisons and the search for origins, which end up in mere speculation of conjecture.35

Similar to Nketia’s query into how external disruptions would affect the traditions

and most importantly the process of meaning making of Ghanaian music—and by

33 Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks, 5. 34 Joseph Hanson (J.H.) Kwabena Nketia has written on the developments, political, growth, expansion, history and intellectual roots of African music making for over 60 years. His groundbreaking text The Music of Africa (New York: W.W. Norton & Co. 1974) is still one of the seminal texts on the study of African music.

35 J.H. Kwabena Nketia, “The Study of African and Afro-‐American Music,” in The Black Perspective in Music, vol. 1m No. 1, (Spring 1973), 7-‐15.

11

extension African music as a whole—this is a solution to the episodic disruption of

enslavement; disruptions that dismembered the African from their cultural

foundations. Engaging the cultural deep thought of Africans should at its premise

be without pathological beginnings or as reactionary agents to tragedy. Though

concerning herself with African-‐centered educational norms in her research, Amy

Yeboah’s directive is worth noting here:

In other words, if you look back far enough you’ll see that African people were doing well until Europe viciously entered the conversation. Through these episodic disruptive phases of the slave trade the function and process of learning for African people would also be impacted. Yet, from the initial capture, to the barracoon (slave-‐pen), through the transatlantic trek (Middle Passage) and the seasoning process, African people took hold and developed approaches, adaptations and improvisational ways to educate their children to strive for excellence.36

My intentions are to frame the examination of African music cultural producers as

inscribers of meaning. This work hopes to recover how African people —in spite

of the tragedies of the Maafa;37 while shackled by the ruling class’ reactionary Slave

Codes; in constant rebellion against the illegal American democratic policies of Jim

Crow; in the face of COINTELPRO and the innumerable attacks against their

36 Amy Yeboah, “(RE)Inscribing Meaning: An Examination of the Effective Approaches, Adaptations and Improvisational Elements in Closing the Excellence Gap for Black Students.” PhD diss., Temple University, 2013, p. 6.

37 Maafa is Kiswahili for “disaster.” The term has been used and popularized largely through the efforts of Marimba Ani in Let the Circle Be Unbroken: The Implications of African Spirituality in the Diaspora (New York: Nkoninfo Press, 1997). The notion of an African holocaust gives way to the notion of Maafa, which affords a larger conceptual frame in which to view the processes of human aggression visited by European upon African people globally over the past half millennium.

12

humanity — lived and continued to inscribe memory through aesthetic cultural

productions. Leonard Brown aptly asserts:

These performance aesthetics were created by the early black pioneers of the music—women and men . . . The music had evolved from ancestral legacies of sorrow songs, spirituals, field hollers, shouts, work songs, and sankeys through the blues of deadly Reconstruction into the early-‐ and mid-‐twentieth-‐century experiences of black folks migrating north, east, and west seeking, at the very least, a civil living situation not fraught with daily threats of intimidation, dehumanization, humiliation, and death experienced in the American South.38

The answers and additional questions expand the larger framework of research

that Carruthers suggested is needed to resume African civilizations after a long

disruption.39 This disruption, caused by European invasion, Carruthers explains is

no longer chattel slavery or even still-‐worrisome socio-‐political colonialism but

instead intellectual domination.40 Applying white supremacy41 to the suppression

of the musical arts of Africa is not an exaggeration of European intellectual

domination. As recently as 1957 Nketia observed:

The student of African musical practice in changing Africa is often haunted by a feeling of urgency. He must hasten to collect examples of the variety of musical types cultivated in a given area before they are lost forever. This feeling is justifiable not only on account of the accelerated pace of change in Africa but also because the dynamic agents of musical change are

38 Brown, 6. 39 Carruthers, Mdw Ntr: Divine Speech, 1. 40 Ibid. 41 See note 12.

13

foreign, powerful and greatly alluring.42

As such, musical arts as a part of the culture of African people must be approached

as a field of intellectual inquiry with the impulse of removing disruptions and

exhuming the space for uninterrupted conversation. So rather than be content

with the comparative model of musical examination the challenge set forth is to

connect these lesser spoken strands that are reflective of the Black radical tradition

that started with the essential query of why.

Purpose Of Study And Research Questions

This research will interrogate several broad areas of African music as a

contribution to the afore-‐discussed project of discipline and methodological

development in Africana studies. Its inquiries into the subject are grounded in

four afore-‐discussed thematic assumptions, summarized for convenience here:

1. Traditional and historical African culture and history must be the foundation to examine African cultures produced in the diaspora.

2. Inquiry seeking answers to research questions of cultural continuity must come primarily from Africans themselves and thinkers and cultural workers of African descent.

3. The development, production, and preservation of culture did not occur in a cultural vacuum43.

4. The methods and methodologies employed to research cultural continuity cannot be loosely connected. Cultural continuance from one geographical space to another must place an emphasis on the function of cultural production rather than its form.

42 J.H. Nketia, “Modern Trends in Ghana Music,” in African Music, vol. 1, No. 4 (1957), 13. 43 This idea of the cultural vacuum will be explored and teased out, infra.

14

If the current approaches to researching African music and musicians are flawed it

enables the disruptions and intellectual domination of yet another area of African

brilliance to persist.44 This suggested approach to the researching and

documenting of African music is not a new approach. It is the approach that

African scholars throughout the diaspora have suggested and directed upcoming

scholars to undertake for some time. Nketia for example observed in 1973 that:

So far, the importance of the music of Africa in historical studies of Afro-‐American music has tended to be seen more as providing a point of departure than as something that continues to be relevant to the present. African music studies have similarity tended to be insular. There has been a tendency to confine investigations to the African continent and leave the African Diaspora out of the account. Very few historical studies of some depth have appeared, partly because of the lack of documents and partly because of the interdisciplinary techniques, which such studies demand of the investigator.45

Across the Atlantic in the same year David Baker sought for research in

Black music that was from the worldview of its participants. Black music, Baker

states, “must have an articulation and description of its needs from the Black

perspective. This is axiomatic. We cannot abdicate from our culture and give it to

those who exist outside of it.”46

44 Nketia suggests that the approach and methods to “collecting authentic African music cannot be disputed even if they appear to be guided by a museum-‐cultural outlook, for it is only through systematic collection, study and documentation of this material that the evolution of African music can be adequately studied in the future.” See Nketia, “Modern Trends in Ghana Music,” in African Music, vol. 1, No. 4 (1957): 13.

45 Nketia, “The Study of African and Afro-‐American Music,” Black Perspective in Music, vol. 1, No. 1 (Spring 1973): 7-‐15.

46 David Baker, “A Periodization of Black Music History,” in Reflections on Afro-‐American Music, ed. Dominique-‐Rene de Lerma (Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1973), 159.

15

What then is to be undertaken is a systematic genealogical approach to the culture

of what Nketia has termed, “African Art Music.”47

Informed by the aforementioned thematic assumptions, this dissertation will seek to answer the following research questions:

1. How does a broad genealogy of African music reveal some of its major functions in African communities?

This inquiry will identify major forms and functions of African music and of its

producers as a prerequisite for analyzing John Coltrane's contribution to the

genealogy. It will not attempt to examine the entirety of all African musical

productions. Following the concept of "long-‐view genealogy,", it will identify

classical Egyptian musical forms and functions, and then connect select spatial and

temporal musical expressions throughout the African continent, highlighting

several aspects of musical form and functions that relate to the study of Coltrane's

work in this dissertation

2. How did Africans continue to create and inscribe cultural meaning using music in spite of episodic challenges?

This question engages the episodic challenges of enslavement and colonialism as a

necessary contemporary prerequisite for understanding the cultural meaning

making practices at work in the contributions of John Coltrane. While this

dissertation does not begin its inquiries of African cultural productions with

enslavement it connects this period to the history of African people. In other

words how did Africans make sense of their place in the world prior to the

47 Kwabena Nketia, African Art Music (Accra: AFRAM Publishing, 2004).

16

disruption of enslavement and colonialism and how, like Coltrane, did they

maintain these functions in their cultural production wherever they found

themselves?

3. How can African philosophical and cosmological ideas be used to

inform the study of the development of the music and its functions to the rest of Africa, using the work of John Coltrane as a demonstrative case study?48

This question frames the second half of the intellectual heart of the study. It draws

on extant Africana studies methods and a select African-‐derived worldview (the

Bantu-‐Kongo) to create a research methodology framed within the African

worldview of historical memory. Testing this methodology's assumptions with the

limited case study of John Coltrane, it seeks to inform the written works of African

musicians going forward as well as to correct erroneous approaches and analysis of

past approaches. In particular, what the latter is suggesting is that the

methodologies used in the biographies of African musicians are overwhelmingly

flawed. The exploratory nature of this question seeks to place African musicians,

their music, performances and compositions within the genealogy of African

adanu. It will apply the Bantu-‐Kongo cosmography and its functions, usages, and

implications in the formulating of new approaches to research in African music as

exhibited in the life of musician John Coltrane, using the case study as an exemplar

48 Théophile Obenga in African Philosophy: The Pharonic Period 2780-‐330 BC (Senegal: Per Ankh, 2004), puts forth the conclusion that, “In sum there is between the Pharonic Egypt and the rest of Africa an unquestionable cultural kinship.”

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to demonstrate how the concepts of the cosmogram can be applied to an effective

methodology in the narrations of African musicians and music.

Significance (Necessity) Of The Study

African cultural, spiritual and aesthetic traditions have been incorrectly

studied, manipulated and exploited by many. As such, the campaign of defining

our history, our cultures and our civilizations on our own terms must become a

priority. The constant and prevalent lies of the history of African people

necessitate the urgency of accurate understandings of African cultures. Each

generation must contribute to the intellectual gathering of ideas, concepts,

methodologies and methods in the remembering of African cultural productions.

This is a gathering of those ideas. It takes on the responsibility of examining

African phenomena from an Africana perspective. The tendencies, according to

Joseph Ki-‐Zerbo, “to explain all the features of African culture by the theory of

outside influence must be rejected. This does not, however, mean denying any

outside influence, but simply involves defining it carefully.”49 And while the

preceding areas have been closely researched they have rarely been placed in the

contexts of the long view genealogy of the history of African modalities. This is

consideration of James Stewart's observation that, “The necessity for a sequestered

body of critical thought is part of moving our music toward the future, where the

music we will supply will be applied to the departments we will create in the

49 Joseph Ki-‐Zerbo, “African Prehistoric Art,” General History of Africa vol 1: Methodology and African Prehistory, ed. J. Ki-‐Zerbo (Paris: UNESCO, 1981), 675.

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world.”50

Limitations Of The Study

As with any study there are challenges to the research. This study is no

exception. The first major challenge to this study was the perpetual challenge in

what Greg Carr has called "Disciplinary Africana Studies"51 To use one major

subject as a test case for applying a simultaneously-‐developing analytical

framework. Using John Coltrane life and music as the model for the proposed new

methodology is limiting considering the countless African musicians that have

contributed greatly to the history of cultural meaning making. The purpose of this

study is to demonstrate new epistemological research devices to the discipline of

African Studies. As such, many more musical artist should be considered for

future research utilizing the infra proposed methodological scheme.

A second limitation of this study is the utilization of one severely distilled

African worldview paradigm. The normative assumption that undergirds this

work is that the peoples, cultures and ways of knowing throughout time and space

from Africa are all worth considering. This study gathered many of the linguistic,

philosophical and cultural norms from varying communities across Africa.

However, in its preliminary considerations for the proposed new methodology, the

Bantu-‐Kongo cosmology was necessarily privileged. Cosmograms are used

alongside other devices to explain the creation of the universe and humankind.

50 Jimmy Stewart, “Introductions to Black Aesthetics in Music,” The Black Aesthetic, ed. Addison Gayle, Jr. (New York: Anchor Books, 1971), 87. (emphasis added)

51 Greg Carr, “What Black Studies Is Not: Moving from Crisis to Liberation in Africana Intellectual Work,” Socialism and Democracy 25 (March 2011): 178-‐91.

19

They also contain the philosophies, wisdom and historical memory of their

communities. The Bantu-‐Kongo cosmogram, then, is a small sample of the many

available African cosmographs. The underutilization of other philosophical

devices is recognized within this study as a necessity in future studies.

Definitions Of Key Terms

Form over function Suggestive of foundational ideas and norms informing the process of music making rather than the instruments (forms) used

Cultural continuity Refers to the way in which traditional cultures engaged with present lived realities and continued traditional cultures in spite of challenges

Cosmograph/cosmogram/ Cosmology

Refers to the way in which communities mapped and explained the known universe and the lived human experiences within it

Cultural meaning making Refers to the types of music, art, dance and/or narratives created during a period.

Content analysis A systematic study of texts, recordings, and artifacts for meaning and

African-‐centered methodology

A research approach which privileges traditional African ways of knowing and doing as its mechanism for inquiry

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Chapter Summaries

This dissertation operationalizes an Africana studies methodology largely

through applying a historical narrative approach. The narrative approach places

historical memory within the context of a larger methodological schema. In doing

such it privileges the entirety of the context in which lived experiences occurred.

The narrative approach does not overly concern itself with the events of history.

The narrative approach connects the past with the present and proposes future

narratives. History as narrative develops the core research question within the

larger context of the cultural, political, spiritual, and philosophical norms of a

people. This project, while focused on African music, addresses the complexities

of its primary subject within the context of the development, production, life, and

connections of that which came before him and those connected to him, that

which they affected, that which altered them and that which follows them. As

such the case study chapters within this work are preceded by the methodological

and conceptual chapters, arranged in accretive and complementary fashion.

Pursuant to research questions one and two, chapter two examines the

literature relative to the study of African music. In particular it will consider the

literature that offered insight into the sonic of music, its functions and usage.

While including the literature that contributes insight into these areas as a whole

within music, the literature that will primarily be reviewed, will be those that

offers insight into African music and its history. Secondly the literature review will

examine works that begin the task of suggesting how African music should be

21

researched. A focus will be placed on works that are contrary to, as well as those,

that are reflective of the possibilities of this current work’s eventual suggestions.

Finally, the literature review will summarize scholars whose work has provided an

intellectual bridge that this work crosses and extends.

Chapter three will offer a counter narrative of African music as a dimension

of historical memory, serving principally to "clear the air" after which chapter four

will propose the methodological frame to consider the dissertation's case study

subject. Within chapter three, however, a general idea of the methodology

detailed in chapter four will be introduced and core concepts and ideas will be

explicated.

As a prerequisite to answering research question three, chapters four and

five will detail the methodology that this work utilizes for its departure. This work

is principally theoretical and as such it assumes the right to certain intellectual

liberties that have not been taken advantage of fully in previous theoretical works

that considered African music research. Chapter four will outline the broad rules

for generating methodology in Africana studies, ending with an introduction of the

primary methodological tool to be applied in this study, the Bantu-‐Kongo

cosmography. The primary focus of Chapter five will be to breach the major ideas

couched in the Bantu-‐Kongo cosmography as a West African iteration of a classical

African philosophical impulse to restore memory (called Whm Msw, or repetition

of birth in Ancient Egyptian language. The cosmograph and other normative

approaches derived from Africana meaning making sources will inform the

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theoretical structure of the study’s methodology and how it can be utilized for

future research, analysis and approaches into African music and musician’s lives.

Pursuant to the third research question, chapters six and seven

operationalize the theoretical model outlined in chapters three through five. A

broad case study of John William Coltrane, and his music, will be used as the

exemplar to demonstrate the afore-‐outlined research methodology. Chapter eight

will conclude with a brief statement of the study’s research findings, its intended

usage, and recommendations for further research.

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The use of the word “music” in the title of this study and its subsequent use in the chapters of this study has been necessitated by the lack of a better word and by fact that this study is written in a non-‐African language. A better word equivalent to “music” and more appropriate, in African terms, would be “singing-‐drumming-‐hand-‐claapping-‐xylophone-‐playing-‐aerophone-‐blowing” (all that as one word). And this must be so because even the acoustic criteria employed by theorists fail to strike any standard classification.52

—N.N. Kofie

CHAPTER 2

LITERATURE REVIEW: INTRODUCTION

While this specific study has not been attempted in prior dissertation

research in Temple University’s Department of African American Studies, it builds

upon existing Africana centered bodies of knowledge developed in the context of

the department’s efforts to develop theoretical architecture, academic vocabulary

and research methods particular to the discipline of Africana studies. Therefore, it

is not in itself a completely original conceptual project.. Moreover several theories

and areas of research inform this work; as such, it posits itself within existing

bodies of knowledge while framing itself outward in orientation to them. There

has been tremendous work done to demonstrate the continuity of various aspects

of African cultures and of those found in the Americas. The fascination and

52 N. N. Kofie, Contemporary African Music in World Perspectives (Accra: Ghana Universities Press, 1994), 12.

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curiosity of what music is and what it does to both performer and listener has

stirred countless theories and investigations.

This study focuses on the ways in which John Coltrane’s work is

representative of how African music and its producers remained culturally

grounded throughout time and space. Its curiosity is spurred in part by the role of

cultural retentions, which forms only part of the study. As a prerequisite for

determining where the current study fits in scholarship in Africana studies, the

primary purpose of this literature review are two-‐fold:

1) to collect the prior research that serves as a bridge to this current work as a

part of Africana studies; and

2) to collect the work that fails to properly engage African music research,

thereby underscoring the necessity of this project in relation to related academic

fields and disciplines.

To familiarize the listener with the subject matter being considered, the

literature review will be divided into two sections. Section one broadly reviews

how African music both within and outside of the continent of Africa has been

researched. Section two surveys the work of those whose research anticipates the

conceptual departure in my proposed work of connecting the function and

research elements of African music study.

It must be noted that this written work is greatly informed by the aural

stimuli and impulses of African music. As such it tethers itself to the mastery

25

impulse of improvisation as found in BAM: Black American Music, 53 or GBM:

Great Black Music,54 in that it improvises off of noted compositions (research

approaches), however, all the while maintaining an adherence to foundational

arrangements and rhythmic structures —African traditional norms—as placed

forth by antecedent55 time keepers within the genealogy of African deep thought.56

A measure of syncopated freedom and license has been taken. Ortiz Walton

notes, “In Africa, on the other hand, syncopation was a necessary and vital part of

the musical structure. It was built right into the music and the languages that the

music reflected. African writing can thus be achieved through the subtle use of

music.”57 Or as John Coltrane would say, “I start in the middle of a sentence and

move [in] both directions at once.” The literature review—and this entire work—

follows Trane’s lead in that many of its sections bleed into one another and draw

from one another rhythmically so as to synchronize the entirety of ideas into a

recognizable academic composition.

53 Black American Music, BAM, is a term originated by Nicholas Payton in part to remove the genre label of “jazz” from African foundational music. See the interview with pianist Orrin Evans for further explanation of the term. Philadelphia City Paper, “The Changes,” January 26, 2012. Shaun Brady.

54 See Kalamu ya Salaam, “It Didn’t Jes Grew: The Social and Aesthetic Significance of African American Music,” African American Review 29, no. 2, Special Issues on the Music (Summer 1995), Indiana State University.

55 The works of John W. Work, James Weldon and J. Rosamond Johnson, Zora Neal Hurston, Willis James, Alain Locke, Eva Jessye, Robert Nathaniel Dett, W.E.B. Dubois, and Hall Johnson must be noted for their early scholarship of Black music and its African origins.

56 For a treatment of African deep thought, see Jacob Carruthers’, Mdw Ntr: Divine Speech (see note 9)..

57 Ortiz Walton, “A Comparative Analysis of the African and the Western Aesthetics,” in The Black Aesthetic, ed. Addison Gayle, Jr. (New York: Anchor Books, 1971), 159-‐160.

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African Music Research: An Introduction58

Modern research and writing regarding African musical concepts,

instruments and performances can be dated to the eighteenth century. Both John

Barbot59 and William Bosman60 recorded their observations of instruments and

musicians while on the Coast of Guinea in 1705 and 1732. While in the Ashanti

region, T.E. Bowdich recorded some of his observations of concerts and

aerophones61, in particular “long hollow reed” flutes in the early 1800s62. In 1912

Robert Milligan published The Fetish Folk of West Africa,63 among other

descriptions he devoted a chapter to his experiences in Cameroon, discussing in

detail the Bulu peoples’ musical and dance styles and instruments.

These early forays into categorizing African musical production developed

as the field of musicology was making inroads into the Western academy. K.F.F.

Chrysander is generally credited with the creation of the field and eventual

discipline of musicology. In relating the development of the field, the Harvard

Dictionary of Music states that “musicology” is:

A term adopted from French (musicologie) to denote the scholarly study of music. It is the equivalent of the German term Musikwissenschaft (science of music),

58 See chapter two epigraph. The term “African Music” is limiting and misleading in that it creates for the listener the possibility of a “single clearly identifiable phenomenon”. However, throughout this work part of the author’s attempt is to enage the limitations of this term and demostrate the complexities of African music and the research involving said complexities.

59 John Barbot, A Description of the Coast of North and South Guinea: Churchill’s Voyages (London: 1723).

60 William Bosman, A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea (Knapton: 1705). 61 The primary musical instrument categories in African music, including the aerophones, will be considered later in this work.

62 T.E. Bowdich, Mission to Ashantee (London: John Murray, 1819). 63 Robert Milligan, The Fetish Folk of West Africa (London: Fleming H. Revell, 1912).

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which was introduced by F. Chrysander in the preface of his Jahrubucher fur musikalische Wissenschaft (1863) to emphasize the idea that musical studies should be raised to the same standards of seriousness and accuracy that had long been adopted for the natural and sciences as well as the humanities.64

Any study that seeks to demonstrate the genealogy of African music must explore

the spatial complexities of African music as it traveled from the continent to the

Americas. In his four-‐volume treatise on African music, Karlton Hester notes, “It is

important to examine the African past carefully if we are to recognize the elements

of African tradition that lie at the foundation of African-‐American music and

culture.”65 Because of the enormity of the continent and its languages, oral history,

countries and regional variances, engaging the entirety of African music is a very

daunting task.66 One major factor in conceptualizing “African music” is the

limitations of the researcher knowledge of the overall culture that they are

examining. This literature review addresses these challenges by collecting the

ideas and theories and contributions from the plethora of Pan-‐African scholars

who considered the complexities of African music and its connections to African

history, spirituality, memory, resistance, and intellectual productions.

64 Willi Apel, Harvard Dictionary of Music (Cambridge: Belknap of Harvard UP, 1969), 558. 65 Karlton Hester, From Africa to Afrocentric Innovations Some Call “Jazz”—The Afrocentric Roots of “Jazz” and African Music in the Americas: Antiquity-‐1910 vol. 1. (Ithaca: Hesteria Publishing, 2000), xii.

66 Nketia notes that, “Over seven hundred distinct languages are spoken by these societies; and although these languages can be grouped into larger families, in some cases many hundreds of years separate the members of such families from their parent languages. The counterpart of this linguistic situation exists in music, for the music of Africa, like its language, is, so to speak, ‘ethnic-‐bound.’ Each society practices its own variant. Hence one can speak of the Yoruba variety of African music, the Akan, the Ewe, the Senufo, or the Nyamwezi variety, and so on.” See Nketia, African Music, 4.

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Africa Speaks . . . 67

Developments in and access to new technology has always been akin to

music and its recording, production and distribution.68 Musical recordings have

contributed to our ability to communicate with the past through a vast catalogue

of recorded music, recorded interviews, and live performances. Technology would

also contribute mightily to scholars’ capacity to conduct research in African music.

Like many other world traditions, however, African music has primarily been an

orally, apprentice-‐transmitted tradition. In the revised edition of his Studies in

African Music69, Ghanaian scholar Alexander Agordoh suggests that:

African musicology began with the invention of the recording machine, which partly compensates for the absence of a written musical tradition (with the notable exception of the ancient notation of the Ethiopian church). Apart from a few sporadic recordings, the first important collections of cylinders date from the first decade of the 20th century; an example is the collection made in 1905 by Pater F. Witte70 in Togo.71

67 This title along with the remainder of the phrase (…America Answers) comprise the headers of this and the immediately following chapter subsection. The phrase is borrowed from the iconic title of noted Ghanian drummer, Guy Warren aka “Kofie” Ghanaba’s 1956 album Africa Speaks, America Answers.

68 Two recent works that examine the rise of technology and its abilities to nurture and grow Pan-‐African relationships are worth considering for the scholar interested in pursuing this idea further. See Tsitsi Ella Jaji, Africa in Stereo: Modernism, Music and Pan-‐African Solidarity (Oxford University Press, 2014) and Alexander G. Weheliye, Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-‐Modernity, (Duke University Press, 2005).

69 A.A. Agordoh, Studies in African Music (Ghana: Ho New Age Publication, 2010), 1. 70 My search for additional informaton on the Pater F. Witte collection has lead to more than one dead end. I encourage future readers of this work to continue the search for Witte’s collection and to conect it to the early field of continental African music recordings.

71 Agordoh, Studies in African Music, 1.

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Agordoh offers a structure that researchers can use to begin framing more salient

questions in their research of African music, or what he aptly calls African

musicology. In spite of technological advances, Agordoh suggests that the music

of Africa is still widely unknown. According to Agordoh, creating the music is one

thing . . . the proper assessment of the music is another. He calls for a paradigm

that would privilege the development of historical depth and perspective in the

assessing of African music’s rich and layered makeup. He states, “Beyond the

range of living memories what has been discovered consists of no more than a

musical instrument here or there, or a picture in which people or instruments are

shown in a musical or social setting.”72

For a view into the distant past, Agordoh posits that one must turn to the

most available prehistorical and archeological work. His repositioning of research

coordinates places scholars within a longer timespan of some 30,000-‐15,000 years

prior, beginning with the emergence of man as a toolmaker, including the

invention of the bow. The bow, in his assessment, was not just for hunting or

shooting an arrow but was also used for the production of sound. He asserts that

the earliest known references to African music from classical antiquity also

concerns North Africa. Agordoh properly situates the development of the bow as a

musical instrument in North Africa, suggesting that the harvest of recorded

archaeological contributions from Kemet (Ancient Egypt) have yielded the most

evidence. Agordoh establishes a trail that the researcher must travel to make

72 Ibid.

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connections from classical Africa to present day African musical productions.73

The strength of this work is in its creation of categories of musical use, which

include: Music’s role in the lives of African communities; festival music;

distribution of instruments in Africa; and particularly the insight he offers into the

varying national groups of Africa and their corresponding musical tropes.

One of the many contributions to research methodology in the study of

African music to be found in Agordoh’s text are located in Chapter Eleven, “A

Guide to Thesis Writing in African Music”. This chapter provides a map for the

budding scholar to write about and research African Music. Agordoh suggests

specific areas in African music that have been overlooked or under-‐researched as

prime candidates for future research. To “calibrate both organization and

execution” of the researcher’s efforts, Agordoh charges the future researcher by

stating, “A successful investigator in African Music should be inquisitive, perceptive,

objective, discriminate, impartial, candid, diligent, persistent, creative and erudite.”74

Agordoh’s suggestion correctly connects the theoretical and pragmatic concerns of

researching African music. His lucid outlines and suggestions at the conclusion of

his text are highly illustrative of the heavy lifting required by future scholars

committed to this work who may lack adequate training and apprenticeship to

execute their research agendas.

73 Agordoh’s suggestion here is similar to Jacob Carruthers’ stated reasons for studying Ancient Egypt in order to gain greater insight into the earliest civilizations. Notwithstanding the role that Kush played in history, Carruthers offers four rationales for prioritizing Egypt in research. Two of his four positions are of note here: The sparcity of information available about Kush’s history and culture; and the vast amounts of information, inclucing archeological and written texts, available to us from Egypt. See Jacob Carruthers, “Why We Study Kemet,” (unknown publisher and year), 1.

74 Agordoh, Studies in African Music, 179.

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Cameroonian musical scholar Frances Bebey’s 1969 text, African Music a

Peoples Art, was one of the earliest75 in the field to begin to canonize the complex

cultures of African music. Writing from the periphery of what was then primarily

a field dominated by outsiders, Bebey observed that:

Over the past thirty years, films, photographs, and records have brought certain aspects of African music, its musicians, and its cultural context to the attention of Western audiences. Unfortunately, however, the aim of most film producers and record companies is commercial success and thus they have tended to emphasize the exotic and the unexpected at the expense of the real substance. By doing so, they have rendered a serious disservice to African cultures generally and to music in particular. The initial curiosity of a Western audience can be followed all too easily by contempt for a way of life that is so unlike their own and by inability to appreciate the music that seems to be so much dissonance and noise.76

Bebey shrewdly sensed that access to African musical history and performances

afforded by improving recording technology would lead ultimately to increased

appropriation and misconstrual by Westerners. At the time of his writing he

suggested that during the previous twenty years the West had begun paying even

more attention to African cultures through numerous conferences, one of which

was the First World Festival of Negro Arts held in April of 1966 in Dakar.77

75 Kwabena Nketia’s The Music of Africa was published in 1974. Bebey’s African Music was published in Englsih in 1975, however his original edition, Musique De L’Afrique, was published in 1969.

76 Francis Bebey, African Music a People’s Art (Brooklyn: Lawrence Hill Books, 1969), 1. 77 While Bebey does not advocate against the rise of music festivals and conferences there appeared to be challenges spurred in part from the cultural hegmony of foreign nations—mainly Europe and America—challenges in particular that concerned the protection and finacial benefits of African muscians and their music. See Ayi Kwei Armah’s essay, “The Festival Syndrome,” in Remebering the Dismembered Continent (Senegal: Per Ankh, 2010), 133-‐38.

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Considering the impending challenges that would arise from musical

conferences, concerts, and particularly written texts focused on African music

during the 1960-‐1970’s, Bebey’s contributions are crucial in researching African

music. Bebey asserts that there are no shortcuts to understanding African musical

cultures. A culture that, “until now has attracted scant public attention, partly

because of its apparently highly-‐specialized nature, but also because it has

previously been described in terms that have tended to imprison it inside the

covers of scholarly treatises instead of making it accessible to all men.”78 In order

to reject hegemonic ideas and to work from the inside out of the music to avoid

preconceived notions of what music should sound like,

Bebey posits, that hours [or years . . . or a lifetime?] of attention is needed

for a real understanding of African music. His admonition to undertake a

sustained method as the optimal approach for researching African music is worth

quoting at length:

Then again, many Westerners think of music as an expression of emotions. Actually, music is too abstract to be capable of rendering truly life like descriptions but Westerners are trained to seek certain signs. For instance, the major key is supposed to convey joy and the minor key sorrow, but there is no logical basis for this contention and the reverse could just as easily be true. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the very popular minor mode was not necessarily used to indicate sorrow. In other words, Western music implies the existence of certain Western music; it is evident that this hermetic approach does not facilitate

78 Bebey, African Music, vi.

33

the understanding of a music based on totally different premises.

Bebey additionally considers the hegemony that exists in the classifying and

codification of Western music with that of African music. He states:

Another factor, which must not be overlooked, is that in the West music is considered as a pure art form. Listening to music is a pleasure to be enjoyed for its own sake. People go to concerts or buy records simply to enjoy music. Those artists who combine music with another art, such as choreography, are all too rare. Music is used as an accompaniment to films or plays, rather than forming an integral part of them. Even in opera, that true marriage of theatre and music, the latter can be divorced from the rest and enjoyed for its own sake. Music is an autonomous and independent art. It is barley an exaggeration to say that those newspapers that have separate columns devoted to “The Arts” and “Music” virtually imply that music is not art at all. For all these reasons and many others, Westerners are frequently at a loss to understand the music of black Africa: the concepts of Africans are so totally different. African musicians do not seek to combine sounds that are pleasing to the ear. Their aim is simply to express life in all its aspects through the medium of sound. 79

African Music a People’s Art establishes itself with two primary positions: 1. Music

in African communities is centric to the life of its people. It is a part of their lives

from, “the cradle to the grave”; and 2. The range of expression that African music

covers is limitless, “including spoken languages and natural sounds.” Bebey’s

insistence upon the limitations of Western standards when researching African

79 Bebey, African Music, 2-‐3.

34

music is telling in that it indicted much of the prior research conducted and future

research that would emerge from Music Studies and Ethnomusicology

departments. His insights extended beyond the written word. Ruling out the

widely popular use of musical transcriptions as accompaniment to musical texts,

Bebey opted instead to refer readers directly to original recordings. He prioritized

the importance of the reader having not only a point of reference with the text and

music, but also through the discography that accompanies it, a personal

experiential documentation. This approach forces the reader and/or researcher to

leave the text and to experience the music and its performers.

Kwabena Nketia’s, The Music of Africa is another foundational text for

researchers in Africana Studies, History and Music Studies. Nketia uses the

internal challenges of enslavement in Africa as introduced by external forces in his

analysis to partially explain the nonhomogeneous cultural nature of African music.

The Music of Africa in many ways mirrors and supplements the contributions of

Bebey’s African Music. Nketia’s text, partly because of his body of prior academic

work, university teaching and performed and recorded compositions, has become

the primarily referenced source in the field.80 Nketia’s work is generally

considered a survey reader. His ‘topics’ section are organized as follows: 1.The

Social and Cultural Background; 2. Musical Instruments; 3. Structures in African

Music; and 4. Music and Related Arts. These topical headings may at first glance

80 For greater biographical insight into Nketia’s life, music, and theories, see Eric A. Akrofi, Sharing Knowledge and Experience: A Profile of Kwabena Nketia: Scholar and Music Educator (Accra: AFRAM Publications, 2002).

35

appear to categorize generalized description. However, in spite of its accessibility,

the text’s depth of research and analysis provides the reader with nothing short of

a long-‐view historical and cultural narrative of African music’s forms and functions.

This volume, in Nkeita’s words, “attempts to provide a broad survey of the musical

traditions of Africa with respect to their historical, social, and cultural

backgrounds as well as an approach to musical organization, musical practice, and

significant aspects of style.”81

Nketia establishes four major factors that contribute to the diversity of

traditions in African music: Cultural differences; inter-‐cultural interactions;

contact with external cultures; and European contact. The cultural differences,

Nketia notes, “tended to be perpetuated by the kinds of political units into which

African peoples traditionally grouped themselves.”82 The case that Nketia

establishes is strong and worth noting, but exception must be taken to the way the

text narrates the relationships between Arab slavers and enslaved Africans. For

instance, when discussing the interchange or borrowing of musical instruments or

musical ideas, Nketia states, “It must be emphasized that the interchange between

African and Arabic cultures did not benefit only Africa. In the field of music, the

adoption of the African drum ganga in North Africa is a noteworthy example of

reciprocal borrowing. Secondly, it was not only Africa that benefited musically

from Islamic civilization.”83

81 Kwabena Nketia, The Music of Africa (New York: W.W. Norton, 1974), ix. 82 Nketia, African Music, 6. 83 Ibid., 11.

36

While accurately conveying one of the means through which societies are

culturally influenced by one another, Nketia unintentionally conveys the often-‐

proposed narrative of optimal, non-‐imposed stripping of one’s culture. His

misguided84 step in this area in The Music of Africa, if not disconnected from

future narratives, reinforces incorrect and bogus theories of African musical

survivals in the United States and effective methods of sustaining and improvising

the cultural norms that inform them.

A key strength of Nketia’s work lies not only in the attention given to

researching and presenting widely documented features that varying African

traditions share but also in his insistence on unpacking subtle nuances of a

national group’s specific cultural productions. Through analytical observations and

limited illustrations, Nketia’s work does not get caught up in the ethnographic

snare of data dumping, “that does not add significantly to the text”. This method

allows Nketia to grapple with the musical commonalities that exist between many

national groups in Africa.

One of the major aspects of The Music of Africa worth noting is Nketia’s

explanations of the training and recruitment of musicians. He distinguishes

between informal aspects of music and musical performances in African

communities the intentional selection and apprenticeship of future musicians.

This dissertation utilizes Nketia’s emphasis on apprenticeship rites to highlight

84 Nketia’s misstep is far from the glaring errors in some of his contemporaries research. For one alarming example, see Lois Ann Anderson’s “The Interrelation of African and Arab Music,” in Essays on Music and History in Africa, ed. Klaus P. Wachsmann (Northwestern University Press: 1975), 143-‐69.

37

and demonstrate the continuity of this practice in the cultivation of BAM

musicians and the need to underscore and affirm this rite in contemporary GBM

productions. In spite of the aforementioned methodological challenges in

examining African music, Nketia and Bebey suggest that the task, though daunting,

is necessary. Bebey notes that, if the study is to be meaningful, “African music

must be studied within the context of traditional African life.”85 Both Bebey and

Nketia’s concerns are not with the research itself but in the kind of research that

facilitates the findings and analyses of the music.

Dr. N.N. Kofie’s text Contemporary African Music in World Perspectives86, is

concerned with integrating the study of traditional languages when approaching

the research in African music. While accepting some of the limitations associated

with using foreign research models, he is much less accepting of foreign terms and

theories utilized in the research.

In chapter two, “Western Epistemology and Musical Perception in African

Cultures”, a major strength of the text, Kofie examines the pitfalls of parallel

research. Parallel research begins with the researcher looking for similarities

between their culture and the one under investigation. This method of research

also demands that the researcher finds (read: forces) words or names for a

particular phenomenon in the studied culture because of a similar phenomenon

having a title or name in their culture. Kofie identifies the Hellenic (Platonic)

85 Bebey, African Music, 5. 86 N. N. Kofie, Contemporary African Music in World Perspectives (Accra: Ghana Universities Press, 1994).

38

roots of this approach, which views knowledge of a thing as being connected to

naming its parts and implying its relationship to its parts. He admonishes the

African-‐centered researcher to steer clear of this method in their analyses.

Kofie’s attempts to decouple the research of African music from the

discipline of ethnomusicology. He also encourages future researchers to avoid

ethnomusicology’s emphasis on systematic musicology, trappings that encourage

baseless speculation. Kofie’s push is for more analytical investigations into African

musical history. His interest and encouragement into African music seeks to

explain the why behind what “ethnic” groups in Africa do as opposed to simply

recording musical scales and structures. He is unapologetic and straightforward in

who and what his work is most concerned with. He understands, for example, the

challenges in learning musical traditions faced by Ghanaian schoolchildren forced

to learn foreign musical traditions of “missionary or missionary-‐trained teachers”,

who, as a consequence, may possibly begin to look unfavorably at traditional

musical practices.

Kofie posits the naiveté of Western forms of research that ultimately

suggest that African music is incapable of advancing. He identifies this position as

a threat to the cultural heritage of African music that leads to further stagnation in

research. His cross culture disciplinary study seeks to uncover relationships

between traditional music and man.

Kofie acknowledges the presence of foreign influences in indigenous music

but insists that one cannot become completely musically acculturated with a

39

perspective anchored in interpretive frames borrowed from outsiders. There must

be something “funny or wrong” with outsider’s music to the indigenous group,

Kofie argues, even if they accepted the outsider’s cultures; including Christianity.

That something, he states, “though unconscious, may be traceable to the cultural

norms of a people—hence the semiotic approach to this study which may also be

described as a search for extrageneric meaning in African music.”87 Acculturation

to Kofie does not imply a hierarchy in culture or, “a less developed culture looking

up to a more developed one.”88 While insisting on the prominence of African

cultural norms framing research into African music, Kofie does not completely

dismiss the improbability of cultural interactions.

The sixth chapter: “Toward a Theory for Aesthetics in African Music”, while

placed at the end of the text, provides the crescendo to Kofie’s work. Utilizing

empirical observations, “partly objectively and partly by questioning individuals as

to what they considered beautiful in specific tunes”89, Kofie negotiates the social

contract between musician and listener. This social contract is easily broken when

one party infringes on the other. Kofie problematizes the imposition of aesthetic

theories of beauty on a community without considering that community’s

normative ideals of the beautiful. His primary target is that of the “Western

stratum of composer and listener—a stratum which tends to look down upon

traditional African music while not knowing what to appreciate in its newly

87 Ibid., 6. 88 Ibid., 6. 89 Ibid., 80.

40

acquired tastes.”90 Those that seek to impose cultural norms also engage in the

process of rendering absent or insignificant those of other groups.

In order to capture a normative sense of the complicated nature of what is

beautiful in African aesthetics Kofie crafts an exploratory semantic and aesthetic

theory. His theory consists of sixteen definitions of beauty, each categorized in an

appropriate context. The criteria are:

1. Anything is beautiful which possesses the simple quality of beauty 2. Anything is beautiful which has a specific Form 3. Anything is beautiful which is an imitation of Nature 4. Anything is beautiful which results from successful exploitation of a

Medium 5. Anything is beautiful which is the work of Genius 6. Anything is beautiful which reveals (1) Truth, (2) the spirit of Nature, (3) the

Ideal, (4) the Universal, (5) the Typical 7. Anything is beautiful which produces Illusion 8. Anything is beautiful which leads to the desirable Social effects 9. Anything is beautiful which is an Expression 10. Anything is beautiful which causes Pleasure 11. Anything is beautiful which excites Emotions 12. Anything is beautiful which involves the Processes of Empathy 13. Anything is beautiful which promotes a Specific emotion 14. Anything is beautiful which heightens Vitality 15. Anything is beautiful which induces Synaesthesis91

The exemplars that follow the definitions illustrate Kofie’s theory of beauty as

functional. His exemplars range in distinction and usage, allowing the researcher

a wide foundation in which to ground their specific research agenda. Kofie’s

semantic and aesthetic theory simplifies the often-‐complicated understandings of

African ideas of beauty while simultaneously illuminating the complexity in

traditional African aesthetics. He seeks to diminish the potential confusion that

90 Ibid., 79. 91 Ibid., 92.

41

could arise from definitions of what constitutes the beauty in music as purported

by, “those who concern themselves with the loftiest academic speculations which

hardly yield anything but confusion . . . .”92

The contribution to methodology of Kofie’s assertion [see definition 8] that

“Anything is beautiful which leads to the desirable Social effects” allows the

researcher to embrace a non-‐universal formula in his work; in his words, “what is

recorded here is not to be taken as a formula for all Ghanaians.”93 And while his

aim is directed at the composer and teachers of music in particular, his opines are

certainly of worth to the researcher whose intent is to be centered in the African

way of knowing, researching, and doing.

. . . America Answers”94

Borrowing from the album title of “Kofi” Ghanaba, 95 Robin Kelley in his

2012 text, Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times96

recognizes that hundreds of musicians have tethered their music to both American

and African models. This tethering of models and structures led musicians to

promote “trans-‐national dialogues and developed innovative fusions, and found in

such intercultural exchanges insurgent political and cultural voices.” Africa

Speaks, America Answers, originally developed as parts of a lecture series that

92 Ibid., 95. 93 Ibid., 96. 94 See note 50. 95 The inclusion of quotations around Kofi is out of respect for Ghanaba’s prefered name, plainly: Ghanaba. While studying in Ghana during the summer of 2011, I visited his student and friend in Anyaa, Ghana, Nii Noi Nortey, who explained to me that Ghanaba never embraced Kofi as a day name but instead prefered to be called and known as Ghanaba.

96 Robin Kelley, Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times (Harvard University Press, 2012).

42

Kelley presented at Harvard University while in the throes of writing his tome on

the life of Thelonious Monk97, concerns itself with honoring the lives and musical

contributions of Randy Weston, Kofie Ghanaba, Ahmed Abdul-‐Malik and Sathima

Bea Benjamin respectively. The selected musicians discussed by Kelley “pushed

back against the notion of unique black American identity, choosing instead to

identify with Africa—to privilege Africa.”98 Kelley uses the shared Pan-‐African

ideology of these iconic figures to underscore the necessity of writing transnational

histories of modern and traditional music. Kelley believes that developing

transnational historiographies of this nature, “sheds light on the vexing

relationships between art, politics, and spirituality, and contributes to a more

global interpretation of jazz history.” 99

Kelley’s research does not delve into the African roots of jazz, nor is its

primary foci the examination of Black jazz musicians’ support of African liberation

struggles. Rather, the text is partly an extension of Jason Stanyek’s theory of

“intercultural collaborations”. Collaborative moments are those performances that

are intersected by time and space, and Staynek explores how these interactions

give birth to new music and musical norms. This dissertation borrows from this

theory but does not limit itself to contemporary interactions. In a methodological

gesture toward the “Sankofa” (return to get) principle in Akan cultures, it attempts

to reach back to collect communal cultural norms that inform the development of

97 See Robin Kelley, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (New York: The Free Press, 2009).

98 Kelley, Africa Speaks, 4. 99 Ibid., xii.

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new musical norms and continue to offer assistance to the improvisational nature

of musical creations.

I would argue against Kelley’s position that, “the diasporic, trans-‐Atlantic

conversations of these artists were less about recovering an atavistic past than

creating new music; they ran much deeper.”100 If Kelley’s position is asserted with

regard to musical form only then a counter argument is moot. However, if the

implication of his assertion are used to describe function as well as creation, then

his notion must be unpacked to reveal the nuanced (known and unknown) ways in

which African musicians ascribed in their performances and production to the

long reaching narrative of African music’s communal nature and function.

Samuel Floyd carries the mantle of crossing the waters and revealing

connections that exist between African cultures and developments in the music

produced in America by Africans. Floyd’s, The Power of Black Music: Interpreting

its History from Africa to the United States,101 is a heavy-‐hitting theoretical

investigation that echoes the mastery impulse of Sterling Stuckey’s Slave Culture:

Nationalist Theory and the Foundation of Black America. Floyd’s contributions to

the field of Black music research are innumerable. The conclusions that he draws

are full of objective intellect, rationality, and reason and are counterbalanced with

experiential cultural memory. The personal and avowedly subjective impulse

grounding his work makes his analysis illuminating and informative to the present

100 Ibid., 9-‐10. 101 Samuel A. Floyd, The Power of Black Music: Interpreting Its History from Africa to the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

44

project. The Power of Black Music is informed by the biographies and

autobiographies of major figures in Black music, further informing this

dissertation’s biography-‐grounded theorization.

Floyd’s work considers the experiences and music of musicians whose “lives

were formed and motivated by African cultural memory and its mythological and

interpretive values.” Utilizing the contributions of Black literary theorists—most

notably the work of Henry Louis Gates’ The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African

American Literary Criticism102—Floyd creates a paradigm for researching Black

music. As with Stuckey’s aforementioned historiographical re-‐imagining, Floyd’s

inquiries are framed within the history, context and cosmology of Ring Shout

performances. As such, his approach to African music research is not “a

traditional music history, but an interpretation of the origin and development of

African-‐American music, and music culture.”103 It is this dissertation’s position

that if the Ring Shout can be utilized as a mode of interpretive framing, the Bantu-‐

Kongo’s cosmograph can also be considered for constructing methodology, on

similar grounds. Floyd’s position on the Ring Shout and its implications of Black

music’s cultural continuity are not informed by the theories of Melville Herskovits,

George Pullen Jackson and Richard Waterman;104 however he does embrace some

of the survivalist theories posited by Jackson.

102 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signyfying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).

103 Floyd, Power of Black Music, 25. 104 See Melville Herskovits, “Problem, Method, and Theory in Afro-‐American Studies,” Afroamerica 1, no. 1 (1947): 5-‐24. Also: Jackson, White Spirituals of the Southern Uplands (Chapel Hill: University

45

Floyd extends his query beyond descriptive studies—an area of study that

Kwabena Nketia urged future researchers to steer clear of.105 His research does not

lead him into inquiries of music-‐to-‐music comparative characteristics, but instead

seeks to demonstrate that:

African survivals exist not merely in the sense that African-‐American music has the same characteristics as its African counterparts, but also that the musical tendencies, the mythological beliefs, and assumptions, and the interpretive strategies of African Americans are the same as those that underlie the music of the African homeland, that these tendencies and beliefs continue to exist as African cultural memory, and that they continue to inform the continuity and elaboration of African-‐American music.106

Floyd’s attempt in his analyses is to create a comprehensive aesthetic for the

proper critique and approach to Black music. In addition his goals are to 1. Suggest

a basis for discourse among intellectuals on musical difference; and 2. To help

break down the barriers of “high” and “low” art. Floyd’s audience is clearly both

music scholars and non-‐music scholars. He wants his work to be “read,

appreciated and interpreted by all.” This intersectional approach opens space for

the non-‐traditional academic to lend interpretations and new ways of knowing to

the field of Music Studies.

The significance of Floyd’s work lays in the connections that he makes

between Black music and African spirituality and cosmologies. His examinations

of North Carolina Press, 1933); Jackson: White and Negro Spirituals (New York: Augustin, 1943). Lastly: Waterman, “‘Hot’ Rhythm in Negro Music,” Journal of the American Musicology Society 1 (1948): 24-‐37.

105 See note 25. 106 Floyd, Power of Black Music, 5.

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consider in particular the cosmology of Ifa and its Orishas and its connections to

music and ultimately prepare the inquiry into how these beliefs transformed in the

Americas. Relying on the aforementioned utilized concept of cultural memory,

Floyd insists that certain creations, beliefs and actions of a community are

nonfactual and non-‐referential but are still “true” and “right”. According to Floyd,

cultural memory in the context of music drives the music and music drives the

memory. Floyd’s arguments throughout the text lend support for the necessity of

new approaches and theories in the perceptions of Black music.

In his text Re-‐Searching Black Music,107 Jon Michael Spencer grapples with

the lack of effective models to engage the culture of Black music. Spencer

concerns himself with the most effective ways to research Black music and include

bodies of knowledge that exist within Black music in particular and the Black

community in general. He prefaces his interrogation with an examination of

Samuel Floyd’s roundtable discussion at the 1993 National Conference on Black

Music Research. Floyd’s “integrative model”, Spencer notes, attempts to “propel

black music scholarship beyond the standard approaches of historical musicology

and ethnomusicology.”108

Spencer insists that as Black people are historically spiritual, the baseline

discipline for an integrative inquiry must include theology. He notes that

musicology and theology brings together essential elements of Black experience.

Putting these two complimentary worlds in dialogue, according to Spencer, forces

107 Jon Michael Spencer, Re-‐Searching Black Music, (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1996). 108 Spencer, 1.

47

researchers rooted in either side of the disciplines to learn the language of the

other discipline. Spencer contests that music should be the only baseline

discipline used in our interrogation across cultures. In chapter 1 of his text, he

argues that African rhythm is the foundation of Black culture. This position lays

the foundation for how Spencer presents his theories throughout the remainder of

the text. He states, “The rhythmic nature of all Afro-‐cultural produce requires

musicological language to discourse about it.”109

Spencer introduces his theology argument as a baseline discipline in

Chapter 2. Religion as a foundation of the Black community demands that any

research focused on Black experiences include spirituality in the analysis. Spencer

uses Folk, Pop, and European Classical music as exemplars throughout the

remaining chapters to model his proposed methodology.

A challenge in Spencer’s work is that, while advocating for theology and

music as baseline disciplines for integrative inquiry, he does not call for a full

departure from Western methods. Spencer firmly rejects the notions that science,

“which has ruled in the West since the European Enlightenment”, should be the

privileged tool used for analysis into queries of Black lives. However, he believes

that varying methods should be brought into the conversations. He cites the work

of Nicholas Cooper-‐Lewter that looks at the integration of theology and

psychotherapy as a musicological praxis. Spencer considers Cooper-‐Lewter’s “soul

therapy,” which incorporates these two disciplines in therapy. The challenge of

109 Ibid., 8.

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Spencer’s acceptance of these methods is that they are out of the context of the

African modalities he otherwise champions. If Spencer’s intent is to interrogate

lived Black experiences authentically, he has not resolved the problematic of

working with the use of models that privilege foreign ways of knowing, some of

which are counterintuitive to the survival of the Pan-‐African community. Spencer

notes, “In fact because theomusicology evolved out of my study of the blues that I

have argued that it is the musicological discipline whose research is least reductive

of the momentousness of black music.”110 As a contribution to the literature on

both the methodology and the applied study of Africana musical traditions from

the discipline of Africana Studies, the present work asserts that only a

methodology deeply rooted in African studies can fully ground such interrogations.

Spencer’s work is useful, however, for the theories that he suggests and the idea of

merging knowledge bases. However, these mergers must emerge from and be

grounded in the canon of African ways of knowing.

110 Ibid., 59

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The first is African music, the second Afro-‐American, while the third is a blending of Negro music with the music heard in the foster land. The result is still distinctively Negro and the method of blending original, but the elements are both Negro and Caucasian.

— W.E.B. Dubois111

Black Music is African in origin, African-‐American in its totality, and its various forms (especially the vocal) show just how the African impulses were redistributed in its expression, and the expression itself became Christianized and post-‐Christianized.

—Amiri Baraka112 (LeRoi Jones)113

CHAPTER 3

RITUALIZING THE PROCESS: AFRICAN MUSIC AS A DEPARTURE FOR ANALYSIS IN UNINTERRUPTED CONVERSATIONS

African music has a long history that stretches across a continent. Its

history continues in North America and situates itself there. The present study’s

use of the life and music of John Coltrane presumes the saxophonist’s modal and

normative musical origins are in Africa. Housed within the music of African

peoples are histories, cultures and social implications too vast and pronounced to

ignore. This music couched in America—albeit in non-‐optimal circumstances—

continued to germinate and encase histories, language, ways of knowing, ideas,

111 W.E.B. DuBois, Souls of Black Folk, (Dover, 1994), 159. 112 This epigraph was written by Amiri Baraka whose name at the time was LeRoi Jones. Throughout this work I will refer to him as “Amiri Baraka,” or “Baraka” in spite of the name used for specific publications. For a compelling reason for using Baraka see: Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradtion, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 271-‐72, note 1.

113 Amiri Baraka,“The Changing Same: R&B And New Black Music,” The Black Aesthetic, ed. Addison Gayle, (Doubleday & Co, 1971), 114.

50

and deep thought. This chapter concerns itself with articulating a methodology

for the present study that is informed by the cultural norms that influenced the

developments, practices, and functions of early African music. It does this by

consistently reaching back toward the earliest known developers of music so as to

connect the rituals that existed in the music, that continued in America, and that

exist today. The task is one of accessing social memory in an attempt to retrieve a

history coded with meanings that has been suppressed and/or unimagined as a

conceptual whole. As such, this chapter will depart from standard methodology

chapters by identifying archetypical examples of African musical practice and

cultural worldview used in contexts that will be identified later as consistent with

the life and work of Coltrane.

Many have ventured into the arena of African music research and Black

American music and its roots and cultural foundations. Some have sought to

divorce the experiences of Blacks in the Americas and the music that they would

produce from African music. Black American music would emerge as a marker for

Black national culture and national identity. There are those that have sought to

ascribe its influences and inspirations as an American phenomenon born of

enslaved peoples or as an exclusive American creation. Simultaneously, there have

been timekeepers who have made it their business to do the intellectual heavy

lifting and push back against these theorists and to protect and preserve this rich

musical culture. They have not only shown the cultural ties that exist, but they

have also sought to inscribe meanings to the culture of African music.

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These inquiries have been mitigated by embracing the necessity of

beginning the research with the earliest impulses of music creations. Paramount

to this research is stationing the developments of musical productions from Africa

beginning with Pharaonic Egypt. Encouraged by the explicit imperative, “to

examine the real historical record of the entire African continent from the

beginnings of recorded history to the present.” The challenge to this research is

that most of what we have today in the way of African music from Egypt is

intersected with and/or informed by more recent waves of invasion, enslavement,

and colonialism. However daunting this challenge is, to begin outside of Egypt

negates the long arc of intellectual musical productions, forms and functions that

would influence later creations—both within and outside of Africa. Musician and

scholar Karlton Hester, who begins his exploration into African music before the

slave trade and locates it in Northern Africa primarily Egypt, 114 affirms the

challenge of this task when he states:

Exploring the complex history of a continent as large and diverse as Africa within a few introductory pages is an impossible task. But it is possible to explore the origins of African people and to raise relevant questions regarding the contexts and circumstances within which “jazz” emerged and evolved.115

Hester is correct in his summation; however, his observations do not

exonerate one from the responsibility of retrieving buried traditions, and

114 Karlton E. Hester, From Africa to Afrocentric Innovations Some Call Jazz: The Afrocentric Roots of Jazz and African Music in the Americas: Antiquity-‐1910: Chapters 1-‐4, vol. 1. (Hesteria Records & Publishing Company, 2000).

115 Hester, 2.

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reconnecting the disconnected.116 Where does the African-‐centered scholar begin

her departure into the great expanse that is African music? The links that have

been connected between both Egyptian and West Africa’s musical traditions are

meager. Where is there in the power of Black music the possibility of ritualized,

uninterrupted dialogues between past and present communities of Africans?

Extending Jon Michael Spencer’s call for the centrality of spirituality in the

development of African-‐centered methodologies, Marimba Ani suggests that

ritualized space, “Joins the spiritual and earthly spheres.”117 As such, she continues,

“ritual during slavery brought the spirits and our ancestors to us. In spirit

possession we became spirits. We communicated and joined our ancestors.”118

Ani’s understanding is not foreign to African peoples. The practice and

participation of ritual and tradition intersect. However, they are not mutually

exclusive in the continuation, preservation and improvisation of culture. Whereas,

tradition is the what of the cultural practices, ritual is the why. Tradition

encompasses the what, the sensory responses and development of one’s culture. It

does not, however, answer the why or completely facilitate the continuance and

preservation of culture—this is the function of ritual. Ritual, as the why cements

tradition into our eternity. Ritual practices are the refusal to move away from the

inherent established cultural norms of a people in spite of temporal or spatial

changes. Additionally, ritual as why enforces to the next generation that their

116 See Armah, Eloquence of the Scribes, chap. 11, 13. 117 Marimba Ani, Let the Circle Be Unbroken: The Implications of African Spirituality in the Diaspora (New York: NkonimfoPublications, 1997), 26.

118 Ibid.

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existence is married to the continuation of the practice of culture —e.g., dance,

language, spirituality, deep thought and music—for reasons that may or may not

always be understood but instead is done and continued because it always has

been done.

What, then, are rituals that are born of African music that allow for

communication with our ancestors as the first step to creating normative theory

for examining contemporary Africana musical creations? Rituals emerge in the

context of what Jan Vansina identified as ‘true traditions’ that “transmit evidence

to future generations.”119 The necessity to listen to the wisdom of our ancestors is

not a novel cliché—it is axiomatic. Armah admonishes:

I like to think the scribes who created the literature of ancient Egypt sent their thoughts out into the universe as gifts offerings to kindred spirits, past and future. They put so much of their intelligence and energy into their art that five thousand years later, their images and words still speak to us, telling us a great deal we need to know: who they were, what they looked like, what they thought and did. If we listen carefully enough, we might even hear them suggest what we can learn from their passage here.120

Scribed texts and inscriptions have left us with an abundance of materials to piece

back together that which has been lost, incorrectly researched, or largely ignored.

Armah advises that, “The material and intellectual record of ancient Egypt leaves

no doubt as to the technical, intellectual and artistic skills of the people who

119 Jan Vansina, “Oral Tradition and Its Methodology,” General History of Africa, vol 1: Methodlogy and African Prehistory, ed. J. Ki-‐Zerbo (Paris: UNESCO, 1981), 144.

120 Armah, Eloquence of the Scribes, 210.

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produced ancient Egyptian civilizations.”121 Contemporary music—especially since

the advent of sheet music or recording machines— offers some insight into music

of faraway times and peoples. Early African peoples’ ideas are conveyed in modern

musical approaches. Sidney Finkelstein observed that:

There is music to be heard today which can give us some idea of the character of this ancient music. There is the blues music brought into being by the Negro people of the United States at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. Such music has ancient roots and is at the same time modern, to the extent that it reflects the feelings and struggles of people today. It is a music partly traditional, in the germ melodic shapes that it uses over and over again, and partly improvisational.122

African music has ageless roots; roots that are deserving of our time and attention.

Hester queries, “Why is it important to glance at the achievements of an ancient

African music and its sociocultural past to understand the evolution of African

American music?”123 He answers:

We are left with perplexing historical inconsistencies if we fail to provide some historical background to offset the racist propaganda that perpetuates the politics and mentality of the slavery era. Understanding that important ancient kingdoms existed throughout Africa, not only in Egypt and Nubia, but also in Ghana, Mali, Songhay, Kanem-‐Bornu, Benin, and other regions of the African continent, challenges stereotypical notions depicting Africans as “savages”—a notion that fails to explain how “socially inferior” African Americans invented one of the world’s most sophisticated,

121 Ibid., 226. 122 Sidney Finklestein, How Music Expresses Ideas (New York: International Publishers, 1952), 12. 123 Hester, From Africa to Afrocentric Innovations Some Call Jazz, 4.

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intriguing, and beautiful genres of twentieth-‐century music.124

Hester’s hypophora here emphasizes the priority of national self-‐identities.

Identities are molded by the messages and memories inscribed into a group’s

music. Similarly, Armah admonishes the African-‐centered researcher to consider

instances in available text and literature, “in which producers of ancient Egyptian

literature and African oral traditions defined the identity of their [own] society.”125

If we listen ‘carefully enough’, even the most remote of what we know about how

they incorporated music into their daily lives, can be of benefit to our research,

analysis and research.

What has been lost can be retrieved. Utilizing the Akan proverb of the

aforementioned Sankofa bird, Armah writes that:

The bird is shown in mid-‐flight: history flows on. Its forward motion is not in doubt; nevertheless, the bird is aware of having dropped something valuable, indeed, indispensable. It therefore casts its vision backward, not with any intention of reversing time and returning to the past to live there, but with the purpose of retrieving from past time just that element of value that should not have been lost, prior to continuing its interrupted motion.126

If inclinations of ancient rhythms in contemporary music are to be found—

heard—today, research consideration of exemplars such as John Coltrane must be

grounded in ‘casting our vision backward’, beginning with Egypt and panning out

124 Ibid., 4-‐5. 125 Armah, Eloquence of the Scribes, 225. 126 Ibid., 118.

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to West Africa for our consideration of Africa’s musical intellectual origins and

normative methodological groundings.

Certain formulaic phrases used in ritual ceremonies occur with the regularity and frequency of key cultural indicators. One such phrase is an invocation to all the protective deities of the Egyptian universe. Naturally, it requires the supplicant priests to turn in all four directions as they call upon the “ . . . neterw resy, mehtet, imentet, iabet.” [gods of the south, north, west, east.]

—Ayi Kwei Armah127

It appears that long ago [the Egyptians] determined on the rule . . . that the youth of a State should practice in their rehearsals postures and tunes that are goods. These they prescribed in detail and posted up in temples, and outside this official list it was, and still is, forbidden to painters and all other producers of postures and representations to introduce any innovation or invention, whether in such productions or in any other branch of music, over and above the traditional forms . . . . As regards music, it has provided possible for the tunes which possess a natural correctness to be enacted by law and permanently consecrated.

—Plato128

Of The Sacred And Secular In Egyptian Music: Inscriptions Of The Draughtsman, Painters, And Sculptors

The preceding epigraphs and observations highlight the intersections of

Egyptian musical philosophies. Uninterrupted conversations with our ancestors

127 Armah, Eloquence of the Scribes, 230. 128 Plato, Laws, (trans. R.G. Bury: Loeb edition, 1967), 656-‐57.

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begin with acknowledging the integral foundations of how they maintained

relationships with the spirit world. African music involved the artist and the

musicians but at all points included the spirit world or the Netcheru.129

Our main glimpse into the world of early Egyptian music is through the

inscriptions and renderings of the artists of the time. African music, Bebey notes,

“is nearly always coupled with some other art form . . . .”130 Because specific

musicians remain relatively obscure we gain glimpses through the artists. Lise

Manniche who has researched and written extensively about early Egyptian music

comments that:

The Egyptian artist had one main task: to render his subject in a manner which was to him the correct one. While pictorial representations abound and classical authors give an occasional glimpse of musical practices in Egypt, literary sources concerning Egyptian music are in general meager. Such representation on public and private monuments are carved or painted with great accuracy and they can tell us a good deal about the instruments and how they developed over time, the techniques used to play them and the types of ensembles that were enjoyed at different periods.131

It is through an examination of the artist’s renderings of Egyptian musicians and

the remaining intact instrument artifacts132 that we gain insight into the

beginnings of the earliest of African music. Manniche states, “Without the

draughtsman, the painter and the sculptor we would know little about the people

129 For an introduction to Egyptian spiritual cosmologies including the Netcheru, see Mfundishi Jhutyms Ka n Heru Hassn K Sali’s Spiritual Healers are Warriors (Kera Jhuty Heru Neb-‐Hu: 2003).

130 Bebey, African Music, 14. 131 Lise Manniche, Music and Musicians in Ancient Egypt (British Museum Press, 1991), 9-‐11. 132 See note 59.

58

who played the ancient instruments, many of which have survived.”133 These

surviving artifacts and instruments provide a narrative into the world of the

Egyptian musician. They are material and intellectual records. Recordings, which

Armah states, “leave no doubt as to the technical, intellectual and artistic skills of

the people who produced ancient Egyptian civilizations.”134 In addition they

address the uncertainties of what music said about their own identity.

Hester places Egyptian music into three categories: the secular, the sacred

and the military. These categories would frequently intersect given the view of the

sacred and secular in African deep thought. Ashenafi Kebede does not locate his

observation specifically within ancient Egypt but they are worth noting here:

Sacred songs in general serve the objectives of religious worship; the human voice is thus used as a medium of communication with the supernatural, with a god or gods, to enhance religious meditation or to advance peace and harmony between a person and his universe. Chanting, a recitation of religious texts, is used to appease spirits or deities in both monotheistic and polytheistic religions in the world. We discover here probably the most important of all functions of music: a person’s desire for communication with the unknown, the supernatural, or a supreme being through the use of sacred chants and songs.135

The four major categories of instruments would all at some point be located in

ancient Egypt: membranophones, (instruments which produce a sound by a

vibrating membrane); aerophones, (instruments which produce sound vibrating

133 Manniche, 9. 134 Armah, Eloquence of the Scribes, 226. 135 Ashenafi Kebede, Roots of Black Music: The Vocal, Instrumental and Dance Heritage of Africa and Black America (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1982), 4.

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columns of air); idiophones, (instruments which produce sound in of themselves);

and chordophones, (instruments which produce sounds from vibrations of

strings).136 The membranophones—drum batteries primarily— while almost

always associated with African musical types, are scarcely depicted before the 12th

Egyptian Dynasty.137 Drums in processions for the Netcheru make their

appearance along with military styled trumpets during and prominently after the

12th Dynasties. Iconographical depictions of sacred devoted ceremonies and rituals

showing musicians with sistren, lute, harps, and lyres accompanied by dancers are

prominent throughout Egypt from the 4th Dynasty on. [see Figure 1] Depictions of

funeral procession during these periods dominate the representation of musicians

and instruments.

Figure 1. Musicians and dancers. Tomb of Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep at Saqqara; 5th Dynasty

136 See Lise Manniche’s Ancient Egyptian Musical Instruments (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1975), which categorizes and illustrates Pharaonic era musical instruments, as well as Kwabena Nketia’s The Music of Africa, chapters 6 through 9 for a detailed explanation of these categories within the context of West African musical origins and performances.

137 Throughout this section refereneces to various periods of Egyptian kingdoms and dynasties will be sited. A detailed explanation or chrnological timeline is beyond the scope of this research. For a clear, beginner’s chronology and historiography of the Pharonic periods of Egypt, see UNESCO’s General History of Africa vol 2: Ancient Civilizations of Africa, ed. G. Mokhtar (PaParis, 1990), 62-‐78.

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Manniche notes that:

Most representation of musicians stem from the tombs of private individuals, officials of the king, servants of the gods, workmen and so on. Temple walls also bear some musical representations, but mainly in connection with public feasts and processions. It is on the monuments of private individuals that we find representations of music as part of the cult of the gods. For example, a singer of the god Amun would set up a commemorative slab portraying himself playing his harp and singing face to face with a deity.138

Artist inscriptions also give us insight into the relationships between music and

Egyptian cosmological beliefs. One such depiction is found in a staircase wall in

the temple of Heset in Dendera. Heset, representative of music, dance, love,

fertility and what Manniche classifies as cosmic music has at this temple a hymn

penned for her:

The sky and its stars make music to you. The sun and the moon praise you. The gods exalt you. The goddesses sing to you.139

Manniche states that, “The concept of cosmic music may, however, have more

ancient roots.”140 There are countless artist renderings in the Middle Kingdom

(-‐2060 — -‐1785) of cosmological drawings involving musicians. One depiction

noted by Manniche is set in the open air with a harpist playing a six-‐stringed harp

with six red disks above his head. On one tomb a passage has been inscribed on a

wall that refers to the owner having, “danced like the planets of the sky.”

138 Manniche, 10-‐11. 139 Ibid., 12. 140 Ibid.

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Manniche suggests that, “It is just possible that this is rare evidence from the

Pharaonic Period of the idea of ‘universal harmony’ in an astronomical-‐musical

sense, which is expressed more explicitly in later writings.”141 Lacking the training,

cultural orientation or intellectual predisposition to place the tomb’s passage

within the context of traditional African life, Manniche misses an opportunity to

uncover a strong connection between man/women and the universe as viewed in

Ancient Egyptian and broader African cosmological and intellectual contexts.. The

passage does illustrate, however, the harmonic necessity of Egyptian life with the

natural world; including the unchartered universe—the unknown. Francis Bebey

firmly states:

But, whereas Western music is rather an inadequate form of expression, the same can by no means be said of African music. The African musician does not attempt to imitate nature by means of musical instruments; he reverses the procedure by taking natural sounds and incorporating them in to his music. To the uninitiated this may result in cacophony, but in fact each sound has a particular meaning, as those who have had firsthand experience of African life can testify.142

Manniche for all of her contributions143 fails here to consider that traditions are

literary and musical works, and should as Vansina suggested be, “studied as such,

141 Ibid. (emphasis added) 142 Bebey, African Music, 3. 143 Lise Manniche is a European scholar who has written extensively on Egyptian cultures. Her foci include Egyptian music, perfumes, cosmetics, medicinal herbs and sex. Her training is not centered in an African way of knowing and doing but the intellectual lifting that she has done is worthy of consideration. John Henrik Clarke’s statement is worth noting here [his remarks were not in reference to Manniche, but instead were directed at Lady Lugard], “In spite of her confusions,” her efforts cannot be ignored. My use of Manniche then in this work is much like Clarke’s approach to White researchers. Clarke summarizes, “That don’t mean I ignore books written by Whites,

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just as it is necessary to study the social environment which underlies the content

of every expression of a given culture.”144 Manniche’s suggestion of a “universal

harmony” approach to musical instructions and productions aptly invokes the

influence of music on the day-‐to-‐day lives of the community.

The developments of specific sounds, rhythms, and functions of music

would be carried out of Egypt and into the various geographical spaces that

marked subsequent waves of African migration. They would take these normative

concepts with them and adapt them to their current lived conditions and the

natural environmental changes. Analysis of these adaptations to their particular

natural environments offers some understanding of the subtle and pronounced

material instrument changes that we find throughout Western Africa as compared,

for instance, to its Northern regions. Let us now consider a few areas of daily life

that evidence the incorporation of music within Pharaonic Egyptian communities.

Work Songs, Secular Songs, The Divine, And Initiations

Much of what we know about secular, work and devotional praise music in

the African tradition begins with Africans in America. A large area of the literature

concerning itself with Black music’s culture and history dedicates tremendous

amounts of research to the work, the leisure and the spiritual songs. This

truncated genealogy carries the same normative flaws as the afore-‐discussed because I ain’t no fool. I know Whites have done some monumental work we need to look at. They’ve had the money, and they’ve had the research skills, and I will not ignore them.” See Clarke, “The World War Against African History Since 1968,” ed. Greg Kimathi Carr, Compass: Critical Commentaries (The Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations, 2014), 31. See also Greg Carr in Jared Ball’s I Mix What I Like! A Mixtape Manifesto, (Oakland: AK Press, 2011), 9. (epigraph)

144 Vansina, “Oral Tradition and its Methodology,” 144.

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linkage of Black American Music exclusively with its American context. While this

is an important area worthy of research the long arc of the field of inquiry requires

that we go back farther.

The origins of the musical cultures and their functions poured out of Nile

Valley civilizations; through migration, germinated in newly formed nation

groups; and finally, improvised and adapted to the circumstances of the Americas.

Establishing the origins of this area of music in America dismembers this

genealogy and excises a consideration of the contributions of the early Nile Valley

African periods. To disregard these contributions—to not listen— is to divorce

scholarly researcher from the possibility of conversations with our earliest of

ancestors. Armah’s wise admonition—though specifically addressing concerns of

land ownership—is extremely valuable to this conversation:

What if the dead ancestors want to tell us that the things to do, if we find petroleum under our soil, is not to sell any of it at all but to keep it here, to find out what those so eager to take it off out hands [plan to] do with it, and to do it here if that is the intelligent thing to do? Listen with your mind. The message of African ancestors is that if we knew who we are, and what our continent is worth, we would not be selling anything but what we make with our brains and hands and machines, at fixed prices by ourselves.145

What the Blacks of the Nile developed as normative in relation to their music

should be examined, analyzed and then carried forward into contemporary

considerations of Black music. The knowledge that was left, that music critics


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charged artists such as John Coltrane as exploring under “Eastern” influences and

that is still being communicated, is vital for creating a salient Africana Studies

methodology.

The sacred and secular songs considered, in an optimal geographical space

and time context, allow us to begin the narrative of a people’s relationship to

music more accurately. Amiri Baraka notes in Blues People that, “Undoubtedly,

none of the African prisoners broke out into ‘St. James Infirmary’ the minute the

first of them were herded off the ship. We also know that the first African slaves,

when they worked in those fields, if they sang or shouted at all, sang or shouted in

some pure African dialect.”146

Works songs in particular are understood as songs that grew out of day-‐to-‐

day labor experiences. These songs were consequently sung, altered, and passed

on from adult to child. The child in turn continued these songs as they entered

the work force. Eileen Southern situates her characterization of the work song in

the antebellum American South. Time and space notwithstanding her definition is

worth noting here:

Singing accompanied all kinds of work, whether it consisted of picking cotton, threshing rice, stripping tobacco, harvesting sugar cane, or simply doing the endless jobs on the plantation, such as clearing away the underbrush or repairing fences. Music served the double function of alleviating the monotony of the work and, at the same time, spurring workers on to fresh efforts.

146 Jones, Blues People, xi.

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A different type of song was that of the lone worker as he went about his assignment of mending fences or building a barn or cooking a meal. Tempo, text, melody—all these things reflected his mood of the moment.147

A long-‐view theoretical methodology extends Eileen Southern’s spatial and

temporal placement of the work songs prior to enslavement. Such a method,

applied in this dissertation, insists that the world that John Coltrane and his

immediate elders and ancestors inherited from the Africans created in America

was an extension of worlds that they lived in before enslavement. These were

cultures that thrived before their lives came into existence; it was an inherited

culture that they were born of and into. As such the work songs that Southern

describes do not have their generative moment on American soil, but are instead a

perpetually renewing staple of African life, growing each generation along a

continuous line of historical cultural production. Contrasting differences in

traditional African music and European music, John Roberts suggests that:

African music differs from European music in that it is much more functional. Up to a point all music anywhere has a function: to please the gods, or to make work go better, or simply to give pleasure. Yet there is no doubt that in Africa it is more closely bound up with the details of daily living than in Europe. There is an immense amount of music for special purposes.148

As was previously noted, because there was little to no separation between the

sacred and the secular in the African worldview, it is possible to consider how

147 Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Ameircans: A History, 2nd ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 1983), 160.

148 John Storm Roberts, Black Music of Two Worlds (Praeger Publishers, 1972), 5. (emphasis added)

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complimentary to the full arc of daily living music produced for these settings

could be. Agordoh states, “In Africa, stress is placed upon musical activity as an

integral and functioning part of the society. Music is used for initiation

ceremonies, rituals and sacrifices, death and funerals for work, hunting and for

healing.”149 What is needed is a proper context to situate these purposes. Sterling

Stuckey cautions that:

Too often the spirituals are studied apart from their natural, ceremonial context. The tendency has been to treat them as a musical form unrelated to dance and certainly unrelated to particular configurations of dance and dance rhythm. Abstracted from slave ritual performance, including burial ceremonies, they appear to be under Christian influence to a disproportionate extent. Though the impact of Christianity on them is obvious and considerable, the spirituals take on an altogether new coloration when one looks at slave religion on the plantations where most slaves were found and where African religion, contrary to accepted scholarly wisdom, was practiced.150

Returning to the abundant corpus of artist renderings of music in Pharaonic Egypt,

we gain insight into the context of classical African-‐era work songs. Work songs

could be depicted in hunting narratives as well. Instruments depicted in these

settings included: clappers, rattles, jingles, flute and the body—not just limited to

clapping—other parts of the body were slapped to vibrate musical sounds.

149 Agordoh, Studies in African Music, 28. 150 Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory & the Foundations of Black America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 27.

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Manniche suggests that, prior to the Pharaonic periods, the evidence of work

songs reliefs are very difficult to interpret.151 While depictions of labor requiring

rhythmic synchronicity which imply music can be found in reliefs from as early as

the so-‐called Old Kingdom (c. 3100-‐2500 b.c.e.) some of the earliest distinct

depictions of African work songs can be found from a building from the New

Kingdom period of Akhenaten at el-‐Amarna dated around 1365 B.C. This scenic

relief drawing shows women in a highly wooded area with tambourines—both

round and rectangular—in hand, scaring birds from trees. [see Figure 2]

Figure 2. Relief from a building of Akhenaten at el-‐Amarna. Scaring birds with tambourines. Bebey’s representation of the hunter-‐gatherer groups in Central Africa underscores

the continuance of work and music conjoining. He notes:

This communal music may be quite elaborate in form, as in the case of the Pygmies who inhabit the equatorial forest. They live by hunting, gathering, wild fruits, and bartering with villages on the edge of the forest; all their daily occupations are accompanied by music.152

151 Manniche, Music and Musicians, 16. 152 Bebey, African Music, 18.

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The connection of the fusion of music and life in Central Africa takes on a

particular significance to the methodology applied in this dissertation: The West-‐

Central African cosmologies of the Bantu-‐Kongo share deep regional affinities with

Central Africans, including a veneration of nature, small-‐group governance

structure and collaborative structure for music-‐making. Further, elements of the

Bantu-‐Kongo Cosmogram, which provides the primary lens for the present study’s

examination of the life and work of John Coltrane as African musical exemplar can

be found among these populations.

During the era of Pharaonic Egypt’s Old Kingdom, boating scenes are

prominently depicted, which Manniche suggests “show(s) how a musical

instrument could also be used to flush out water-‐fowl.”153 One depiction shows:

A light papyrus boat being manoeuvred [sic] through the marshes by an oarsman and a helmsman, while two men stand in the boat. A boy holding two decoy birds in one hand blows into a tube. Unfortunately the relief is damaged and the lower end of the instrument is missing, but it has been tentatively interpreted as a trumpet. If so, it would be the earliest example of such an instrument in Egypt, but it may equally well be a megaphone. The trumpet’s primitive ancestor, or a reed instrument; it may even be a blowpipe and not a musical instrument at all.154

The text of this scene can be read from several areas of interest. The possibility of

an early aerophone developmental chronology is one reading of this depiction.

This historical genealogy of the aerophone is satisfactory enough for the music

153 Manniche, Music and Musicians, 17. 154 Ibid.

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researcher. As Manniche notes, the tube being blown by the boy could possibly be

an early trumpet. If not a trumpet, then possibly an earlier rudimental instrument

of the same family: perhaps the megaphone. The chronology within this depiction

locates one of the earliest of non-‐membranophone instruments of the African Nile

Valley.

Another area of interest in this relief that contributes greatly to the

construction of Africana Studies research methodology for the study of African

musical cultural norms and archetypes concerns the passengers in the boat. Less

pronounced, but immensely significant to this conversation, is the depiction of the

two boatmen, the two men standing and the singular boy. The numeric notations

are not necessarily of import here. What is significant to this reading is the

possibility of an artistic rendering of ritualized musical apprenticing taking place

in this relief. We cannot glance over the presence of the “boy” figure among men

who is allowed to grasp the decoy birds and play an instrument. A major aspect of

the musical tradition of African music, regardless of setting, was the initiation of

musicians through apprenticing.

What can we take from this relief for an emerging methodology? One

possibility is that the “boy” figure’s presence is inconsequential to the hunting

process depicted in this work setting. Though, from what has been widely

researched regarding African hunting groups, we can with some level of certainty

conclude that it is highly unlikely that just anyone was allowed to accompany

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hunters on expedition; it in of its self being a sacred act.155 In addition the

functionality of the “boy’s” instrument— to ‘flush out waterfowl’—underscores a

process of selection, guidance and training. If we argue that his playing was not to

draw out prey we still have to conclude that a certain level of efficiency is still

needed to perform even the simplest of notes, sounds, and or songs on the

aerophone that he is in possession of. This would dovetail with continuing

expectations of apprenticeship in global African music traditions.

Let us refer to Bebey to extend the frame of this conversation. Bebey

establishes two basic facts regarding African musical cultures: 1. That music is an

intricate part of African life, “from the cradle to the grave” and 2. That music in

Africa “covers the widest possible range of expression, including spoken language

and all manner of natural sounds.”156 Bebey states that these two facts would make

one conclude that, “everyone in Africa must, by definition, be a musician.”157 This

conclusion could incorrectly be made of the “boy” figure as well.

The role of apprenticing within African communities is crystalized when

the contents of the boating relief are aligned with Bebey’s musical inferences.

Participation in African ritual musical ceremonies was not open to all. One was

invited, trained, and initiated. Bebey states, “Strict rules govern the choice of

155 The Ndembu people of Zambia for instance perform the Isoma ritual as one of their chidikas (special engagement or obligation). The Isoma chidika deals with procreation. During the Isoma—accompanied by male and female singers—a Wuyag’a initiation is performed for inclusion into the hunter cult. See Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti Structure (Chicago: Aldine Publishing, 1969), 4-‐37.

156 Bebey, African Music, 17. 157 Ibid.

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instruments to be used on specific occasions and the musicians who are permitted

to play them.”158

Nketia underscores Bebey’s position when he notes, “Since the success of a

musical event depends to a large extent on good musical leadership, the

recruitment of musicians is something of prime concern to social groups,

especially where performances are based on differential participation and role

distribution that demand specialization.”159

Musical training in Egypt did occur informally; such as parents singing to

their young children, or older children hearing simple work songs160 such as the

following call-‐and-‐response performance found commonly above tombs of the Old

Kingdom:

Q: O West! Where is the shepherd, the shepherd, the shepherd of the West?

A: The shepherd is in the water with the fish. He speaks with the phagos-‐fish and converses with the oxyrhnchus-‐fish.161

Still, however, a highly specialized process for selection and training of musicians

for important positions and events shepherded the development of apprentice

musicians.

Nketia notes that customs of the Baganda people of East Central Africa

dictates that anyone aspiring to be a flutist of the royal ensemble had, “to be in

attendance at the Palace from the age of ten to twelve years, until he had learned

158 Ibid. (emphasis added) 159 Nketia, The Music of Africa, 56. 160 See Agordoh, Studies in African Music, chap. 3, for additional instances of parental led musical training.

161 Manniche, Music and Musicians, 17. (emphasis added)

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to play the instrument well and had “listened to the ensemble for several years.”162

Many of these young musicians were live in students who trained with relatives,

fathers or master musicians. The sacred selection of musicians was so important

that it sometimes went beyond the realm of the living. On some occasions it

involved spirit mediation. Recalling a conversation with a Baule musician of West

Africa, Bebey tells us:

Because of a dream—or a vision—a man who never touched a musical instrument before in his life became the best harp-‐lute player in his region. How did he intend to pass on his art? Would he teach his own children to play or did he look upon it as a personal gift? Here is his own reply: “I’m not dead yet, so I can’t teach anyone else to play the instrument. When I die the dwarf-‐genii will choose my successor. It could even be someone who isn’t a member of my family.163

Bebey insists that this recollection is not one of naivety but instead demonstrates

the association between humans and music, a “mystical, almost magical

relationship”164 between these two entities. The relationship of the spirit world and

the musician are affirmed in this final statement of Bebey’s conversation with the

Baule musician:

This story also demonstrates that people sometimes learn to play an instrument because they have been more or less forced to do so. Music is a communal undertaking and people tend to become musicians not so much from personal vocation as from a need to fulfill a social obligation.165

162 Nketia, The Music of Africa, 61-‐62. 163 Bebey, African Music, 20. 164 Ibid. 165 Ibid., 22.

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This intersection of spirit and musicianship in the African worldview is an

unambiguous relationship. If engaged and properly contextualized, the work,

secular and sacred songs depicted on reliefs, inscribed on tombs, and elsewhere in

Pharaonic Egypt, can greatly aid future approaches to African music research.

Note again Nketia’s observation, “So far, the importance of the music of Africa in

historical studies of Afro-‐American music has tended to be seen more as providing

a point of departure than as something that continues to be relevant to the

present.”166

Our Chronological Homework: (Re) Inscribing The Framework For Interpretation

In most areas of African music, then, if the starting point of investigation

begins with Pharaonic Egypt, the spirituals of the American South will not be

researched in isolation as only a response to harsh social conditions, but integrated

as part of a protracted rich cultural history and living genealogy. This kind of

genealogical research prioritizes the humanity of the group in question as opposed

to privileging the hierarchy in rule. To avoid these links— to not do as Clarke says,

“our chronological homework”167— is disastrous to the field of African music

research.

166 Nketia, “The Study of African and Afro-‐American Music,” 8. 167 Clarke warns that the world war against our history and our place in history continues. One key element in this war he posits was the attempt to “say Egypt was a part of western Asia or a part of Europe.” To combat this affront he admonishes African-‐centered scholars to, “understand Nile Valley chronology.” If scholars understood and did not ignore or “write off” these important chronologies in Egyptian history, they would avoid being “goddamned lazy scholars [that] haven’t done [their] work.” See Clarke, “The World War against African History since 1968,” 27.

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The major focus in African music research continues to neatly carve away

pieces of these communities and to develop interpretive narratives in almost

complete isolation. This continues despite attempts in what Greg Carr has called

“Disciplinary Africana Studies” to ensure that the existence of prior influences is

no longer written out of the history. Well-‐established erroneous research

approaches to the study of African music include the continuing partitioning of

Pharaonic Egypt away from Africa and positing its original musical traditions as

Northern and Arab; trekking almost exclusively to West Africa in search of the

drum and dance; and traversing across the Atlantic to beginning the musical

traditions of African people there with enslavement. This pastiche approach, like

many others, is rendered useless in an Africana Studies methodological context

that privileges the long narrative of African cultural contributions.

Scholarship has yet to undertake the serious tracing of pathways of ritual

preservation by which what has been dichotomized as “sacred” and “secular” music

and song was deposited in West Africa as communities and families migrated

south out of Egypt. Our understanding of the music produced in more recent eras

and its functions are not as limited as that of the music of Pharaonic Egypt. The

migration of Africans out of Egypt did not detach them from the roots of their

cultural norms. Nketia notes that:

When we turn to the rest of Africa, we find African societies whose musical cultures not only have their historical roots in the soil of Africa, but which also form a network of distinct yet related traditions which overlap in certain aspects of style, practice, or usage,

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and share common features of internal pattern, basic procedure, and contextual similarities. These related musical traditions constitute a family distinct from those of the West or the Orient in their area of emphasis. The most important characteristic of this family of musical traditions is the diversity of expressions it accommodates, a diversity arising from different applications of common procedures and usages. In part, this may be the outcome of the complex historical grouping of African peoples into societies ranging from as few as two thousand people to as many as fifteen million.168

The initial work of Bebey and Nketia in the mid 1950’s to the late 60’s,

began to displace the era of little being known about ‘Authentic African music.’169

Nketia and Bebey sought to introduce the world to traditional African music.

Their refusal to abridge or co-‐op these long standing tradition have laid the

groundwork that future scholars similarly committed can build upon. The

research was not to be insulated; however the field continues to have to be

protected and developed. Bebey noted that the field had attracted sparse ‘public

attention’ and that it may it part be “because it has previously been described in

terms that have tended to imprison it inside the covers of scholarly treatises

instead of making it accessible to all men.”170

The music of West Africa is a continuum of traditions born out of and

resembling the cultural norms of Pharaonic Egypt. Incumbent upon the African-‐

centered researcher is an imperative to always start from the beginning. Consider

168 Nketia, Music of Africa, 4. 169 Bebey, African Music, 1. 170 Ibid., vi.

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the aforementioned reliefs, tomb inscriptions and material findings. These

artifacts of the varying periods of Pharaonic Egypt aid tremendously in our

understanding of the fabric from whom the contemporary work, secular and

spiritual songs were spun. It is vital that we connect these narratives. The

challenge that the African-‐centered scholar is faced with is one of disengagement.

How do we decouple our research from established traditions? This is the

question constantly hovering above and around our work. If we research music of

African origins, would an application of Western standards (read: methodologies)

ever correctly convey the correct rhythms (read: analysis) that we seek to establish.

Manniche, with all of her access to original texts, would not consider associating

the styles and functions of work songs during the 10th dynasty of Egypt, to the

hunter melodies of the Yoruba, with the field hollers of an enslaved Akan woman

in Hazlehurst, Mississippi. The charge to develop methods that will is not

Manniche’s. This is not an indictment of her research. Africana Studies work does

not require interpretation from outsiders. Note Kofie’s remarks on this matter:

All too often African scholars are accused of echoing their master’s voices without finding out how what they may have learnt applies to African reality. This is an attempt to use some of the methods of a discipline to solve African problems. The book deals with pertinent issues in African music but makes references to non-‐African music where necessary. The reason is simply that African music is rediscovering itself after interacting with Western music. Many if not all the terms used in describing African music are “Eurocentric” and can only be understood from the European point of view.171

171 Kofie, Contemporary African Music, 2.

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The western origins of African music research are evident. The African-‐centered

researcher has to imagine new approaches to properly convey the ideas of these

musical cultures. The findings unearthed by outsiders—the work that our

Ancestors have inscribed—have left us, “a roadmap to the things that [we] need to

reclaim.”172 Our research can consider the entirety of concepts found in Ancestral

inscriptions from as far back as we can authenticate. The texts are there for us to

read.173 Developing effective methodologies that can be utilized in future research

will animate our national identities. These identities will be similar to those that

Armah spoke of as being a basic product of a society’s culture.174

With this in mind, the previous two chapters have sketched a working

genealogy of African musical practice with readily identifiable archetypes and

conceptual similarities. The following chapter applies these grounding archetypes

and conceptual similarities to create the Africana Studies methodology and

technique to be applied to the subsequent study of John Coltrane as African

musical exemplar.

172 Carr in Jared Ball’s, I Mix What I Like!: A Mixtape Manifesto, 9 (epigraph). 173 Text here is understood to be anything that can be read. The notion of reading in this context is not reserved for a literal text only. Instead is qualified as any aesthetic development that bears ideas and/or concepts for consideration, analysis or translation.

174 See note 15.

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Each dissertation in the Temple University Department of African-‐American Studies must for all practical purposes be two dissertations in one. In addition to the specific subject area covered, each dissertation must deal as a matter of responsibility with the broad issue of the development of paradigms of Africology.

—Greg Carr175

Maybe I was listening with the wrong part. Maybe she was communicating love to the Black soul and I was using Western-‐trained ears.

—Barbara Crosby176

CHAPTER 4

RESEARCH APPROACH: AN AFRICAN-‐CENTERED PERSPECTIVE

This study utilizes an African-‐centered methodology to guide its analysis,

theories and subsequent findings. The case study at its foundation employs the

long-‐view genealogy of African phenomena to inform the basis of its research

findings.

Many of the ideas posited in this work are interpretive. However, it does

not venture out of the constructs of African analysis in its interpretations. The

African-‐centered perspective, according to Molefi Asante, “places African ideals at

the center of any analysis that involves African culture and behavior.”177 Asante

also asserts that it is “a frame of reference wherein phenomena are viewed from

175 Greg Carr, “African Philosophy of History in the Contemporary Era: Its Antecedents and Methodological Implications for the African Contribution to World History.” PhD diss., Temple University, 1998, p. 114.

176 Barbara Crosby, introduction to Nikki Giovanni, Gemini: An Extended Autobiographical Statement on My First Twenty-‐Five Years of Being a Black Poet (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), ix.

177 Molefi Asante, The Afrocentric Idea (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), 6.

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the perspective of Africa’s…people, concepts, and history from an African world

view.178

The analysis will extend the African-‐centered scholarly positions related to

the music of Africa and Africans in the Americas by considering the following

beliefs:

1. African musical productions are a part of the intellectual arena and unbroken genealogy179 of African historical memory;

2. The music created by Africans in the Americas is connected to both the

literature and oratory performances of African traditional cultures;

3. The music created in America by enslaved and free Africans is not merely a response to adverse condition found in the Americas;

4. Biographies of African American musicians are flawed because of their

inability to connect the musicians to their African antecedents; The major impetus of this study, as with all similarly situated work in Disciplinary

Africana Studies, originates from a lack of proper methodologies and research

tools that can correctly analyze the long memory of African ways of knowing,

produced through cultural developments. This lack of effective methods

necessitates the main objective of this work. At the inception of Africana Studies

as a discipline in the Western Academy there has been a demand from scholars to

develop methodologies derived from an African-‐centered perspective to research

African people and traditions. Talmadge Anderson, reminds us of Nathan Hare’s

proposal at the outset of Black Studies. Hare, Anderson notes, “proposed from the

beginning that Black scholars must develop new norms and values grounded in a

178 Molefi Asante, “The Afrocentric Idea in Education,” Journal of Negro Education (1991): 170, 180. 179 On the concept of “unbroken genealogy,” see Carr, “What Black Studies Is Not,” 181.

80

new (African) ideology and from such ideology new methodologies might

evolve.”180 Essential to this study is the use of effective methodologies, languages,

ideas, philosophical concepts and methods that have been developed within the

discipline of Africana Studies and by others outside of the discipline to research

the vast cultures, histories and peoples of African descent.

Because this is a study anchored in the discipline of Africana Studies, it is

aligned with a normalize set of constructs that directs the research, intra. These

constructs from the inception of the discipline challenged what Anderson calls,

“the traditional theoretical and methodological constructs from the study of

African people.”181 Stipulating that African peoples and their history are reflective

of a distinct set of knowing and understanding of their place in the world, Africana

Studies research methodologies must evolve out of historical and collective African

memory. This study, then, discards prior methods that have a pretense of accruing

to neutral value systems but instead “turn out to be disguised ideology.”182

Framing The Study

This study grows out of the call for improved methodologies that can

effectively frame the history, functions and use of African music. Music historian

Portia Maultsby identifies a void caused by a lack of systematic efforts to

document the Black music tradition as a functional dimension of Black culture.

180 Talmadge Anderson, “Black Studies: Overview and Theoretical Perspectives,” in The African American Studies Reader, ed. Nathaniel Norment Jr. (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 2007), 474.

181 Ibid. 182 James Turner, “African Studies and Epistemology: A Discourse in the Sociology of Knowledge,” in The African American Studies Reader, ed. Nathaniel Norment Jr. (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 2007), 78.

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She explains that, without this void, research materials could have been available

to enhance scholars’ understanding of cultural continuity and change. She

summarizes by stating:

The lack of systematic efforts to document the Black musical tradition as a functional dimension of Black culture has created a void in resource materials that could enhance our understanding of cultural continuity and change. Since the turn of the century, studies have been made of various Black music genres; many of them published before the late 1960’s, and dominated by the works of sociologists from the University of North Carolina, offer little, if any insight into the relationship between Black music and Black culture. This void, in part, stems from the use of an inappropriate methodology for research, which led to the development of a conceptual framework that does not consider music as a manifestation of culture. In addition, conclusions presented in some of these studies are influenced by the biases of primarily white writers, whose cultural orientation limited their capabilities to critically assess the social significance of the Black music tradition.183

In addition to helping to address a lack of effective music research methodology

this work also considers the plethora of flawed biographies of too many African

musicians. Biographies of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Nina Simone, Charlie

Parker, Miles Davis, Billie Holiday are just a few of many biographies that have

been written with failed or underdeveloped approaches to linking Africana

genealogies to the lives and culture of the musicians studied. The lives of the

183 Portia Maultsby, “The Role of Scholars in Creating Space and Validity for Ongoing Changes in Black American Culture,” Black American Culture and Scholarship: Contemporary Issues, ed. Bernice Johnson Reagon (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1985), 13.

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individuals whose music has had a global influence has been an area of interest for

many years by numerous researchers. This study examines the lived experiences of

African musicians and considers saxophonist John William Coltrane’s life as an

exemplar to model the methodology introduced in this chapter. Leonard Brown

observes “that the musical and spiritual legacies of John Coltrane are some of the

most powerful and significant in the history of American and global music.”184 It is

therefore crucial that the examination and narrative of Coltrane’s life and musical

productions be couched in African-‐centered methodology.

Central to this study is the consideration of African music as an aesthetic

production and as an extension of the intellectual underpinnings of African ways

of knowing and conceptualizing their known world. This study’s reinterpretation

of African music history and methodology in Music Studies is grounded in a

methodological frame built upon 1. The Insiders Approach; and 2. African

Conceptual Ways of Knowing.

The Insider’s Approach

Ethnomusicology is the dominant voice in the field of music research.

More specifically, its prime objective is the consideration of non-‐European musical

aesthetics. The field is plagued with European-‐centered researchers with

oppositional assumptions that are all too frequently counter to the normative

assumptions in global African musical traditions. Non-‐African-‐centered

researchers assert that components that make up the production of African

184 Leonard Brown, ed., “Preface,” in John Coltrane & Black America’s Quest for Freedom: Spirituality and the Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), vii.

83

cultural products are “the integral results of their particular cultural

communality.”185 The persistent presence of anti-‐African bias in ethnomusicology

requires that the majority of research on African music and life narratives of

musicians be carried out using the general assumptions of African-‐centered

approaches.

Ethnomusicology has at least one conceptual tool and research technique

that can be repurposed for this study. The insider’s approach, an underutilized

strategy in ethnomusicology, shares objectives with African-‐centered

methodological research approaches. A guiding assumption of this study is that

African music produced on the continent and in the diaspora is rooted in a long

arc of African historical memory. As such, an insider’s approach to this study will

privilege group identity and allow for explanation of musical norms within one’s

culture. The insider’s approach also informs methodological tools that nonmusical

research specialists can use to engage and analyze African musical production,

musicians, and, in the present study’s case, the life and work of John Coltrane on

internally-‐generated terms generated outside of Western musical research norms

and hegemony. In the first edited text on John Coltrane, Leonard Brown states:

This book uses the “insider’s approach” because this approach acknowledges and values the study of music in culture as identified and defined in its own terms and viewed in relation to its own society by individuals who can view its field as members of the music culture as musicians and nonmusical specialists.186

185 Jimmy Stewart, “Introduction to Black Aesthetics in Music,” in The Black Aesthetic, ed. Addison Gayle, Jr. (New York: Anchor Books, 1971), 76.

186 Brown, “Preface,” viii.

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Furthermore, this approach facilitates research into an area of Coltrane’s life and

compositions that has not yet been proposed or addressed. The insider’s approach

gives context and enables an analysis of African musical cultures that have not

been examined by outsiders or generated distinct, culturally grounded approaches

within Western frameworks of research. The insider’s approach has its own set of

assumptions, including one that guides this study: The idea that Africans

throughout the world have musical aesthetic traditions that developed without

external influences. Jimmy Stewart notes that these particular musical traditions

have determined the values, functions, forms and philosophies within the music.187

Building upon the intent of Leonard Brown’s volume, this work’s objectives

are to:

1. Acknowledge the continued relevancy and significance of John Coltrane’s musical and spiritual legacy in contemporary times;

2. Provide broad, rich, and new insights and understanding to the roles and functions of music in Black America’s continued aspirations for freedom and equality, then and now;

3. Contribute to greater knowledge and understanding of how John Coltrane’s sound and music are rooted in Black American spirituality; and

4. Increase knowledge and understanding of the majesty of John Coltrane’s impact and influence as a representative of great master artists and intellectuals.

Both Brown and Stewart share observations that scholarship on African musical

aesthetics is inundated with “white cultural paternalism” that passes judgment on

Black musical creations. As such Stewart admonishes, “The incongruity of this

187 Stewart, “Introduction to Black Aesthetics in Music,” 78.

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situation as a condition of a disjunct cultural situation has been exacerbated at this

present moment to the point that our present necessity for a sequestered body of

critical thought is not even debatable.”188 As a methodological device, the insider’s

approach allows an insider to gather knowledge of the roles and functions of

African music and to merge my lived experiences as a member of this musical

community with research, analysis and theories that I develop.

African Conceptual Ways Of Knowing

This study recognizes the importance of John Coltrane’s music and

intellectual contribution to the history and genealogy of African music. It also

addresses the urgent need of new insights and understanding of African music’s

forms and functions. This study considers’ Brown’s intent as a suitable way to

engage African music and its musicians. However, Brown’s American point of

departure is not entirely suitable for this study. This study, as previously stated,

considers the long arc of African historical memory. The methods used to

construct new paradigms have been assembled in this study to address the

following questions:

1. What are the effective ways to research African music and musicians? 2. What African-‐centered ways of knowing can be utilized as an

epistemological device to engage the research? 3. How can the family and lived experiences of John Coltrane be used as an

exemplar to model new approaches? In order to effectively address these questions, the inside researcher must divorce

himself from foreign epistemologies. As such, this methodology pushes the

188 Ibid.

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departure of the research of African music far beyond the borders of America’s

encroachment upon African cultures. Greg Carr states, “Any study of African

people which does not begin with the recognition of and systematic re-‐connection

to both the concept of African cultural identities and the specific, lived

demonstration of them will only continue to erase Africans as full human begins

and actions in world history.”189 African musical approaches have been

undergirded by their philosophies, which are “animated by a total vision of life.”190

Inasmuch as these beliefs and values shape musical approaches, they demand that

researchers recognize the foundations for these views. The foundations of African

music philosophies begin with the Pharaonic period of Egypt.

Beginning our study in Egypt and moving through time and space allows

this music research to pose innovative queries to prior research. Questions

include: What functions did music serve in intentionally African communities?

What were processes of cultural transmission from one generation to another? In

what ways did Africans improvise in the face of the ordeals of the episodic

moments of enslavement? What is an effective African-‐derived epistemological

model that can be utilized to fashion biographies of African musicians (this

question primarily concerns itself with developing a paradigm that captures the

life of John Coltrane within an African-‐centered lived experience)?

189 Greg Carr, “Teaching and Studying the African(a) Experience: Definitions and Categories,” in School District of Philadelphia African-‐American History High School Course Curriculum (Philadelphia: Songhai Press, 2006), 12.

190 Stewart, “Introduction to Black Aesthetics in Music,” 80.

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Rationale For Use

This study employs the six theoretical classifications of Carr’s Africana

Conceptual Categories model as a methodology in tandem with the integration of

select secondary considerations. [see Table 1] This model has the ability to capture

cultural norms of historical and contemporary African ways of knowing and being.

It closely considers the historical, philosophical and linguistic norms of African

communities and its decedents when interrogating their cultural productions.

Carr notes that, “Each category is always present in human interaction: being able

to distinguish between them as they relate to the African experience in recent

human history (1500-‐present) will aid immeasurably in helping us understand the

difference between Africana Studies and the simple study of materials involving

Africana.”191

191 Greg Carr, “Africana Studies and the Six Conceptual Categories: A System for Studying African People, Places and Culture,” in Introduction to Afro-‐American Studies I: Course Syllabus (Spring Semester, 2010), 7.

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Table 1. Concept Primary Inquires Secondary Considerations

Social Struc

ture

What is/are the social structures in place for the people discussed? In other words, what social structure do the people being discussed live under at the time we are studying?

Under optimal conditions, e.g., prior to enslavement and colonialism, what were the forms and functions of music in African communities within African nations? How did the forms and functions of the music change during the periods of enslavement, colonialism, and/or of imposed ideologies?

Gov

erna

nce

How did the Africans being studied organize themselves during this period and under the particular social structure they find themselves in and/or subject to?

How did intentional African communities regardless of their current conditions—be it optimal or not—maintain, organize and transmit cultural music norms to each concurrent generation? What are the rules that govern the selection, training and initiation of potential musicians?

Way

s of Kno

wing/ Systems of

Thou

ght

What ways/views/senses (e.g. ideas about the nature, purpose, function and process of existence and being) did Africans develop to explain the worlds they lived in during the period being studied, and how did they use those ways to address fundamental issues of living during this period?

How was music used as an extension of the intellectual understandings of these communities’ ways of knowing and responses to conditions as they presented themselves? In addition what traditional knowledge systems can be appropriated into a methodology/epistemological device to research and write about African music and musicians?

Scienc

e an

d Te

chno

logy

What types of devices were developed to shape nature and human relationships with animals and with each other during this period and how did they affect Africans and others?

As technology advanced and was improved upon what affects did it have on the development of musical instruments and musician performances as well as the oral/aural transmission of the music? What effects did technology have on the Pan-‐African community of musicians and its audience?

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Mov

emen

t and

Mem

ory

How did/do Africans remember this experience? Experiences that include: life/communities before enslavements, the enslavement period, ritual and traditional ways of doing.

How is music used to explain these experiences? How is the prominence of musical performance in these ritualized and traditional spaces explained/understood? What is the process for initiation as a performer in these ritualized spaces?

Cultural M

eaning

-‐ Mak

ing

What specific art, dance and/or inscriptions (literature/orature), otherwise characterizable as “texts and practices” did Africans create during this period?

How can we use a time and space orientation to understand the music produced, and improvised so as to decouple ourselves from commodified imposed genre classifications?

This conceptual model provides required space for the consideration of the vast

cache of phenomena of African experiences to be interrogated through a lens

whose orientation is rooted in ancient African ways of knowing and being. This

study does not concern itself with how Africans made sense of the world by

analyzing their cultural norms in the context of oppressive social structures. The

employment of the Africana Conceptual model allows us to decouple from

theoretical frames that insist on pathological beginnings and cultural synthesis.

This model forces us to imagine ways of seeing the world through African oral

transmissions, folklore, primary and secondary texts.

Decoupling this work from prior used theoretical frames allows for the

utilization of the introduced methodological model of the Bantu-‐Kongo

cosmography. The employment of the Africana Conceptual Categories aligned

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with the proposed Bantu-‐cosmology methodology supports the development of

the methodology in its application throughout this study and in particular in

exemplar of John Coltrane’s life as a demonstration of the model. The conceptual

categories allow the proposed model to consider the lives of African people and

their cultural norms from their particular lived experiences. As such the

conceptual categories will be considered at each Vee phase of Coltrane’s life and in

addition as cultural and historical norms are engaged the primary inquires and

secondary considerations will inform the analysis.

The Methods

The theoretical nature of this work requires tools that carve out a previously

non-‐extant academic space. This study uses these newly minted academic methods

to uncover underutilized forms for research in African music. The study applies a

two-‐prong approach to its inquiry.

The first of these prongs is content analysis. The content includes texts,

inscriptions and artifacts of Pharaonic Egypt that offer us insight into the musical

traditions of African communities. Additionally, an analysis of West African and

Black American musical traditions writings and oral transmissions concerns itself

with threading the continuity of cultural norms through the transmission between

communities of musicians. The changes (or what Eurocentric scholars call the

“evolution of the music”) can be attributed to African musicians’ intellectual

responses to the cultural subterfuge of imposed definition of community. Ron

Wellburn, speaking of Black music in America, notes:

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If we speak of the “development” of music, that term, like “evolution,” ought to be understood as having had an involuntary impetus. It is the politics of culture in the United States that is responsible for the character of black music.192

An imperative exists for new tools to research the aesthetics of African music. This

research asks how Africans, in spite of episodic disruptions over the straits of time

and space, maintained and reproduced musical traditions from their historical

memory.

These tools allow for the engagement of the bevy of biographies written

about John Coltrane. While Coltrane did not write his own biography, this study

does an analysis of additional written material, including his interviews, liner notes,

written letters, and interviews by those close to him. Outsiders have written the

overwhelming majority of biographies of Coltrane. Their work proclaims a level of

appreciation for Coltrane and his music. However, as outsiders they suffer from

what Leonard Brown describes as the inability to listen, hear and really appreciate

Coltrane’s music.193 Brown observes that, at the time of Coltrane’s greatest

notoriety, jazz critics were primarily white and had “little to no knowledge of or

respect for Black American history and culture.”194

Many current Coltrane biographers share another trait. While they are

knowledgeable of the prescribed set of norms concerning aesthetic values and

competency based on Western models, they lack the ability to consider the long-‐

192 Ron Wellburn, “The Black Aesthetic Imperative,” in The Black Aesthetic, 126. 193 Brown, “In His Own Words: Coltrane’s Responses to His Critics,” 13. 194 Ibid.

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view genealogy that informs John Coltrane’s historical memories and musical

inheritance. As such, the analysis of Coltrane’s own words, the recollection of

those closest to him, and those who have written about him as insiders is crucial to

the development of the aforementioned biographical methodology.

The second prong of this study’s method applies a narrative analytical lens

derived from the afore-‐mentioned cosmology of the Bantu-‐Kongo as an

epistemological device to express the collective wisdom and experiences of African

music and musicians. The use of the Bantu-‐Kongo cosmology as a research device

places us almost entirely outside Western modalities of music research. Seba

Kimbwandende Kia Bunseki Fu-‐Kiau states that his desire for the second edition of

his text Tying the Spiritual Knot was for researchers to use it as “one of the basic

tools to understanding the “scientific” structures of the development of old,

African traditional scholarship and its ancient schools.”195 Fu-‐Kiau asserts that

these basic conceptual tools require sharpening for the full realization of the

explanatory value of the raw materials that is the Bantu-‐Kongo cosmology, a

mound of raw materials that serve the interest of the individual and society. This

study uses the cosmology and the “secret aspects of the Bantu teaching”196 as an

epistemological device for analyzing John Coltrane’s life and work as an exemplar

of African music and musicians, thereby enhancing its dual contribution to

Africana Studies methodology and the application of that methodology to the

195 Kimbwandende Kia Bunseki Fu-‐Kiau, Tying the Spiritual Knot: African Cosmology of the Bantu Kongo—Principles of Life & Living (Canada: Athelia Henrietta Press, 2001), 14.

196 Ibid.

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subject at hand.

The Bantu-‐Kongo Cosmology As A Methodological Device

The next step in assembling a research methodology for the current study

requires the reiteration of “The African Worldview” as the foundational concept

for unpacking and agreeing upon aesthetic meanings and intents of language and

music. This non-‐negotiable point of departure is informed by the works of

foundationalist thinkers in the area of African-‐Centered theory.197 Approaching

the cosmology of the Bantu-‐Kongo and utilizing it as a methodology of inquiry,

according to Greg Carr, “requires integrating the African-‐Centered Worldview and

the Black Radical Tradition in a balance of the relationship between historical

events and narratives of those events.”198 The integration of these historical and

narrative events encompasses: 1. The earliest of African memories and cultures; 2.

The experiences of the Maafa and subsequent enslavement in America; 3. The

adaptation and improvisation of cultural norms under harsh conditions; and 4.

The apprenticing in and transmission of cultural norms to the next generation.

The imperative to assert and utilize this proposed methodology comes from a lack

of suitable models that utilize African ways of knowing to research the purposes of

African derived music or to narrate the lives of African musicians. Portia

Maultsby’s observation is worth recalling again:

197 See note 176. 198 Greg Carr, “‘You Don’t Call the Kittens Biscuits’: Disciplinary Africana Studies and the Study of Malcolm X,” in Malcom X: A Historical Reader, eds. James Conyers Jr. and Andrew P. Smallwood (Durham, Carolina Academic Press, 2008), 353-‐75.

94

This void, in part, stems from the use of an inappropriate methodology for research, which led to the development of a conceptual framework that does not consider music as a manifestation of culture. In addition, conclusions presented in some of these studies are influenced by the biases of primarily white writers, whose cultural orientation limited their capabilities to critically assess the social significance of the Black music tradition.199

The Bantu-‐Kongo cosmology is a symbolic understanding of the universe and life

in it, including the position of human beings relative to seen and unseen forces. It

offers a creation narrative as well as what the Pharaonic Egyptians would have

called a “Sebayt,” or wisdom teaching of morals, ways of doing and beliefs. This

understanding lays the groundwork for the present study’s approach to music

research. The researcher approaching this music must understand the historical

world that the African musician inhabits and not just narrate the short time span

of their lives. To the contrary, in order for the researcher to be effective she must

consider in every way possible the long historical memory of the culture that

produced the musician and the music that they subsequently produce. If the

musician has a sense of obligation to this cultural memory, their creative work will

speak to it. Therefore, the researcher’s intent must be to code and recode this

long-‐view history, a process that can only take place if they understand the

nuances of the culture.

199 Portia Maulstby, “The Role of Scholars in Creating Space and Validity for Ongoing Changes in Black American Culture,” 13.

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Figure 3. Bantu-‐Kongo cosmogram.

The Bantu-‐Kongo cosmogram [see Figure 3] is made up of two primary lines.

These intersecting vertical and horizontal lines designate the separations of worlds

and the life cycles of the muntu (human). The kalunga along the horizontal line of

the cosmogram represents, among other ideas, the division of terrestrial life,

muntus, submarine life and the spiritual world. The Bantu-‐Kongo assert that an

ocean of water divides the physical and spiritual world.

Fu-‐Kiau explains, “Kalunga became also the idea of immensity,

[sensele/wayawa] that one cannot measure; an exit and entrance, source and

origin of life, potentialities [n’kingunzambi] the principle god-‐of-‐change, the force

that continually generates.”200 The kalunga, according to the Bantu-‐Kongo,

200 Fu-‐Kiau, Tying the Spiritual Knot, 21.

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entered the mbungi (the vast emptiness) and charged it with enough energy to

generate all things into existence.

Represented at each watershed demarcation along the cosmogram are sun

points.201 Each of these points along the cosmogram has its specific meaning and

color. Starting from the lowest point and going vertically counterclockwise, the

musoni (yellow) is the beginning of life. It is what Fu-‐Kiau calls the “go order to all

beginnings.” The kala (black) represents birth. This moment is where one is born

into existence out of the mbungi and into the physical world and where speech

begins. The highest moment along the cosmogram’s physical half-‐sphere is the

tukula (red). The tukula is crucial to the development of the muntu and the kanda

(community). The tukula represents maturity and leadership. The tukula also

signals the highest human aspiration in the physical world. Fu-‐Kiau expounds that

in this moment, “inventions, great works of art, etc., are accomplished while

passing through this zone of life.”202 As life rounds the cosmogram, it enters the

luvemba (white) phase. The luvemba is the end of the physical experience, as we

understand it. In the luvemba human beings enter our climactic transition into

the spiritual world—beneath the kalunga line.

African music must be researched on African terms. In spite of the severe

circumstances that required responses illustrative of slight changes in the shape of

201 The idea of the Vee is so sacred within the Bantu-‐Kongo belief system that it was not publicy discussed until 1966 by local masters. Fu-‐Kiau informs us that the “Kikumbi institution was the only institution that disseminated not only the secrecy and sacredness of the first ‘V’ to its candidates, but its mystic meanings as well.” (Fu-‐Kiau, 127, 130).

202 Ibid., 140.

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the music, it is still tethered to the foundational assumptions in African cultural

creation. Wellburn sternly admonishes us, “We cannot afford to allow our music

to remain a surrogate for white American psychosexual allusions.”203 Wellburn

speaks of events in the future that would necessitate the development of music

that is a reflection of our “strong relationship to our mystical nature and

conception of the universe”.204 These developments would be a continuum of our

motions towards emancipation. The present study echoes Wellburn concern

regarding the protection of scholarship on Black music and, ultimately, Black

music itself. As such, the subscribed methodology and methods utilized

throughout this study work to sustain the survival of the music and its musicians

throughout the world, wherever Africans find themselves, as well to restrict the

harassment from without through commonly used hegemonic research methods.

Materials And Procedures

This study uses a two-‐pronged critical research method approach. [see

Table 2]. This approach includes a content analysis of archival data and primary

source texts as well as the application of the secondary questions informed by the

major categories from the Africana Conceptual Categories matrix. The sampling

and data collection is divided into three main categories. The criteria for each

category were then used to engage the three research questions.

203 Wellburn, 141. 204 Ibid.

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Table 2.

RESEARCH QUESTION

DATA SAMPLE METHOD

What is the genealogy of African music? And what were some of its major functions in the African community?

Archival data, architectural reliefs, and primary source texts for Dynastic Egypt, Akan, and Western Africa

Content Analysis: Primary source materials from Pharaonic Egypt and Western African communities were analyzed for cultural meaning as interpreted through translation from archeological reliefs and primary texts. After analysis and translation functions and forms of cultural continuity in musical cultures were considered between the Egypt and West Africa.

How did Africans continue to create and inscribe cultural meanings through music in spite of enslavement?

Archival data, primary source texts of interviews from various jazz musicians—living and deceased Interviews, letters, album titles; covers; and liner notes on John Coltrane Bantu-‐Kongo cosmograph

Content Analysis and Second Consideration Questions

How can African philosophical and cosmological ideas be used to inform the development of the music and its functions to the rest of Africa?

Bantu-‐Kongo cosmograph

Implementing of proposed methodology using the Bantu-‐Kongo cosmograph: The Bantu-‐Kongo cosmographic philosophies were utilized as an epistemological device in the developing of the proposed music research methodology. In addition John Coltrane’s life and musical career was used as an exemplar in the demonstration of the methodology.

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Damn the rules, it's the feeling that counts. You play all twelve notes in your solo anyway. —John William Coltrane205

This is the music of the African muse/I just want to be of use to my ancestors/It’s holy work and it’s dangerous not to know that ‘cause you could die like an animal down here.

—Abbey Lincoln206

CHAPTER 5

WHM MSW

BREAKING THE CONTRACT: A RETURN TO OUR FOUNDATIONS207

It was noted at the onset of this dissertation that one of its primary foci

would be to develop a methodology for utilizing traditional African ways of

knowing to analyze and suggest effective ways to interpret African musical

traditions. The totality of this work reaches back to embrace the distant and

recent past as well as present experiences of African people’s existence and ways of

knowing: Their wells of deep thought. This chapter presents a corpus of ideas that

have been produced from foundationalist thinkers engaged in acts of conceptual

recovery of traditional African philosophies. These foundationalists prioritize the

205 John Coltrane, source unknown. 206 Abbey Lincoln, Ford Foundation Jazz Study Group (notes taken by Fred Moten, November 1999). 207 Whm Msw: The Repetition of the Birth (pronounced without vowels) was declared over four thousand years ago by Amen M Hat during the Egyptian Middle Kingdom. Whm Msw, according to Jacob Carruthers, was a route to restore divisions and conflicts from previous eras. During the whm msw, Carruthers notes, “Old texts were revised and new genres were established for the creation of new literary directions.” Of particular interest in Carruthers’ summation was that the whm msw was not only to recall from memory past histories but instead, “was the establishment of a new edifice on the firm foundations of ancient traditions.” More on the whm msw and its implicatons will be discussed, infra. See Jacob Carruthers, “An African Historiography for the 21st Century,” 47-‐72; and Carr and Watkins, “Appendix 1—Inaugural Meeting of the African World History Project,” 327-‐53 (see note 14).

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“restoration of the African image.”208 In so doing, they tethered African

philosophies and ways of knowing and doing from across the continent to the

process of formal intellectual inquiry. This continental departure led them to

“emphasize that Kush and Kemet are to the rest of Africa what Greece and Rome

are to the rest of Europe.”209

This is an attempt to restore to our national identity ancient ways of doing.

These ancient ways are timely and effective for our present day and for generations

yet to come. They are the ways transmitted from the Netcheru to the scribes, the

djelis would in turn pass it along to elders, who would then entrust it to the

younger generation to protect and instruct those yet to come. In all of these

movements, the musician was present. In this intergenerational system, musicians

took note of these ways and expressed them through sound. Carruthers, quoting

Joseph Ki-‐Zerbo states that, “History is the memory of nations. Unless one chooses

to live in a state of unconsciousness and alienation, one cannot live without

memory, or [with] a memory that belongs to someone else.”210 The musicians were

central in and to the recording, recoding and interpreting matters of importance

and encoding that historical memory through compositions.

The tools used to restore historical memory will determine how nationhood

projects are navigated. The tools will determine our intellectual directions. Seba

Clarke’s metaphor of the compass is worth noting here:

208 Carruthers, “An African Historiography for the 21st Century,” African World History Project, 65. 209 Ibid. 210 Ibid., 48.

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History, I have often said, is a clock that people use to tell their political time of day. It is also a compass that people use to find themselves on the map of human geography. History tells a people where they have been and what they have been. It also tells a people where they are and what they are. Most importantly, history tells a people where they still must go and what they still must be.211

A recurrent theme of this dissertation and the academic genealogy in which it

works has been the proposition that normative set of assumptions must be

established before the direction of a study is finalized. Emphasizing the

relationship of an individual or group’s ideological positions to their social choices,

Valethia Watkins notes, “The assumption one holds will shape the kinds of

answers one seeks and can influence the types of questions a researcher is likely to

ask.”212 The assumptions collected in this chapter stem from research on the ethos

of African cultural norms. These assumptions hold that cultural aesthetics that

were created and developed have extended histories. The cultural productions

birthed from the labor of the musicians are not contemporary reactions to world

events but are, rather, memories affixed into their history. These memories are

fluid and extend beyond our sensory notions of time and space. They couch

themselves in present moments but are reflections of the past and future. In The

African-‐Centered Philosophy of History Greg Carr writes:

The ways in which humans apprehend and order time and space—and their particular definitions of memory and reason as well—reflect their particular experiences and the cultures that they have developed to make

211 Clarke, foreword to African World History Project, xvii. (emphasis added) 212 Watkins, “Black Feminist Gender Discourse,” 22.

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sense of those experiences in a systematic, structured, and institutional fashion. Still, there are commonalities in the materials and methods that humans use to know and use to make sense of time and space that form the basic building blocks of human identity.213

Thus the necessity of whm msw—the rebirth: a return: a reclamation of that which

has been forgotten—misappropriated.

Across the Atlantic on American shores—dismembered214 and enslaved,

Africans held on to cultural traditions, and when needed—which was very

frequent—stylized production forms from available materials found in the

geographical space that they survived [≠ lived] in, and improvised the cultural

functions to necessitate the time; be it affixed or extended. Nathan Mackey

suggests that these improvisational moments are broken claims(s) to connection.215

The broken claim to connection is a deployed assertion of music and speech. Fred

Moten infers that these assertions occur, “between Africa and African America that

seek to suture corollary, asymptotically divergent ruptures . . . .”216 The objective

here is to bring back to our national identity intentional practices of cultural

norms. These divergent ruptures were in need of sutures because of the, “advent

of the slave industry and subsequent colonization as painful disruptions that must

be repelled by building on the foundations of African traditions.”217 It is in these

moments that Africans in America began to create a non-‐traditional memory.

213 Carr, “The African-‐Centered Philosophy of History,” 293. 214 See notes 23, 24. 215 Nathaniel Mackey, “Bedouin Hornbook,” Callaloo Fiction Series, vol. 2 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucy, 1986), 34.

216 Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 6.

217 Carruthers, “An African Historiography for the 21st Century,” African World History Project, 66.

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Carruthers calls it a move toward, “Pan-‐African memory—racial memory if you

please.”218

This non-‐traditional racial memory born from historical memory and

necessitated by current conditions began a phenomenon of reinterpretation.219

Their existing circumstances left enslaved Africans with few alternatives to

maintain their cultural norms. Of these limited choices, reinterpretation, Gomez

suggest was the lone option. In Exchanging Our Country Marks, he notes:

In music, art, folklore, language, and even social structure, there is sufficient evidence to conclude that people of African descent were carefully selecting elements of various cultures, both African and European, issuing into combinations of creativity and innovation. They borrowed what was of interest from the external society, and they improved upon previously existing commonalities of African cultures in such ways that, with regard to music for example, the slaves’ “style, with its overriding antiphony, its group nature, its pervasive functionality, its improvisational character . . . remained closer to the musical styles and performances of West Africa and the Afro-‐American music of the West Indies and South America than to the musical style of Western Europe.”220

Armah sums up the role of the African scholar even when we find ourselves in less

than optimal spaces. He states, “The relevant fact is that we have an antidote to

the poisons: if we step outside of our formal education, we can look at African

realities and from our well-‐researched perceptions build up an accurate vision of

218 Ibid. 219 Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks, 10. 220 Ibid., 10-‐11.

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our world, a worldview.”221 Crucial to this process, Armah suggests, is the

translation and recovery of African languages and cultural aesthetics.


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there is a phantom language in my mouth. a tongue beneath my tongue. will i ever remember what i sound like. will i ever come home. —african american i i lost a whole continent. a whole continent from my memory. unlike all other hyphenated americans my hyphen is made of blood. feces. bone. when africa says hello my mouth is a heartbreak because i have nothing in my tongue to answer her. i do not know how to say hello to my mother —african american ii can you be a daughter. if you have no mother language. —african american iii222 The slaves’ suffering and the fury of the revolt is united in a belief: freedom. The means from this freedom cannot adhere to the concept of beauty prevalent in white aesthetics; it necessarily has to be a subversion of those aesthetics. —Jorge Lima Barreto223

Motherwit: Reclaiming Our Languages—Reframing Our Aesthetic Values

Subsumed in our traditions are two mediums of culture that are

instrumental in our reclamation project. The first of these is language. The

second, often informed by the former, and of equal importance is aesthetics.

These two complimentary systems have to be considered in the developing of a

222 Nayyirah Waheed, SALT (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013), 109-‐11. 223 Jorge Lima Barreto, Quoted in Arnaldo Xavier, “The Greatest Poet God Creole,” Callaloo 18, no. 4 (1995): 781.

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suitable framework to build a methodological approach to music that suitably

encompasses African culture and values.

Both language and aesthetic ideals inform our assumptions. Through these

two systems we are presented from birth with concepts of meaning, definitions of

beauty and notions of the profane. In fact Ngugi wa Thiong’o posits that, “since

culture does not just reflect the world in images but actually through those very

images conditions a child to see that world in a certain way, the colonial child was

made to see the world and where he stands in it as seen and defined by or reflected

in the culture of the language of impositions.”224 Cultural ideals are engrained into

societal fabrics that we will engage knowingly or unconsciously.

There is power within language and aesthetic values. Leonard Koren notes

that, “Virtually everything we know about the world, except that which is

genetically encoded, comes to us through our senses ad is then intellectually

processed in one way or another.”225 The dominance of these systems is self-‐

evident and can be used to our benefit. In Something Torn and New, Thiong’o

again writes, “Language is a communication system and a carrier of culture by

virtue of being simultaneously the means and carrier of memory—what Frantz

Fanon calls bearing the weight of civilization.”226 Aesthetic values that are often

influenced by language systems can be crippling when wielded over an oppressed

group.

224 Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonizing the Mind (Harare: Zimbabwe Publishing House, 1986), 15-‐16. 225 Leonard Cohen, Which “Aesthetics” Do You Mean: Ten Defnitions (California: Imperfect Publishing, 2010), 53.

226 Thiong’o, Decolonizing the Mind, 20.

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Clyde Taylor states in The Mask of the Art that:

This book tries to make a contribution to an important but still scattered discussion. The way people, things, and ideas are influenced by the social and political interests mediating their presentation—the politics of representation—has become increasingly relevant with the enlarged role played by filtering and reproduction in our diet of intellectual impressions. Specifically, I challenge the veracity and probity of the “aesthetic,” the overdeveloped paradigm for control of our values regarding art and beauty, an eighteenth-‐century intellectual plantation from whose grip most of us have yet to free ourselves.227

Language and its power in the control of oppressive regimes reinforce the regimes

ideology. Gomez notes that, “Language was co-‐conspirator in the process of

enslavement, a veritable “colonization of the mind.” Language became

synonymous with the condition of servility, and as such was reinvented, having

vaulted over symbolism to achieve substance itself.”228 Many foundationalist

thinkers have long considered reclamation of African languages as paramount in

resolving the strains of enslavement and colonization. Languages are reservoirs of

our history. Adisa Ajamu notes that the, “use of African language addresses one of

the key issues on the construction of an African world history: the learning and use

of African languages as a technique for decolonizing the African mind.”229

Beyond the range of language are the ideological underpinnings of what

Clyde Taylor calls the “hypodermic effect”. This effect described by Taylor is, “a

227 Clyde Taylor, The Mask of the Art: Breaking the Aesthetic Contract—Film and Literature, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), xiii.

228 Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks, 171. 229 Carr and Watkins, “Appendix 1 – Inaugural Meeting of the African World History Project,” 337 (see note 14).

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belief that an image projected to an audience enters that audience’s consciousness

like a hypodermic needle injection into the mainstream of its mind”230 What

Taylor suggest is of some significance. In as much as we are dismembered from

traditional languages and are almost completely tethered to foreign linguistic

forms our historical memory will continue to remain disrupted. To the extent that

our language choices are couched in oppressive regimes our memories will

continue to be projected to us as forgeries.231 Taylor makes note of a common

‘liberation-‐minded’ creed, “to learn the oppressor’s language is to imbibe his

culture, and to imbibe his culture is to submit to cultural inferiority.”232

The process of recovery and restoration of traditional African languages offers one

of the most impactful solutions to the study of “getting our problems straight.”

Congolese scholar Kimbwandende Kia Bunseki Fu-‐Kiau’s states:

Africanists and all African wisdom lovers, likewise, must be interested in the study of African languages in order to avoid yesterday’s biased blunders. How can someone be a true Africanist if he/she is not able to speak a single African language? How could he/she represent a system he/she dares not truly taste and feel? Food tastes good only if one can taste and feel the mind and heart of the person who cooked it. This applies to cultures as well. A systematic understanding therefore is possible only if one can taste and feel the radiation beauty [n’nienzi a minienie] of the language that generates that culture.233

230 Taylor, The Mask of the Art, 177. 231 This idea is taken in part from Cedric Robinson’s tome Forgeries of Memory and Meaning: Blacks and the Regimes in American Theatre and Film before World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).

232 Taylor, The Mask of the Art, 176. 233 Fu-‐Kiau, Tying the Spiritual Knot, 10-‐11.

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What Fu-‐Kiau suggests is axiomatic. In order to understand our culture,

traditional languages must be engaged. Language is the essence of the culture, the

kernel through which traditional ideas stem and in this setting is reanimated.

Thiong’o suggest that culture is loss not only in the dismembering of language but

also with the imposition of a foreign tongue. He infers that:

To starve or kill a language is to starve and kill a people’s memory bank. And it is equally true that to impose a language is to impose the weight of experience it carries and its conception of self and otherness—indeed the weight of its memory, which includes religion and education.234

Kalamu ya Salaam concretizes Fu-‐Kiau and Thiong’o’s complimentary views in his

1995 essay “It Didn’t Jes Grew: The Social and Aesthetic Significance of African

American Music.” Salaam looks at GBM as a medium in which African languages

exist and culture germinated and bloomed. Salaam writes that he:

addresses language as both a basic means of communication and as a tool for artistic expression; the foundational aesthetics of African American music which I refer to as GBM (Great Black Music); and the state and significance of the four major genres of GBM in the contemporary setting—Gospel, or religious music; Jazz; and Black Pop or R&B, which includes everything from Jump Blues, Doo-‐Wop, Soul, and Dunk to New Jack Swing and, arguably, Rap (as an extension of R&B). This essay is an attempt not simply to explain what GBM is and how it functions within the Black community, but to contextualize both the total significance of and worldview implicit in GBM.235

234 Thiong’o, Decolonizing the Mind, 20. 235 Salaam,“It Didn’t Jes Grew: The Social and Aesthetic Significance of African American Music,” African American Review 29, no. 2, Special Issues on the Music (Summer 1995), Indiana State University, 351-‐52.

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Restoring African language then is not for the exclusive exercise of memory and

repetition but also serves as a silo of culture, a practice where conversations with

our cultural antecedents can take place intergenerationally. This process is not an

easy undertaking or a casual engagement. Fu-‐Kiau admonishes that the relevance

of his text should not be seen as unimportant but instead as a contribution to the

accumulative experience of knowing and:

Not [as] a collection of some data for some academic exercise which, usually, consists of transferring bones from one graveyard to another. It is a mound of raw materials that require sharp tools and trained minds to work with for individual, societal, and/or academic interests.236

Much like the functional applications of African proverbs— to express the

collective experiences and wisdom of its people— musical productions within

African traditions serve a similar purpose. Even within the confines of

enslavement the function of music and its producers remained essentially the

same. Music served as translator for enslaved Africans, especially during the

momentary challenge of communication, through the process of forced language

divorcing.237 The creation of new musical developments still adhered to historical

236 Fu-‐Kiau, Tying the Spiritual Knot, 14. 237 This does not suggest that Africans completely lost or discontinued usage of their traditional languages, syntax, etc. Evidence supports the fact that the earliest of Africans enslaved in America retained and passed on traditional languages to future generations. Over time and through future generations, many traditional African languages were synthesized into the dominant tongue and eventually said languages riffed off of English primarily. All the while, however, traditional syntax and ideas remained in use even to this day. For ways in which languages in varying African communities in America were transmitted and translated and how English was rejected, learned and adapted, see Michael Gomez, “Talking Half African,” in Exchanging Our Country Marks. Lisa Green’s master work, African-‐American English: A Linguistic Introduction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002) is worthy of consideration. In addition, Geneva Smitherman’s Talkin and

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memory. Salaam approaches this process of translation through the sacred act of

naming. He asks:

So what shall we call this child? Naming is a sacred act. For slaves and the descendants of slaves, naming is not only sacred; naming is also revolutionary. When a slave names her or himself, in effect that slave consciously asserts a sense of self which exists outside of the purview and control of the master. Naming can be as simple as selecting a few words to call a newborn baby, or as complex as selecting and propagating a word or phrase to call a people or land.238

This naming ritual extended into the development of music. Salaam adds, “But

although we were denied expression of our native languages, being the creative

people we are, we not only developed our own approach to the master’s tongue,

but we went one better: We created a nonverbal language which expressed our

worldly concerns as well as our spiritual aspirations. This language we created is

‘the music.’239 Salaam suggests that Great Black Music became our native tongue

in this process of recovery and cultural retention. He summarizes in this way:

Why do I claim GBM as the “mother tongue” and SAE [Standard American English] as a second language, with what was once called “Black English” as a third

Testifyin—The Language of Black America (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1977) makes considerable contributions to the context and history of Black language use within Black culture. Also of interest here is Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory & the Foundations of Black America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 75, which notes one observer’s recollection of Africans in Rhode Island on election day, demonstrated “great delight to the young and animated sons of Africa,” who found the time to entertain and instruct by telling tales in their native languages. In fact, the announcement of the election of a new governor of the blacks was known to occasion “a general shout . . . every voice upon its highest key, in all the various languages of Africa,” which meant a sense of community, of underlying cultural unity, was felt despite linguistic and other differences among them.” (emphasis added)

238 Kalamu ya Salaam, “Naming and Claiming Our Own,” Black American Culture and Scholarship: Contemporary Issues, 77.

239 Salaam,“It Didn’t Jes Grew: The Social and Aesthetic Significance of African American Music,” 352.

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category somewhere between the two? GBM was developed as a language of communication and cultural affirmation among ourselves and specifically ourselves. “Black English” was our means of day-‐to-‐day communication among ourselves about mundane and ordinary matters.240

Salaam’s ideas underscore the linguistic work of Nissio Fiagbedzi. Fiagbedzi, in

Nature of the Aesthetic in the African Musical Arts describes the efforts of the Ewe

people of Ghana in preserving their cultural identity and musical worldview

through language. The Ewe found a way to resolve the forced language of

missionaries to delineate the Western imposed idea of art with that of their

traditional way of knowing the musical arts. The Ewe’s word for art is adanu.

Nissio states that adanu:

Translates to be clever, able, and skillful but also cleverness or zaza (in the sense of being mentally quick, resourceful, and ingenuous). Similarly the verbs do-‐adanu meaning to advise transforms into adanudodo (the act of counseling or one such counsel given).241

Thus the musical arts of the Ewe is best understood as adanudowo or performative

arts or occupations that involve the creation, performance, and/or production of

humanly organized sounds that are acceptable as musical and African primarily by

Africans. And while there is no umbrella term for music in traditional Ewe

language, it should be noted that music to the Ewe reveals truth.

Fiagbedzi summarizes the importance of musical arts as such:

240 Ibid., 354. 241 Nissio Fiagbedzi, An Essay On The Nature of The Aesthetic in The African Musical Arts (Ghana: Royal Crown Press Limited, 2005), 2.

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The Ewe frequently describes the musical arts as modzakadenu (li., modzaku: boredom; de: remove: nu: thing i.e. boredom-‐removing object). This attraction away from pain made emphatic by observed differences in Nature as well as in society provide the condition for making aesthetic choices that satisfy rather than displease; are of perceived merit rather than worthlessness; beautiful rather than ugly; motion based rather than static, and balancing more preferably than imbalanced or unbalancing.242

What then in the absence of an ability to write in traditional African

languages can the African-‐centered scholar utilize to ground their work in

historical memory of their people? If the languages convey ideas, meanings,

history what is lost in our use of foreign languages? What ideologies are being

reinforced—perhaps even subtly—in our work to create new theories and

epistemologies that advances our interests? Armah speaks of Arab and European

languages and the ambivalence among Africans in using such languages as

logical.243 This move away from oppressive regimes and back toward traditional

languages is a slow walk. It is a long-‐range effort that involves planning, mastery

and training. We must still be tacticians in our approaches. Armah’s

admonishment is worth noting in its entirety here:

However, if as writer we see ourselves as not only in the hot, immediate fight for power, but in the long-‐range, value oriented effort to envision, then to design and create a better society, then two considerations become important: First, no longer is the need for speed in the process of social change so urgent and immediate that we can divorce style from substance or,

242 Ibid., 21. 243 Armah, Eloquence of the Scribes, 241

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indeed, sacrifice style altogether. Second, if what we want to do is to plan for long-‐range change, then we cannot hide behind the claim that time is short. We know we have the time to examine our craft in all its historical depth, and we can afford to study the necessary connection between substance and style.244

The theories that we imagine and the epistemologies that we create—while for

now may be written in the language of the oppressor—notwithstanding, the ideas

that they suggest and call into existence must be couched in African ways of

knowing.

244 Ibid., 242-‐44. Armah’s admonition here is reflective of ideas that Malcolm X noted in his Message to the Grass Roots speech, (Malcolm X Speaks, Selected Speeches and Statements, ed. George Breitman, New York: Pathfinder, 1965, 11-‐13) over fifty years prior. In his short talk to the congregants of the Northern Negro Grass Roots Leadership Conference in Detroit, Malcolm introduced many of the modern ideas of revolutionary movements from Africa of the time and wedded them with the necessary actions for Africans in the Americas to work towards their liberation. In suggesting the reciprocal benefits of historical research, Malcolm X offered, “that history is best prepared to reward our efforts.” He undergirds his observation in the following passage, “And when you see that you’ve got problems, all you have to do is examine the historic method used all over the world by others who have problems similar to yours. And once you see how they got theirs straight, then you know how you can get yours straight.” Malcolm pulled from the rebellious narratives of 1) the Mau Mau of Kenya; 2) indigenous South African’s resistance to apartheid; 3) the revolts of the Algerians against the French and 4) our brothers and sisters throughout the Congo who fought against Belgium rule. Malcolm’s historical narrative crossed the Atlantic and coalesced the struggles of Africans in California, New York, and Michigan, “as a common cause . . . against a common enemy.” Malcolm’s admonition reinforces the idea that the intentional recovery and restoration of traditional African languages offers one of the most impactful solutions to the study of, “getting our problems straight.”

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The decade of the forties provided an anchor as well as a point of reference for resolving the contradictions and discontinuities which erupted in American culture. The bankruptcy of racism and labor exploitation had been defiantly exposed by its victims, who changed the terms of the discourse as well as the mode of discourse. Post World War II America would never be the same again—uptown or downtown— as the voices of resistance grew stronger and more assertive. Now is the Time, Things To Come and A New World’s A-‐Coming boldly led us to Freedom Now Suites and A Love Supreme.

—Acklyn Lynch245

My men and my race are the inspiration of my work. I try to catch the character and mood and feeling of my people. The music of my race is something more than the American idiom. It is the result of our transplantation to American soil and was our reaction in plantation days to the life we lived. What we could not say openly we expressed in music. The characteristic melancholic music of my race has been forged from the very white heat of our sorrows and from our groping. I think the music of my race is something that is going to live, something which posterity will honor in a higher sense than merely that of music of the ballroom.

—Duke Ellington246

Radicalized Traditions: A Recoding Of Our Aesthetic Values

Before advancing it must be agreed that our contemporary problems cannot

be solved without memory.247 My mention of this understanding here is to

245 Acklyn Lynch, “Black Culture in the Early Forties,” Nightmare Overhanging Darky: Essays on Black Culture and Resistance, 101.

246 Notes from the Duke Ellington album The Blanton Webster Band (Blue Bird, 1940-‐42). 247 This statement is taken from Dr. Greg Carr, who constantly reminds his students of the need for historical memory in our responses and solutions to current conditions. This reminder implies that

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address a challenge that continues to present itself in academic research of African

music. Unfortunately, all too often, departures into Black radical movements are

written as if they began in the late 1950’s to 1960’s. These movements are seldom

written without mention of the pronounced contributions of Black music of the

era. Geneva Smitherman suggested in the late 1970’s that writing about the

significance of Black music in the Black experience had become cliché.248

Alluding to the extensive writing about Black music Seba Asa Hilliard adds,

“Perhaps no better documented area of the variety of human experiences in the

United States exists than that of music.”249 The decade of the 1960’s however is an

imagined utopia of Black rage and regime resistance for many vindicationalist

scholars.250

This period so affixed in the mind of historians and musicologists whose

research interest prioritizes modern Black music seldom allows them to

interrogate a time or space beyond these decades or beyond American soil.251 The

research, reading, and writing are complimentary tools in the process of liberation. Memory, then, in this context, resists knee-‐jerk reactions from intentional controversial modern “problems” that are in fact distractions from the longer, deeper systemic challenges facing the Pan-‐African community. This idea from Carr is reflective of the wise words from his Seba, John Henrik Clarke, who often reminded us that, “Any group of people who begin their history with slavery will see everything after that [enslavement] as an accomplishment.”

248 Smitherman, Talkin and Testyfyin, 50-‐51. 249 Asa Hilliard, The Maroon Within Us: Selected Essays on African American Community Socialization (Black Classic Press, 1995), 23.

250 See Carruthers, “An African Historiography for the 21st Century,” pp. 64-‐66, for his vindicationists theory.

251 One glaring example of this is Stanley Crouch’s response to John Coltrane’s compositions and playing during the periods of 1964 to 1967. Crouch—whom Greg Carr categorizes as a Neo-‐Liberal (“What Black Studies Is Not,” 178-‐91)—in his special kind of revisionist history states: “In fact, much black nationalism was really about enormous self hatred and contempt for Negro-‐American culture. Its vision misled certain black people into denying the depth of the indelibly rich domestic influences black and white people had had on each other, regardless of all that had been wrought

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creative uprising in America that birthed the songs, hymns, movements,

recordings, and dances of the 1960’s were informed from an extended narrative

that occurred before the horrific challenges of Jim Crow and a political racist

system. In other words, as Ralph Ellison persuasively indicates, “black history and

culture are infinitely more complex, proactive, affirmative, and internally driven

than mere responses to white oppression.”252 Historical memory tells us that Black

resistance on American253 soil began when they realized that as captives they

would not be returning home; that America was a foreign land; that the languages

they spoke was not English; their customs and cultures were not of the Western

world, “and that every morning at a certain time certain work had to be done and

that they would probably be asked to do it.”254 This was the animation of the

wailing and the blues in America for enslaved Africans. However, it was not the

beginning of their intellectual musical responses to lived conditions and

by slavery and segregation. The greatest of John Coltrane’s music reflects that confluence of races and influences. A country Negro from North Carolina, Coltrane was as much an heir to all that Bach and his descendants gave the world as he was to the blues. He was an heir to all that Negroes had done with the saxophone and what he admired in Stan Getz. None of Coltrane’s music, early or late, ever sounded like African music because his bands didn’t play on one and three, which Africans do, and because—until the end—they swung, which Africans do not—nor does anybody else unaffected by that distinctly Negro-‐American contribution to phrasing. “For those who persist in calling jazz African music, I ask but one question: Where in Africa is there anything that resembles Art Tatum or Coleman Hawkins?” Crouch, “Coltrane Derailed,” Jazz Times (Sept. 2002).

252 Ralph Ellison, Shadow & Acts, quoted from Waldo E. Martin Jr., No Coward Soldiers: Black Cultural Politics and Postwar America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 5. (emphasis added)

253 For an in-‐depth historical treatment of Black resistance in America, see Cedric Robinson, Black Movements in America (New York: Routledge, 1997).

254 Baraka, Blues People, xii. Michael Gomez suggests a similar process during the barracoon and Middle Passage phase of enslavement Gomez states, “The barracoon and Middle Passage constituted the hazy beginning of the process. In the midst of turmoil and confusion, in the center of the storm, certain facts gradually began to come into focus. The first was the most obvious: all who were in chains were black, and nearly all who were not were white. This would suggest to the former that skin color was in some way central to the call to suffer.” Exchanging Our Country Marks, 165.

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experiences. The improvisational responses to new conditions were bound to

foundational adherences though adapted to suit their current lived conditions.

Albert Murray writes in The Hero and the Blues:

To refer to the blues idiom is to refer to an established mode, an existing context or frame of reference. But then not only is tradition that which continues; it is also the medium by which and through which continuation occurs. It is, or so it seems in the arts at any rate, precisely that in terms of which the objectives of experimentation are defined, and against which experimentation begins. Perhaps a better word for experimentation as it actually functions in the arts is improvisation. In any case, it is for the writer, as for the musician in a jam session, that informal trial and error process by means of which tradition adapts itself to change, or renews itself through change.255

This imagined world of the vindicationalist school presents challenges to

developing a music methodology that concerns itself with extending the

framework of meaning making beyond our contemporary times. To recode

knowledge—to build a new structure in the rigid academic cesspool is a threat to

the objectives and accepted thoughts and methodologies of this hierarchy.

Objectives, which Carruthers note, “keep us intellectually, politically, economically

and socially dependent.”256 An African-‐centered methodology to music stems

from a push against these objectives. An allegiance to change is not without its

challenges. Clyde Taylor observes:

The recodification of knowledge gets us embroiled in sometimes painful ironies and contradictions. At the

255 Albert Murray, The Hero And The Blues (New York: First Vintage Books, 1973), 72. (emphasis added)

256 Carruthers, African World History Project, 10.

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moment their efforts finally win some recognition under the banner of the aesthetic (like the dubious recognition of a “Black renaissance” in a special cover story in Time magazine in October 1994) some cultural narrators of emergent populations may become irritated to hear that the banner salutes a corrupt deal. This news may be taken as an even more painful contradiction if their economic livelihood depends on their credibility within the art-‐culture system. Reframing knowledge always means disrupting social and personal histories that people are caught up in living at the moment.257

Indispensable to our approach to researching African music culture is an

agreement that the methodologies of the oppressor are counterintuitive to our

own liberation. GBM pianist Cecil Taylor embraced the idea that his musical

approaches had to be connected to a genealogy from which he arose. He relays,

“I’m really quite happy, or becoming more comfortable with the conception that

[Duke] Ellington, after all, is the genius I must follow, and all the methodological

procedures that I follow are akin, more closely aligned to that than anything

else.”258

African music is worthy of interrogation —our aesthetic values emerge out

of this foundation—and a methodology that privileges its historical foundations is

crucial.

257 Taylor, 240. (emphasis added) 258 Cecil Taylor in Spencer Richards, liner notes, Cecil Taylor, Live in Vienna, Leo 1988. May 1988.

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In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

—John 1:1 Our words represent us, for they are our words. Our words declare our vision of the world and our relationship to it. We are our words.

—Michael Gomez259 Words don’t go there.

—Charles Lloyd260

The Germination Of Music From Words

Do words sometime get in the way? Does the allegiance to improvisation

and adaptation within Black musical experiences alleviate the need for words?

Does Lloyd’s observation that ‘words don’t go there’, suggest that words and sound

(music): while both creators of vibrations are not mutually exclusive. Is there

something lost in words that only music can convey. Fred Moten queries, “Where

do words go? Are they the inadequate and residual traces of a ritual performance

that is lost in the absence of the recording?”261 African idioms of the spoken word

suggest that there are creational powers in the speech/thoughts. That words carry

power and intent is understood in the original Kemetic ideas of Mdw Ntr (the

words of God; Divine speech), Mdw Nfr (Good speech), and Tf (Idle chat)

respectively. That they generate ideas and actions is understood in the Dogon’s

259 Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks, 173. 260 “Editors Note,” Moment’s Notice: Jazz in Poetry and Prose, eds. Art Lange and Nathaniel Mackey (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1993), x.

261 Moten, In the Break, 42.

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usage of the phrase Nommo. Adisa Ajuma writes, “Nommo represents the African

conception of the generative and productive power of the word. In this context

the use of language becomes a means of giving potency, authenticity, and agency

to the human experience while simultaneously creating and affirming reality.”262

An African way of doing does not separate words from music: music from

sound: sound from words. Mutuality is encouraged. When words met a certain

limit, sound through the medium of music was utilized. Words are encoded with

ideas that are in turn indexed with rhythm and created into sounds. Music is a

complimentary extension of words. Dr. Robert Rhodes sheds a very important

light onto the way that intellectual utterances are extended by music. Rhodes,

speaking about the intricacies of U.S. foreign diplomacies notes:

This is a complicated question that needs further elaboration. Best way to get further elaboration is to listen to my favorite Horace Silver record, “(scatting), beep—boop—ba—di—bo—da.” You guys [speaking to the audience] know how to rap, when we were younger you had to know how to bebop—it was much harder—you had to remember the changes.263

Context of the previous conversation aside; Rhodes in his nod to bebop and BAM

musician Horace Silver illustrates how Black music simplifies ideas by unraveling

the complexities of words and themes. Musicians gather the figure of speeches,

tales, proverbs, syntax, ideology, and traditions of their people and express them

through music. Smitherman notes that, “The black musician, his or her way of life

262 Adisa Ajuma, African World History Project, 197. 263 Robert Rhodes, at Gerald Horne’s lecture, “The Hidden History of Black Internationalism in the United States,” presented by UBIQUITY at Howard University, September 20, 2013.

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and talk, provide a kind of standard in the Black English-‐speaking community.”264

Ben Sidran in Black Talk extends Smitherman’s idea by stating:

My basic assumption is that black music is not only conspicuous within, but crucial to, black culture. It has often been asserted that music—its place in society and its forms and functions—reflects the general character of the society. It has, however, rarely been suggested that music is potentially a basis for social structure. Yet I contend that music is not only a reflection of the values of black culture but, to some extent, the basis upon which it is built. This places on the importance of musical expression a stress alien to the tradition of Western cultures.265

These oral modes of communication served as a fundamental medium of cultural

preservation for enslaved Africans who had an understanding of an existence prior

to their present conditions. The oral dispensing of cultural norms that African

values are built upon allowed for creative embedding with philosophies essential

to community continuity. When these philosophies are transplanted in new spaces

the underpinnings of them are informed by an exchange of ideas. These exchanges

of ideas across time and space involved an intellectual exchange as well.

Edward Said interrogates the actions of intellectual artifacts as it moves from time

and space.266 Said’s assertion, according to Michael New, is that the “cultural and

intellectual life are usually nourished and often sustained by this circulation of

ideas, and whether it takes the form of acknowledged or unconscious influence,

264 Smitherman, 52. 265 Ben Sidran, Black Talk (NewYork: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1971), xiii. 266 See Edward Said, “Traveling Theory,” in The Edward Said Reader, eds. M. Bayoumi and A. Rubin (New York: Vintage Books), 195-‐217.

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creative borrowing, or wholesale appropriation,” occurs.267 Music as intellectual

developments thusly is a circulation of ideas. Ideas that circulated not from the

outside world of the captors that hovered around Black communities but instead

circulated internally from within intentional Black communities. However, Gomez

notes, that there were parameters built around the selection of a common tongue:

In anglophone North America, English was the obvious solution. But it could not be white folk’s English. The African could not simply parrot what he heard from the very fount of oppression. No, the words had to be altered. The syntax had to conform to that which was more reminiscent of home. The meter required attenuation so that when spoken, the language would be as deracinated as possible. So the African put his indelible, undeniable imprint on the language, re-‐creating it in his own image to the degree possible.268

The importance of self-‐dialogue was a significant issue that would arise in these

communities during enslavement. One form of a common tongue that united

Black communities in the years following enslavement was the use of folk speech

and proverbs. The use and application of proverbs will be considered in the

ensuing section.

Of The Use And Roles Of Proverbs

A common inquiry in music research concerns itself with non-‐lyrical

compositions. How does one contextualize the meanings and ideas of African

compositions that are without words? How do we begin to understand the

267 Michael J. New, “‘Black Metaphysical Grace’: Theorizing the Movement of Music in the Black Diaspora, the Case of Cymande,” in Expanding What We Know Through Research Across the African Diaspora, eds. Keith B. Wilson and Kevin J. A. Thomas (Minneapolis: Tasora Books, 2009), 103-‐20.

268 Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks, 172.

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meanings of — jazz compositions, hymns, blues, work songs, field hollers etc.—

and place them in a correct context if they are composed without words that

suggest their ideas. The space between words and music is an in-‐between space,

where words have not quite connected with sound to inform context. This space is

bridged by proverbs.

Proverbs are a key element in the transitions from words to music.

Linguistic expert Dell Hymes classifies proverbs as, “speech acts in that they are

shaped by specific sociocultural factors within a given speech community.”269

Proverbs are primarily told through the spoken word. The Akan aesthetics of the

proverbs in its classical development was primarily used to encapsulate the

collective wisdom and experiences of the people. Kofi Opoku states:

that proverbs have many uses in African societies; they may express an eternal truth; they may be a warning against foolish acts or be a guide to good conduct. African proverbs express the wisdom of the African people and are a key to the understanding African ways of life in the past and in the present. The main purpose of the Akan proverbs is to express the accumulated wisdom and experiences of past generation.270

Akan culture is saturated with proverbs and are deeply rooted in the lived

experiences of the people. Almost everyone in traditional African communities

became a living carrier of proverbs, and are interwoven in local languages.” The

art of the Akan and, by extension, their proverbs are not merely for aesthetic

contemplation, but it is a part of a complex system of thought. This complex

269 Dell Hymes, Foundations in Sociolinguistics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1974), 53. 270 Ibid., xxi. (emphasis added)

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system among other things articulates ideas, engages moral precepts and

memorializes the dead. Through the use of proverbs the living utter the wisdom

of the ancestors. J. T. Milimo states, “It is in the proverbs that our people stored

up all their wisdom and experiences of the centuries, but especially because it was

this wisdom of our forbearers which led them to find simple but adequate means

of teaching about life.”271 Proverbs are significant in the socialization process,

mental development, abstract thinking, rhetorical devices in arguments, and are

indices of cultural assimilation, and are used to defend or prosecute in legal

settings. Issac O. Delano states, “In Yoruba society no one can be considered

educated or qualified to take part in communal discussions unless he is able to

quote the proverbs relevant to each situation.”272

The power of proverbs is very apparent in the African judicial processes in

which the participants argue proverbs that intend to serve as past precedents for

their present actions. In addition they are heavily used in resolving daily conflicts.

Within Akan communities’ proverbs are necessary verbal tools that can be used to

achieve the goal of reducing conflict. Nii O. Quarcoopome offers that, “Oral

traditions are continually evolving and their meanings are changing. Thus the

application of proverbs, songs, and other verbal forms to the imagery in works of

art may well be modified to reflect new thinking and shifting social and political

271 J.T. Milimo, Bantu Wisdom (Lusaka: Zambia Printing, 1972), 27. 272 Issac Delano, Yoruba Proverbs: Their Meaning and Use (Ibadan:Oxford University Press, 1966), 9.

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conditions.”273 As an aesthetic they embellish, adorn or enrich everyday

conversation; they put salt into what is said.274 Proverbs are not used arbitrarily or

in common conversation. They are void of meaning if they are not applied in the

correct context. The proper usage of the proverb is for the wise. The Akan say,

Oba nyansafo wobu be, na wonka no asem, (the wise person is spoken to in proverb

not in plain talk). This notion is the antithesis of another Akan expressions which

states, Okwasea na wobu no be a, wokyere no ase, (when a fool is told a proverb, the

meaning of it has to be explained to him).

The retention of proverbs in our contemporary times is everywhere. Jack

Daniel states, “Almost everyone knows some of them but no one has adequately

defined them. They offer conventional wisdom…but many people report that they

heard their mothers and grandmothers use them most often.”275 Daniel observes

that, “Proverbs are an index of cultural continuity and interaction— they provide a

mirror to the world of African and Diasporic people, they continue to exist in Black

popular culture and bear directly on the issue of African survivals in the New

World.”276 Kofi Opoku states, that within the Akan culture, “proverbs are also

expressed in the language of the drums and the sounds of the horns.”277 The

communal appropriation of proverbs into musical production is a natural

273 Nii O Quarcoopome, “Art of the Akan,” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 23, no. 2 (The Art Institute of Chicago: African Art): 137.

274 Opoku, xxi. 275 Jack L. Daniel, Geneva Smitherman-‐Donaldson and Milford A. Jeremiah, “Makin' a Way Outa No Way: The Proverb Tradition in the Black Experience,” Journal of Black Studies 17, no. 4 (June, 1987): 482-‐83.

276 Ibid., 484. 277 Ibid., xx.

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transition. Much like the norms associated with musical spaces within African

communities the process, in which proverbs are learned, transmitted, passed on

and used are similar.

Of particular interest are the specific instances when proverbs are utilized

as well as the individuals that are trained in their usage. For much like music in

African communities proverbs are everywhere and are used by many. However,

there are still those that are apprenticed and trained in their specific use and

entrusted with passing on their nuanced meanings and historical memory of them

to the next generation. Leonard Brown explains, “The black community had

required, even demanded, music of a certain type and feeling—something that

expressed their trials and tribulations, hopes and dreams, wants and needs . . . .

The musician’s role was to understand and express all this through and in the

music.”278 Fu-‐Kiau’s description of the use of proverbs in African communities is

similar to the ways in which Bebey and Nketia discuss the training of individuals

into musical traditions. Fu-‐Kiau suggests:

For African people, proverbs constitute a special language. Sometimes, for many, proverbs are considered both a secret and a sacred language in their communication where the expression—“talk in proverbial language” [zonzila mu bingana], an expression used within the community to prevent the leak of very fundamental principles of the society, i.e., to prevent the outsider from auditing the debate to have access to any basic systematic concepts of the

278 Leonard Brown, “You Have to Be Invited: Reflections on Music Making and Musician Creation in Black American Culture,” John Coltrane & Black America’s Quest for Freedom, Spirituality and Music, ed. Leonard Brown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 6.

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structural organization of the society, especially it’s secrecies.279

Our collective understanding of African languages, words, compositions

and proverbs brings us to the development of the proposed methodology. The

tools that we use to restore our historical memory will determine how our

nationhood is sustained and advanced. Paramount to restoring our historical

memories and the abilities to pass them on are cultural inscriptions. The methods

will determine our direction and survival thrust. Let us then consider how the

Bantu-‐Kongo’s cosmology as an epistemological device can be used as a

methodological approach to Africa’s musical cultures and the life and music of

John Coltrane.

279 Fu-‐Kiau, 93-‐94.

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The hardest part of the music is improvising, and it gets harder the older you are. Improvisation is a gathering together of all the evidence you have of how to resolve going from here to here.

—Dizzy Gillespie280

The Vee Of The Bantu-‐Kongo And African Musical Genealogy

The complexities of the Bantu-‐Kongo cosmogram and its fluidity are an

epistemological devise that is useful for our engagement into African musical

cultures. As demonstrated the cosmogram is a proverbial device that couches the

ideals of the community. In particular, as Fu-‐Kiau highlighted: creation narratives,

morals, precepts, instructions, communal and family relations and balance are

explained through the moments of the suns—the Vees. That the cosmogram was

the nucleus of the community helps in our understanding of the depth of ideas

that it had to engage.

Its fluidity allowed for adaptations as communities faced new choices and

experiences. The four Vees and their particular characteristics accounted for most

experiences that an individual or a community would face. Before the notion of

cultural survival occurred to African peoples there was the normal position of

cultural sustainability. My position suggests that Africans, before the challenges of

enslavement, focused on culture as necessary to the existence of their home, their

families, and their communities. The survival aspect radiates from new

geographical spaces over extended amounts of time. However as Floyd states,

280 John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie, Interview with John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie, in Charles Graham,The Great Jazz Day (Da Capo Press, 2000), 114.

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“African survivals exist not merely in the sense that African American music has

the same characteristics as its African counterparts, but also that the musical

tendencies, the mythological beliefs and assumptions, are the same as those that

underlie the music if the African homeland . . . .”281 The cosmogram existed in the

Americas in varying forms and functions. The iconography of the cosmogram has

been located in America on trees, homes, clothing, burial caskets and other

material possessions.282 The ideology of the Bantu-‐Kongo cosmogram extended

into the performances of the Ring Shout and eventually led into the development

of Second Line ritualized movements.283

Considering the survival and fluidity of the Bantu-‐Kongo cosmograph and

its functionality as an epistemological device is an easy appropriation. The four

281 Floyd, Power of Black Music, 5. 282 Most recently I read a news story about the First African Baptist Church in Savannah, GA. Among the many highlights of the First African Baptist Church primarily being the oldest Black church in North America—founded in 1775—the author of the article notes: The church was built with a secret floor underneath its real floor, and was a stop on the Underground Railroad. Never discovered by authorities, the crawlspace hid hundreds of runaway slaves and a tunnel led them to the Savannah River. To mask their true purpose, the floor’s breathing holes were bored in the shape of the Kongo Cosmogram; an African spiritual symbol often used by American slaves. See Savannah for 91 Days, (http://savannah.for91days.com/2011/01/14/first-‐african-‐baptist-‐church/, January 1, 2014). (emphasis added)

283 Both Samuel Floyd and Sterling Stuckey, whose Slave Culture influenced a great amount of Floyd’s early work speak in detail about the Ring Shout and its convergence in America out of the cultural norms of the Bantu-‐Kongo cosmogram. Floyd extends Stuckey’s ideas of the Ring Shout and its developments into the Second Line. Floyd notes in (“Ring Shout! Literary Studies, Historical Studies and Black Music Inquiry,” Black Music Research Journal 22, (2002): 49-‐70, Center for Black Music Research, Columbia College Chicago and University of Illinois Press), “What Stuckey does not say, but which will be clear to readers familiar with black culture, is that from these burial ceremonies, the ring straightened itself to become the Second Line of jazz funerals, in which the movements of the participants were identical to those of the participants in the ring—even to the point of individual counterclockwise movements by Second Line participants, where the ring was absent because of the necessity of the participants to move to a particular remote destination (the return to the town from the burial ground). And the dirge-‐to jazz structure of the ring shout, where “the slow and dignified measure of the ‘walk’ is followed by a double quick, tripping measure in the ‘shout.’”

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moments of the cosmogram, Carr notes, “symbolize the cyclical dimensions of

reality, including the daily, group, and historical human experience as microcosm.

The Ki-‐Kongo trace the movement of history/reality from sunrise (birth) to the

apogee of material power and strength (noonday sun), the waning of physical

reality (sunset), and the apogee of spiritual power and strength (the midnight

sun).”284

KISE (Fatherhood)

Each moment along the cosmogram serve as markers and indicators of the human

life cycles. [see Figure 4]. Nothing in the life of the Kongo community has an

outside existence of the cosmogram. Marriage for instance has points along the

284 Carr, “You Don’t Call the Kittens Biscuits,” 364.

LONGO (Marriage) TATA

(Father)

KINGWA-NKASI (Unclehood)

NGUDI (Mother)

Figure 4. Longo cosmogram.

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cosmogram that informs the community. Fu-‐Kiau states, “Notice the position of

each element allied to marriage longo. Longo itself occupies the position of center

(didi), the source of radiation of life. The marriage, in other words, for the Bantu-‐

Kongo, is a physically living symbol of alliance(s) between, at least, two

communities.”285 The community is held together by the relationships of the

longo. Fu-‐Kiau notes that kanda does its best to maintain the life of the longo.

Another governance model of the cosmogram is depicted on the macro

level of the community. The Muntu [see Figure 5] model differs from the longo

285 Fu-‐Kiau, Tying the Spiritual Knot, 39.

Buta (Family)

Mwelo-nzo (Extended Motherhood)

Moyo (Motherhood)

Kanda (Community)

Muntu (Human)

Figure 5. Muntu cosmogram.

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model in that it explains the broader concepts of the community. These concepts

are the historical norms of the Bantu-‐Kongo people in that they explain concepts

of “family.” The muntu at the center much like the longo suggests the nucleus of

the community arrangement. The muntu as person is a set of concrete social

relationships and is a system within systems. The mwelo-‐nzo—extended

motherhood—as it relates to the muntu is of extreme importance. The kanda and

the mwelo-‐nzo as they relate to children explain child governance. The buta is the

most important institution in Kongo societal structures. However, the child is not

the sole responsibility of their primary buta. But instead belongs to a collective and

extended paternal community. Fu-‐Kiau says, “By recognizing the longo as legal,

the society accepts automatically the responsibility to raise all offspring’s of such a

“longo” whereby the African saying, “It takes the whole community/village to raise

a child.”286 The buta is where kanda norms are taught, practiced and reinforced.

A methodology to researching the genealogy of the intellectual production

of African music can be achieved by wedding Fu-‐Kiau’s treatment of the Bantu-‐

Kongo’s Vee understanding and Portia Maultsby’s Map of the Music: The Evolution

of African American Music. We arrive at an intersection of complimentary

contributions from deep thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic, who offer insight

into how this intellectual project can be engaged. If we examine the Bantu-‐

Kongo’s Vee cosmography superimposed onto Maultsby’s Map of the Music [see

Table 3] the intellectual genealogy of African music is configured into a working

286 Ibid., 41-‐42.

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concept and a suitable paradigm in which the grander work of mapping the

musical genealogy in spite of an absence of an abundance of primary materials can

be engaged.

Figure 6. The third Vee. The Vanga Phase.

The third Vee of demarcation is the Vanga, [see Figure 6] from the term

ghanga, which means “to perform, to do.”287 According to Fu-‐Kiau, “This Vee, the

most crucial in life, represents the stage of creativity and great deeds or tukula

stage of the root verb kula, to mature, to master.”288 In other words it is at this

stage of the cosmogram in the physical realm that the highest of forms of creativity

take place. It is where inventions, great works of art—music—is produced. In

addition to be becoming a kula in this Vee the muntu becomes a healer and

specialist. This process is quite similar to the Ewe’s word, adanu, which aside from

expressing art ideas also conveys the idea of one who has zaza (cleverness), or does

adanu (advisor, counsel, possessor of skill). Fu-‐Kiau continues, “At this point one

287 Ibid., 139. 288 Ibid.

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becomes an nganga, a master, a doer, a specialist in the community of doers. It is

in this phase of the cosmogram that the Bantu-‐Kongo says one “stands vertically”

inside ones Vee.289

One becoming a kula does not happen simply because of advancing in age.

The process of kula is reflective of apprenticing with those who have made their

way around the Vee. African music is developed in a similar way. African music is

reflective of the lived existence of the community. It engages ideas and obstacles

and gathers all the wisdom and experiences that have been agreed upon and

passed on—and put into sound. African music research must express these

specifics in their analysis. The cosmogram’s movements and purposes from its

musoni to luvemba remains the same. It is reimagined and facilitated wherever

Africans found themselves. Consider for example the creation of the work songs.

The work songs had a go order—their musoni, on American soil. Its creation was a

gathering of all the lived experiences possible, related to their current conditions

and emptied into music and sounds. But these creations were not new290. They

were repetitions of cultural productions and norms that had been created in other

times and spaces.

Utilizing the cosmogram puts to rest allusions of enslaved African cultures

in America—discovered by outsiders at some point—was somehow invented here.

This is what I label as the vacuum theory. The vacuum theory explains the

phenomena of outsiders discovering something new—e.g., Christopher Columbus

289 Ibid., 140. 290 See note 14.

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or the latest gentrification movements—and then labeling it as theirs, and re-‐

appropriating its functions, meanings, and forms into a palatable and/or

voyeuristic activity. Ortiz Walton’s explanation of this phenomenon in Music:

Black, White and Blue is worth noting here in length:

Implicit in this argument is the assumption that culture, or particularly, the expressive aspect of culture, is determined only by social-‐political forces, to the exclusion of other possible variables, e.g., climate and geography. But the most serious assumption is the denial of what is readily given for other groups—a sense of cultural heritage. Irish living in America are accorded a sense of cultural descendancy, and so are Italians, Poles, and Mexicans. Africans living in Brazil, Trinidad, and Haiti are also accorded this sense of cultural descendancy, but the black man in America, unlike other ethnic groups in the new world, is conceived of as having no cultural roots anywhere except in America.

Walton furthers his examination into the implications of musical

development reductionism:

The problem cannot be simply reduced to one of social oppression, inasmuch as poor whites, who have had an equally long history of poverty and now make up the majority of welfare recipients, did not create the Blues, Jazz or Spirituals. Although the social conditions peculiar to America have obviously been an economic disadvantage to Blacks, they have coalesced with African retentions to produce a new and highly influential culture and world view. The Blues cannot be reduced to a reaction against what white people do and have done: rather they would be more accurately conceived of as a positive form that affirms and preserves Afro-‐American culture.291

291 Ortiz Walton, Music: Black, White & Blue—A Sociological Survey of the Use and Misuse of Afro-‐American Music (New York: William Morrow, 1972), 33-‐34. (emphasis added)

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The Bantu-‐Kongo’s cosmogram explains this repetition. As was demonstrated

Africans of the Nile Valley incorporated work songs into their daily lives. In

addition, as intentional African communities over time round the moments of the

suns they also discard that which is no longer of use. These nonfunctional ways

are not passed on or apprenticed to newer generations.

Using the model of the Map of Maultsby with the Vee of the Bantu-‐Kongo

allows us to research the development of African music. The placement of the Vee

at the tukula movement encompasses the foundations of the music as African

Deep Thought; and then as a process of the Maafa, it reaches its vertical stand in

the ‘reversed pyramid’ in America. In this spatial diversion, the function of African

music primarily remains the same—to express the collective wisdom and

experiences of a people—as a result of mastery of oneself and knowledge of self

with the rest of the universe. Reading the cosmogram as an epistemological tool

for research allows us to seek answers that are beyond the present methods used.

The current methods to the music is often attached to the culture but is examined

through the dominant cultures gaze and norms. African music is not interrogated

as a long history that precedes the current conditions.

What the Bantu-‐Kongo’s cosmogram achieves for the researcher is the

ability to ask first order questions about the musical culture and its musicians.

Carr suggest that these first order question would include: 1.What were the long-‐

view genealogies of African historical memory that were introduced through

institutions of family and community? 2. Were there ordered techniques drawn

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from the same cache of African historical memory that governed the process of

improvisational contributions to future generations? 3. How have current

generations incorporated memory and improvise memory techniques into their

longer genealogy of Africana historical memory, the Black Radical Tradition, and

the African-‐Centered Worldview?292

Of this point, Salaam states, “In the final analysis it’s all about context and

control—what we do in and with our own space and time. Everything is informed

by its time of creation, existence, and demise; what was happening when it was

going on.”293 In this context the critic; music executive; money grabbing, capitalist

impetus that lead to the artificial imposition of genre demarcation is rendered

obsolete. In its place I suggest the only genre label that should be utilized should

be that of time and space. A temporal and spatial reorientation situates us in

appropriate moments and movements and instructs our future direction. Armah

would suggest, specifically in regards to Cheikh Anta Diop and Théophile

Obenga’s work, but also relevant to this conversation, “it was not about Egypt

alone or the pharaonic period alone, but about the continuity of African space and

time.”294

Our acute understanding and utilization of the Bantu-‐Kongo’s cosmograph

in our research, approaches and analyses of African music and musicians is

paramount to our recovery.

292 Carr, “You Don’t Call the Kittens Biscuits,” 366. 293 Kalamu ya Salaam. “It Didn’t Jes Grew: The Social and Aesthetic Significance of African American Music,” 375.


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The main thing a musician would like to do is give a picture to the listener of the many wonderful things he knows of and senses in the universe. That’s what music is to me. I’ll continue to look for truth in music as I see it, and I’ll draw on all the sources I can.

—John William Coltrane

When a black musician picks up his horn and starts blowing, he improvises, he creates, it comes from within. It’s his soul. Jazz is the only area in America where the black man is free to create. 295

—Malcolm X

CHAPTER 6

JOHN WILLIAM COLTRANE’S FIRST TWO MOMENTS OF THE SUN

This entire project could have been devoted to the life and music of John

William Coltrane. The rationale for it is simply that his compositions and life is

reflective of the continuity of African foundational music and cultural norms.

However, in an attempt to build a framework that can be used for most African

musicians’ lives—in particular those who participate in the BAM conversation—I

find, out of necessity, that the greater need is to use Coltrane as an exemplar to

demonstrate how the Bantu-‐Kongo cosmogram methodology can be engaged. The

research approaches to African musicians from outsiders is reflective of the failed

methods to African music. T.J. Anderson underscores the need for new

approaches when he states, “At this time, we are experiencing a crisis—the lack of

intellectual respect for a culture that has been subjected to both the best and worst

295 Frank Kofsky, Black Nationalism and the Revolution in Music (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970), 65.

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of American attitudes. It is particularly significant that these works come directly

from African American culture.”296 Utilizing the Bantu-‐Kongo cosmography as a

research device, this chapter will narrate Coltrane’s life within the African long-‐

arched historical experience.

To date, I have counted eleven biographies;297 one edited volume;298 four

children’s books;299 three books focused on an album/record label;300 one complete

recordings/concerts/events/discography anthology;301 two books centered on Black

Nationalism;302 one book that explores theology in Coltrane’s music;303 and two

296 T.J. Anderson, John Coltrane and Black America’s Quest for Freedom: Spirituality and the Music, ed. Leonard L. Brown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), v.

297 See Bill Cole, John Coltrane, (New York: Schirmer Books, 1976); John Fraim, Spirit Catcher: The Life and Art of John Coltrane (Ohio: The Greathouse Company, 1996); Karlton Hester, The Melodic and Polyrhythmic Development of John Coltrane’s Spontaneous Composition in a Racist Society, (Ontario: Edwin Mellen Press, 1997); Farah Griffin and Salim Washington, Clawing at the Limits of Cool: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and the Greatest Jazz Collaboration Ever (New York: St. Martins Press, 2008); Frank Kofsky, John Coltrane and the Jazz Revolution of the 1960s (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970); Eric Nisension, Ascension: John Coltrane and His Quest (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995); Lewis Porter, John Coltrane: His Life and Music (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999); Ben Ratliff, Coltrane: The Story of a Sound (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007); Cuthbert Simpkins, John Coltrane: A Biography (New Jersey: Herndon House Publishers, 1975); Martin Smith, John Coltrane: Jazz, Racism and Resistance (London: Redwords, 2001); J.C. Thomas, Chasin’ the Trane (New York: Da Capo Press, 1975).

298 Leonard Brown, ed., John Coltrane & Black America’s Quest for Freedom, Spirituality and Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

299 Gary Golio, Spirit Seeker: John Coltrane’s Musical Journey (Calrion Books, 2012); Before John Was a Jazz Giant: A Song of John Coltrane (Henry Holt and Co., 2008); Chris Raschka, John Coltrane’s Gian Steps (Richard Jackson Books, 2002); John W. Selfridge, John Coltrane (Franklin Watts, 1999).

300 Ashley Kahn, A Love Supreme (see note 13); Ashley Kahn, The House that Trane Built: The Story of Impulse Records (New York: W.W. Norton Company, 2006); Tony Whyton, Beyond A Love Supreme: John Coltrane and the Legacy of an Album (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

301 Chris DeVito et al., The John Coltrane Reference, ed. Cole Porter (New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2008).

302 Frank Kofsky, Black Nationalism and the Revolution in Music (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970); Valerie Wilmer, As Serious as Your Life—John Coltrane and Beyond (Great Britain: Cox & Wyman, 1977).

303 Jamie Howison, God’s Mind in That Music: Theological Explorations through the Music of John Coltrane (Cascade Books, 2012).

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compilations of interviews304—twenty-‐four texts in total, all focused completely or

primarily on John Coltrane’s life and music. Many approaches have been

considered regarding Coltrane, his life, compositions and recordings, drug

addiction (unfortunately, so many writers focus on this when talking about

musicians of his genre), his “free-‐jazz” period, and his contributions to the art form

known as “jazz”. Frequently, the authors of his biographies take a hagiographic

approach.305 However, very little scholarly work is focused on the way in which his

life reflects and his compositions retain even the slightest bit of an African

aesthetic. This is not to say that there are no writings that discuss or compare

Coltrane’s composition and African cultural aesthetics; however, what is being

suggested is that, aside from trying to pair Coltrane’s life and music with the Black

Nationalist Movement or within an Eastern/Indian sound, little in-‐depth work has

been produced that shows the continuity of African historical memory in his life.

This lack of cultural centering to Coltrane’s life can in part be attributed to

Anderson’s observations:

It is understood that scholars from different backgrounds also contribute to the interpretation of John Coltrane and his musical legacy. But it is a matter of perspective. The contributors whose works appear in this book are immersed in African American lifestyles and come to this moment with a black point

304 Chris DeVito, ed., Coltrane on Coltrane: The John Coltrane Interviews (Chicago: A Cappella Books, 2010); Carl Woideck, ed., The John Coltrane Companion: Five Decades of Commentary (New York: Schirmer Books, 1998).

305 See Michael “Salim” Spencer Washington, “Beautiful Nightmares: Coltrane, Jazz and American Culture.” PhD diss., Harvard University, 2001, pp. 4-‐8.

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of view. This is an insider’s view of the black experience in music and its impact on one musician.306

The biographies—not only of Coltrane but also of too many Black musician—are

infected with a dominant culture hegemony that privileges a pathology model in

their narratives and analysis. It is a common narrative that “is disproportionately

influenced by a class-‐based epistemology that privileges the moments and sites

where those individuals interacted with Western educational and other socializing

institutions.”307

This model takes on varying forms but mostly resembles the following

approach. 1. Birth: The Black child is born into poverty or under abnormal—

including phenomenal or extraordinary—conditions. 2. Child Phenom and

Introduction: The Black child born into poverty is serendipitously introduced to

an instrument and demonstrates extreme prodigy-‐like abilities without any or very

little formal training. 3. Isolation and Tragedy: At this phase, the narrative of the

Black child is written with very little community interaction. The absence of any

paternal relations or any current existing one is severed through absenteeism or

death. This may be the tragedy phase, but could also include an unnatural death

of a sibling or close family member, constant proximity to the possibility of death

or emotional pain or injuries and constant poverty. 4. Discovery and Rise: The

Black child, now entering young adulthood or full adulthood, has been discovered

from a White or Eurocentric savior. The savior is less concerned with the child’s

306 T.J. Anderson, vi. [emphasis added] 307 Carr, “You Don’t Call the Kittens Biscuits,” 365.

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talents than he or she is with the economic benefits derived from control of the

child’s talents. As the narrative of the child has already been written without

interaction with his or her own community, the control and isolation is heightened

in new surroundings that cause certain paranoia and self-‐esteem issues. As these

fears increase, the sensationalized childhood tragedies surface and are coped with

through self-‐medication or anti-‐social behaviors. 5. Fame, Death, Redemption:

In spite of or because of drugs, sex, and racism (racism in this model is imagined

or not systemic, but is isolated to rogue hyper-‐prejudiced individual or groups, e.g.,

KKK, childhood teacher, former employer), the Black musician achieves fame and

prosperity. However, the demons of the past308 pull the musician down into the

abyss of ruin. This ruin is usually attributed to an inability to handle wealth and

notoriety. The Black musician’s fall is written as if it is his or her fault alone.

During this phase, the musician dies, self-‐destructs, or is jailed. Cheating death or

short imprisonment necessitates the most sincere of apologies to the nation and

the White savior, but never to the musician’s community or family—as these

families and communities are persona non grata. The narrative of the Black

musician’s life ends here, no matter the years left.

The proposed narration will consider Coltrane’s apprenticing, his family

dynamics (including his familial religious traditions), his musical connections to

African proverbs, and the continuation of African cultural aesthetics. These facets

308 If the narrative is of a musician during Jim Crow or the Civil Rights era, racism and integration has to be included into the tale.

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of Coltrane’s life will be wed to the four movements of the sun, the four Vee stages,

and other core concepts of the cosmogram.

John Coltrane’s Musoni: “The Go Order”

As noted by Fu-‐Kiau, the musoni is the first moment of the sun the birth of

all things. The Vee at this moment is called the vangama. The vangama is the

formation process whereby “biological life, all genetic codes are imprinted into the

future ‘living sun’ to be, the child.”309 What we understand of Coltrane’s vangama

will inform even an outline of our narrative of his life; including his musical

developments. It is important to recall here that the cosmogram does not begin

with the individual but “symbolize[s] the cyclical dimensions of reality, including

the daily, group, and historical human experience as microcosm.”310

As such, while we inscribe Coltrane’s life, we have to always engage it as a part of

the long history of African experiences. His life along the cosmogram is a

collection of all the experiences in which his community, and in particular his

bloodline ancestors,311 participated, engaged, and believed. The amount of

research devoted to Coltrane’s family origins remains inadequate.312 However, we

309 Fu-‐Kiau, African Cosmology, 138. 310 Carr, “You Don’t Call the Kittens Biscuits,” 364. 311 John Coltrane’s maternal family were the Blairs from the coastal regions of North Carolina, and his paternal side the Coltranes were from the central regions of Piedmont, North Carolina.

312 David Tegnell’s documentary story is the most comprehensive study to date of Coltrane’s beginnings. “Hamlet: John Coltrane’s Origins,” Jazz Perspectives 1, no. 2 (Nov. 2007): 167-‐215. His research, “drawn from an ongoing larger study that looks both backward and forward, detailing the histories of the Blair and Coltrane families from approximately 1810 through John Coltrane’s migration to Philadelphia in 1943.”

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can utilize the collection of research, interviews, letters, and biographies, along

with the Bantu-‐Kongo’s cosmogram, to “frame our interrogation”313 of his life.

From birth, his families’ strong educational, musical, and spiritual

foundations informed Coltrane’s worldview. Both his maternal and paternal

grandfathers—William Wilson Blair and William Henry Coltrane—were reverends

at various southern African Methodist Episcopal churches, including North

Carolina. His maternal grandfather, Rev. William Wilson Blair, also received an

honorary doctorate of divinity degree from Livingston College around 1921.314 At

the same time, Coltrane’s mother, Alice Blair, at 23 years old was enrolling in the

same college (as a high school student), graduating in May 1925.

A very confident and proud man, five years old when the Civil War ended,

Reverend Blair earned enough as a pastor to pay his daughter, Alice’s tuition to the

private high school and protected his wife and daughter from the “humiliation of

servitude” as domestic workers in white homes.315 His parents—Alice and John

Robert Coltrane, would marry August 17, 1925, following Alice’s graduation in May.

That both their fathers were reverends and they were not married in either

churches or even in Hamlet, North Carolina, but instead in Bennettsville, South

Carolina, reinforces the belief that they eloped. After marriage, the couple moved

into a small apartment in Hamlet, North Carolina, and later to High Point to be

closer to their families. Coltrane’s parents were both musicians; Alice, who was

313 Greg Carr’s utilization of the “Ki-‐Kongo” cosmogram as a paridgm for framing Malcolm X’s life in part influences this work. See Carr, “You Don’t Call the Kitten Biscuits,” 366.

314 David Tegnell, 178. 315 Ibid., 200.

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raised with a piano in the home, frequently played European compositions and

also sang opera; John Robert often played pop tunes on his ukulele and violin.

Considering this small snapshot of Coltrane’s family fabric within the

vangama process, we can surmise that his life is encoded with meaning, wisdom,

spirituality, adanu, and security. That the vangama’s function is partly one of

conception it is not surprising that Fu-‐Kiau notes, “[i]n this sense, ideologically, we

all get pregnant. And all pregnancies begin inside the ‘V1,’ the most fertile garden

of all.”316 The formation of biological genetic codes in this Vee assumes that

Coltrane from birth was embedded with ideas of his community. [see Figures 4 &

5] The longo and muntu paradigms during the musoni movement and at the

vangama stage also participate prominently in Coltrane’s birth, early childhood,

and adolescence.

That Alice and John Robert chose to live near their families, Coltrane would

have been a part of a Mwelo-‐nzo (extended motherhood) and as part of a longo

(marriage) was in an “alliance between, at least, two communities.”317 His mother’s

religious adherences—informed by her personal dedication but also from

consistent family norms—would have a huge impact on Coltrane’s life and music.

Coltrane, speaking about his mother and his religious upbringing, notes:

Well, it wasn’t too strict, but it was right there. Both my grandfathers were ministers. My mother, she was very religious. Like, in my early years I was going to church every Sunday and stuff like that, being under the influence of my grandfather—he was the

316 Fu-‐Kiau, 138. 317 Ibid., 39.

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dominating cat in the family. He was most versed, active politically. He was more active than my father, [who] was a tailor; but he [Coltrane’s father] never seemed to say too much. He just went about his business, and that was it. But my grandfather, he was pretty militant, you know. Politically inclined and everything. Religion was his field, you know. So that’s where—I grew up in that.318

His kanda (community) and the importance placed on education and spirituality

and the constant performance of musical styles, including those heard from the

church would animate Coltrane’s inner development as it began to “[a]ccelerate in

order to expand itself and its environment as well.”319 Coltrane’s experiences with

A.M.E. ritualized services and music would find its way into his compositions as he

grew as a composer and muntu. Coltrane was not alone in his infusion of black

church rituals into his musical styling. Dizzy Gillespie’s compositions were filled

with his influences from the Sacred Church. In his autobiography he notes:

Finally came the Sanctified church where everyone knew the whole congregation shouted . . . . The leader of the church was Elder Burch, and he had several sons, Willie and Johnny Burch were two of them . . . . Johnny Burch played the snare drum, and his brother Willie beat the cymbal; another one of the Burch brothers played the bass drum and the other tambourine. They used to keep at least four different rhythms going, and as the congregation joined in, the number of rhythms would increase with foot stomping, hand clapping and people catching the spirit and jumping up and down on the wooden floor, which also resounded like a drum.

318 Coltrane interview with August Blume, June 15, 1958. In Lewis Porter, John Coltrane: His Life and Music, (University of Michigan Press, 1999), 13.

319 Fu-‐Kiau, 138.

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Everybody would be shouting and fainting and stomping. They used to shout awhile. The Sanctified church’s rhythm got to me as it did to anyone else who came near the place. People like James Brown and Aretha Franklin owe everything to that Sanctified beat.320

At the foundation of these cultural musical forms we find spirituality. The music

produced comes from African traditions of sacred and secular cohesion. The Black

church directly influenced the musicians. However, the music that would be

produced by these musicians did not reflect the Eurocentric aesthetic of music

making. It was less Christian doctrine and more liberation theory, less hymns and

more polyrhythmic, less monologue and monotone sermons and instead a heavy

call and response as well as call-‐response performance.321 This juxtaposition of

sacred music and BAM underscores the pronounced contributions that the Black

church and its community would have in the music of Coltrane. In addition the

ideological underpinnings of his parents and extended family resonated and

manifested in his choices as an adult. Fu-‐Kiau notes, “The second key word in this

stage vumuni the breathing-‐being finds its root from the verb vumuna, to breathe.

320 Dizzy Gillespie, To Be, or Not to Bop (New York: Doubleday, 1979), 31. See also Sterling Stuckey’s “The Music That Is in One’s Soul: On the Sacred Origins of Jazz and the Blues,” Lenox Avenue: A Journal of Interarts Inquiry, vol. 1 (1995): 73-‐88, Center for Black Music Research, Columbia College Chicago. This essay is a gem of resources that connects jazz and blues first to their African origins and then to the Black church. As well, the essay does an extrodinary job of connecting jazz and blues to the black communities—poor-‐, middle-‐, and rich-‐classes. Stuckey’s examination of musician Mahalia Jackson life and her observations and understanding of the relationship between jazz and gospel music is particularly worth noting.

321 For an in depth explanation of the differences between call and response and call-‐response, see Samuel Floyd Jr., “Ring Shout! Literary Studies. Historical Studies and Black Music Inquiry,” in Signifyin(g), Sanctifyin’ & Slam Dunking, ed. Gena D. Caponi (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 146-‐55.

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It is the functioning process of all biological “motors”, the heart.”322 The vangama

stage of Coltrane’s life framed his thoughts and actions and “breathing power” as

he entered his second Vee—the Vaika.

Before we continue along the cosmogram and enter the next stage of

Coltrane’s life within the Vee it is important that we consider some pragmatic

developments. Specifically the next section will consider how the saxophone was

introduced into the musical culture of Black musicians. In addition it considers

the art of improvisation in the understanding of form over function.

322 Fu-‐Kiau, 138.

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The tenor is a rhythm instrument and the best statements negroes have made of what their rhythm soul is have been on tenor saxophone. Now you think about it and you’ll see I’m right. The tenor’s got that thing, that honk, you can get to people with it. Sometimes you can be playing that tenor and I’m telling you the people want to jump across the rail.

—Ornette Coleman

Improvisational Developments: Form Over Function

Improvisational art was first expressed in Africa.323 The open expression of

emotions through aesthetic developments was encouraged in intentional African

communities. Throughout this study the continuation of culture through space

and time has been highlighted to show the power of aural/oral transmission.

Included in this continuity on American soil was antiphony and improvisation.

Between these two musical cultures Walton notes that one can find the mingling

of joy touched with a melancholy expressions, elements of social protest, and

economic disenfranchisement. Ortiz Walton connects the music of South Africa

with Black American Music. His interest lies in disputing the notions of

“ethnomusicologist who hold that Black music is of European origin or that it is a

completely new music.”324 The trumped up assertions of ethnomusicologist are in

part supported by African musicians’ use of non-‐traditional instruments. African

musicians used traditional European classical music and military instruments in

the absence of their own traditional instruments. Sidney Bechet recalls memories

323 Ortiz Walton, “A Comparative Analysis of the African and the Western Aesthetics,” in The Black Aesthetic, 154.

324 Ibid., 159.

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of his grandfather Omar in New Orleans making drums from the skins of pigs and

horsehides and playing them at the Congo Square on Sunday. Often times

traditional-‐like instruments were, “invented when the materials were available—

instruments such as bones (claves), washbucket bass, kazoo (merliton) and various

drums (especially in Louisiana).”325

What accounts for the adoption of European instruments by African

musicians? In particular, how and why did emerging black musicians begin to

incorporate the saxophone into their battery of instruments? It must be noted

that aerophone reed instruments did not play a major role in the musical

traditions of Africa. While there were double-‐reeded instruments such as the

ghaita and the bumpa it was not as popular as the flute class. Aside from the

makeshift invented instruments, the main instrument of enslaved Africans was the

voice. The voice was used to create unique sounds through the manipulation of

timbre, texture and shading. Portia Maultsby observes that in Africa and

throughout the diaspora Africans utilized the voice to create a variety of sound.

She notes that, “Black musicians produce array of unique sounds many of which

imitate those of nature, animals, spirits and speech.” The reproduction of these

sounds used a variety of techniques, “including striking the chest and maneuvering

the tongue, mouth, cheek, and throat.”326 African instrumentalists familiar with

voice techniques found it necessary to continue this tradition in America. Bebey

325 Ibid., 164. 326 Portia Maultsby, “Africanisms in African-‐American Music”, in Afircanisms in American Culture, ed. Joseph E. Holloway (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 191.

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discerns that:

Western distinctions between instrumental and vocal music are evidently unthinkable in Africa where the human voice and musical instruments speak the same language, express the same feelings, and unanimously recreate the universe each time that thought is transformed into sound.327

A shift in the employment of new instruments used by liberated Africans

occurred following the Civil War. With a surplus of wartime instruments available

and emancipated Blacks having some income the possibility of purchasing and the

process of appropriating European instruments outside of their fixed tonal styles

began. Doug Miller suggests that in the years following the Spanish-‐American war

in 1898 the saxophone entered New Orleans around 1912 “through the backdoor via

disbanded musicians who accompanied US troops in Cuba.” The saxophone

served little use outside of the military context during this period. This resulted in

a surplus of saxophones being pawned and as a result became accessible to less

well-‐off, aspiring black musicians.328

One of the instruments that became readily available was the tenor and alto

saxophone. The saxophone is a hybrid instrument in that it does not have a fixed

tonal range, which lends much scope for variations in timbre. Portia Maultsby

327 Bebey, African Music, 26. (emphasis added) Bebey’s observations of the instrumenatalist, “recreation of the universe” is very similar to Askia Toure’s desrciption of his first time seeing John Coltrane perform live. Toure recalled, “We went into this bar . . . and up on this platform was young John Coltrane . . . he had a trio . . . a pianist and a drummer. And we sat down there, Bill Day and I . . . and listened to John Coltrane reconstruct the universe with his horn. And my head got so out I had to take a break . . . [because] I’m going to be flying in a minute. I never heard nothing like this.” (Askia Toure interview with the author, April 10, 2011).

328 Doug Miller, “The Moan within the Tone: African Retentions in Rhythm and Blues Saxophone Style in Afro-‐American Popular Music,” Popular Music 14, no. 2 (May 1995): 156-‐57.

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observes, “Given the traditions of African music of note tonal concepts,

vocalization, improvisation and the social function of performance and at the same

time the lack of traditional African instrumentation in the Southern states – it was

probably inevitable that Afro-‐American musicians would feel forced to deviate

from certain principles of melodic structure, organization and function and

produce pitches unavailable on Western instruments.”329

One character that stood out to African instrumentalists was the

saxophone’s allowance of tone variations. Saxophone historian Larry Teal asserts,

“that the saxophone is very similar to the human voice in terms of the physical and

mental processes required for tonal production.”330 A primary similarity is the

breathing procedures in vocal performance and the saxophone. Secondly the reeds

of the saxophone and vocal chords serve the similar purpose. The final similarity is

the great flexibility afforded both vocal chords and the saxophone in sound

productions. What emerging black saxophonist, lacked in formal Western

modalities—standards that dictated that the saxophonist maintain a firm

embouchure and play clean notes—they made up for by pulling from their

traditions where no such constraints applied and played their instruments

according to what they found in them. Miller underscores this when he states “the

uptake of the saxophone in Afro-‐American popular music relates to the extent to

which as an instrument the saxophone offered players the ability to sustain African

329 Portia Maultsby, “West African Influences in US Black Music,” in More than Dancing: Essays on Afro-‐American Music and Musicians, ed. Irene Jackson (Connecticut: Greenwood Prager, 1985), 44.

330 Larry Teal, The Art of Saxophone Playing (New York: Alfred Publishing, 1963), 46.

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musical concepts in the absence of traditional African instrumentation.”331 Both

Sidney Bechet and Coleman Hawkins (regarded as the father of the BAM tenor

saxophone) would highly influence the saxophone’s new tonal styles. Hawkins in

particular would affect the development of the timbre approaches on the horn.

Doug Miller traces the initial popularity of the tenor saxophone to Texas. Houston

in the 1940’s became a blues nexus and “spawned the careers of tenor saxophonists

Eddie ‘Cleanhead’ Vinson, Arnett Cobb and Harold Land”332 among others.

Members of the Red Connor band would train important teen-‐players such as

Ornette Coleman, David Newman, James Clay and King Curtis. Missouri would

become an additional incubator for new tenor idioms. Miller states, “Not only was

it the birthplace of Coleman Hawkins but in Kansas City it provided a centre in

which a distinctive style of orchestral jazz was able to develop, a style that was to

be crucial for the development of R&B [sic] saxophone.”333 That the saxophone

became a key component within the Black music battery of instruments is a

moment that cannot be overlooked.

Two claims can be made from this moment. First the idea that function

was prioritized over form is self-‐evident with the historical memory of African

aesthetic values. Maultsby asserts “Africans adapted to environmental changes

and social upheaval by relying on familiar traditions and practices. In essence, new

331 Miller, 159. 332 Ibid., 158. 333 Ibid.

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ideas were recycled through age-‐old concepts to produce new musical styles.”334

That Africans living in new spaces found fit to approximate and improvise on

found materials including instruments supports this claim.

A second claim that can be made relates to Coltrane and his moments

around the cosmogram. As Coltrane’s makes his way out of the musoni stage of

the Vee and begins to enter the second stage, the vaika all that he had learned and

experienced would enter with him. The cosmogram as a process in constant

motion across generations passes along to current generations ways of knowing

and cultural meanings and ways in which cultural norms are executed.

Simultaneously it is the responsibility of the current generation to gather, master,

and apply these ideas to their current conditions through improvisational acts that

befit the needs of their larger community. Thusly the ideas and developments that

occurred without Coltrane’s input would still inform his development and ideology

in the vaika stage.

As such it is no wonder that the seemingly arbitrary use of the saxophone

by Black musicians would play a major define a part of his vaika phase. The

influence of Coleman Hawkins and Eddie ‘Cleanhead’ Vinson to his musical career

cannot be ignored. In as much that Coleman Hawkins influenced Coltrane in his

teenage years and because his early musical abilities built a reputation that led to

him being invited in the late 1940’s to become a member of Eddie Vinson’s

traveling band speaks to Coltrane’s gathering of ideas from the great tenor

334 Maultsby, “Africanisms in African-‐American Music,” 205.

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saxophone players of his era. Discussing his time playing with Vinson, Coltrane in

his own words notes, “A wider area of listening opened up for me. There were

many things that people like Hawk, and Ben and Tab Smith were doing in the ‘40’s

that I didn’t understand, but that I felt emotionally.”335 His influence from

Hawkins; a tenor master and apprenticeship with Vinson would be collected as his

movements around the suns continued. Let us now turn our attention to the next

phase of the Vee—the Vaika stage.

The Vaika Stage: John Coltrane’s Early Rise

In June of 1943 John Coltrane moved north to Philadelphia, PA from High

Point. His mother, aunt and cousin Mary had already moved to Philadelphia in

1942—Coltrane stayed behind in High Point to graduate high school.336 Coltrane

would lose his grandparents and father between 1938 and 1943. Arriving in

Philadelphia at 16 years old Coltrane was embedded with countless musical and

spiritual beliefs. His early musical influences were Johnny Hodges, Illinois Jacquet,

and Coleman Hawkins. His idol and clear influence was Lester Young. Although

his earliest instrument was the alto horn he notes that, “I chose the sax because

Lester [Young] played it. At the beginning I played the alto—I don’t really know

why, since I admired [tenor saxophonist] Lester Young at that time.”337

335 John Coltrane: The Official Website, http://www.johncoltrane.com/biography.html, (April 22, 2014).

336 That Coltrane stayed behind under the watch and care of family friends, the Flairs again underscores the cosmogram’s notion of the kanda (community). See: Figure: 5.

337 John Coltrane interview with Francois Postif in Lewis Porter’s, John Coltrane:His Life and Music, 30.

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In the vaika stage the ideas and beliefs germinate in the individual. It is the

start of one’s concepts and philosophies in relations to themselves and their

known communities. Fu-‐Kiau notes, “This Vee is the door into the physical world.

Under this “V”, “things” are born, rise up to the upper world [ku nseke] as “living”

suns in the community, biologically or ideologically, have their birth at this stage

under the Kala Sun.”338 That Coltrane’s musical concepts begin to take form

during this period is seen in his choice of instrument, formulation of his own high

school bands, and attendance of live shows and constant listening of specific

sounds on album recordings. One friend observed that, “For a while I don’t think

he had anything but that horn.”339 It is during this phase that apprenticing is

paramount. Carr states that, “The final critical elements of the modified Ki-‐Kongo

cosmogram paradigm are the apprenticed reception of historical memory

(repetition) and the contribution to the ongoing accumulation of memory

(improvisation).340

Coltrane’s musical apprenticing at this stage starts with the collective

historical musical and aesthetic memories of his parents, his community, his

school music teachers, and from recordings and concerts of master musicians. As

he advances in this stage his apprenticing would not be casual relationships or by-‐

way-‐of training. At this stage in preparation for the next stage Coltrane’s training

would become very formalized. Leonard Brown explores Coltrane’s training in his

338 Fu-‐Kiau, 138. 339 Porter, 17. 340 Carr, “You Don’t Call the Kittens Biscuits,” 365.

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essay, You Have to Be Invited. Brown notes that the oldest method of, “passing the

music on is the oral/aural tradition, in which musical knowledge and performance

practice is carried on through a people’s memory and history.”341

Brown evokes the expression of the Haudenosaunee that explains the

selective process of transmission of musical knowledge and cultural beliefs. He

notes that the, “Haudenosaunee have an expression that means you have to be

invited; it implies that only when you are thought to be ready and able to use

certain knowledge responsibly will it be shared. It does not imply that knowledge is

secret but rather that those entrusted with knowledge know how it should be

used.”342 Brown notes that:

These musicians were a part of the community and shared common experiences as black Americans. As pioneers, they collectively conceptualized and created stylistic approaches based on black cultural aesthetics. Much of this music was rooted in the practices of African ancestors, and often reflected adaptations and innovations resulting from black American life experiences. Consequently, the musicians had the responsibility of determining to whom, when, and where this knowledge would be passed. There were no “jazz studies” programs at this time. The musicians were the keepers of musical knowledge and controlled its dissemination.343

Coltrane after arriving in Philadelphia and reaching the apex of his vaika stage

would be noticed for his musical abilities and perhaps even his commitment to his

341 Leonard Brown, “You Have to Be Invited: Reflections on Music Making and Musician Creation in Black American Culture,” John Coltrane & Black America’s Quest for Freedom, Spirituality and Music, ed. Leonard Brown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 3.

342 Ibid., 4. 343 Ibid.

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instrument and training. However the privilege of carrying and transmitting

musical knowledge was not just given only because of observed musical talents.

The music developed by Africans even after enslavement was still created to house

memories and “to meet the needs of their people and community.”344 As such the

selection of mentees was not a light decision. The choice of Coltrane reflected his

preparation, ability to accept instructions and a desire to carry the weight so-‐to-‐

speak of the long arch of cultural memory. Brown notes several other qualities

that Coltrane had to exhibit to be selected. Among the many that he notes the

following are crucial to our understanding of how the Bantu-‐Kongo cosmogram

influences African’s decisions and worldview to this day.

They are:

• sincere desire to be a musician • high level of instrumental proficiency • thorough understanding of melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic

performance practices, including a strong understanding of improvisational approaches

• the “right” attitude: a thirst for knowledge and a willingness to learn • respect for previous and existing performance aesthetics and an openness

to exploring new realms of possibilities • “saying something” on the horn—the ability to communicate with the

listeners using the aesthetic vernacular of Black culture345 Three years after arriving in Philadelphia Coltrane was recruited by established

Black musicians to perform and record with their groups. His invitation into this

musical community “signified that the older, established community of black

344 Ibid. 345 Brown, 7.

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musicians recognized Coltrane was ready to be exposed to deeper knowledge of

the music. They recognized that he had potential to make significant

contributions on the bandstand by expressing the aesthetics of the music that was

required by the listeners and upheld in the community by the musicians.”346

This training underscores a process in the vaika that involves speaking—the

vova. Vova is to speak to code and decode. “Established musicians” Brown notes,

“realized that Coltrane could speak the language in ways that could enhance

tradition.” This process Fu-‐Kiau explains “was for the outside world, the universe,

what is genetically coded/printed [sonwa] inside one’s inner darkroom. It is not

only to feed the ears of the world, but to fill with our waves (expressed energies)

the cosmic voids. It is to hear and to be heard.”347

Considering his training during the years to follow—two stints with Miles

Davis;348 a short time with Dizzy Gillespie; an impactful master training with

Thelonious Monk; and with many other master teachers—Coltrane’s training and

responsibilities were crystalized. The crystallization of Coltrane’s apprenticeship

led him on a quest of “ceaseless and exhaustive expressions of a kind of aesthetic,

intellectual, spiritual and personal movement over the course of a tune, a

performance, a recording session, a life.”349 This quest allowed Coltrane to again

consider the movements and historical memory of his people. This reflection led

346 Ibid., 5. 347 Fu-‐Kiau, 139. 348 See Herman Gray’s “Coltrane and the Practice of Freedom,” for a description of Coltrane’s time with Miles Davis and how it aided in his artistic development in John Coltrane & Black America’s Quest for Freedom, 51-‐54.

349 Ibid., 53.

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to what Guthrie Ramsey would call hybridity. Ramsey indicates that during this

period and in subsequent movements of his music Coltrane would gather and

include all the available musical elements of his time. As he edged closer toward

his next Vee stage Coltrane would began to formulate ideas of his own approaches

to musical motifs. Leonard Brown considers Coltrane’s cultural meaning making

and describes it as such, “Coltrane expanded the tenor range to four octaves from

its original two-‐and-‐one-‐half-‐octave range, pioneered new and innovative sounds

through his explorations—sheets of sound, running chords—and used many other

sonic twists, turns, runs, polyphonics, and harmonics to a achieve a kind of self-‐

accompaniment or conversation, call and response if you will.”350 This

development and his formal training within the vaika stage prepared him for his

second rise during the third Vee stage—the vanga.

350 Ibid.

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The truly spiritual, the actual religious music of Black, people must be kept back, controlled, not played at all costs. If we could hear (it). . . with the same unending consistency of white rock or r&b all of our consciousness would be so raised that very government of the United States would be imperiled.

—Imamu Amiri Baraka351

He [Art Tatum] said, “Well, he knows what I do, but he doesn’t know why I do it.” And so that was the same kind of thing with John [Coltrane]. Here is a guy that a lot of people heard the notes that he played, but they didn’t get the spirit behind it.

—Billy Taylor352

CHAPTER 7

THE VANGA: COLTRANE STANDS UP STRAIGHT IN HIS VEE

Around his second term with Davis in 1957 Coltrane enters his third Vee

stage—the vanga. One aspect of the second Vee; the vaika is that it heals and

condemns. Fu-‐Kiau notes that, “It is [this] Vee that teaches about the power of

words in and around us in life: Mambu makela, words are bullets, says a Kongo

saying.”353 In 1957 prior to returning to Miles Davis’ group Coltrane states:

During the year 1957, I experienced, by the grace of God, a spiritual awakening which was to lead me to a richer, fuller, more productive life. At that time, in gratitude, I humbly asked to be given the means and privilege to make others happy through music. I feel

351 Imamu Amiri Baraka, “The Ban On Black Music,” Black Music, vol. xx, no.9 (1971): 4-‐12. 352 Leonard Brown, “Masters on a Master Introduction: Conversations With Billy Taylor,” in John Coltrane and Black America’s Quest for Freedom, 211.

353 Ibid.

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this has been granted through His grace. ALL PRAISE TO GOD. As time and events moved on, a period of irresolution did prevail. I entered into a phase which was contradictory to the pledge and away from the esteemed path; but thankfully, now and again through the unerring and merciful hand of God, I do perceive and have been duly re-‐informed of His OMNIPOTENCE, and of our need for, and dependence on Him. At this time I would like to tell you that NO MATTER WHAT . . . IT IS WITH GOD. HE IS GRACIOUS AND MERCIFUL. HIS WAY IS IN LOVE, THROUGH WHICH WE ALL ARE. IT IS TRULY – A LOVE SUPREME.354

From his formalized instructions and embracing of his historical memory it is

evident that Coltrane understood his role as a musician in the African cultural

sense of adanu—healer, counselor, and wise one. Coltrane exits out of the vaika

stage healed. The personal and systemic obstacles that Coltrane had to overcome

were not the direct influencers of his compositions in this period. His changes

were reflective of his mentoring and the communal conservatory training process

that extended back over centuries. Coltrane respected the particular beliefs and

set rules of music meaning making and honored them through his music and life.

His apprenticing allowed him access into the old ways, current trends and grasp

future movements in the community and how the music would need to approach

it. Brown notes that Coltrane learned how to care for and maintain his horn, how

to select and customize reeds, proper attire, and when and when not to speak.355

354 John William Coltrane, liner notes from A Love Supreme (Impulse Records, 1964). 355 Something as mundane as reed choices was an important aspect to the saxophone player. Rahshan Roland Kirk states, “Coltrane and I used to get together and talk about mouthpieces and reeds and music.” Musician Dewey Redman recalls, “I was living in San Francisco in 1963, and I saw Coltrane

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By 1957 Coltrane was a leader of his own band and had recorder his first

album as bandleader. Coltrane’s first released album the self-‐titled Coltrane had

six tracks. Three of the tracks were standard tunes; two compositions were

Coltrane originals; and the lead track Bakai was written by his close friend Cal

Massey. Bakai in Arabic means to cry. This track was dedicated to Emmett Till.356

Fu-‐Kiau explains that the vanga stage involves performing, doing. “This Vee” Fu-‐

Kiau points out as “the most crucial in life, represents the stage of creativity and

great deeds or tukula stage of the root verb kula to mature to master.”357 The

vanga stage is where Coltrane calls down all of his training and improvised off of

the millennia of cultural expressions. It is his time around the cosmogram. As he

stands upright in the vanga he becomes an nganga (doer/master) to his local and

the Pan-‐African kanda (community). Coltrane during this period utilizes the

plethora of systems and beliefs ascribed to his communal adanu (music). That he

is often cited as being meticulous and ferocious in his practices is not a surprise or

anomaly when understood in the vanga context. Herman Gray notes in his essay,

Coltrane and the Practice of Freedom that:

Coltrane’s legendary personal discipline took many forms, most notably, his brutal practice regime, which became the basis of his approach to improvisation, composition and performance. His personal discipline

at the Jazz Workshop. Afterward, I talked with him and he invited me to his hotel room to talk about mouthpieces, because I was having trouble with mine and I wanted advise. When I got there, he dumped out two airline bags of mouthpieces on the floor and and said ‘Take your pick.’ I tried them out until I found one I liked.” See J.C. Thomas, Chasin’ the Trane: The Music and Mystique of John Coltrane (New York: Doubleday, 1975), 151, 161.

356 Martin Smith, John Coltrane: Jazz, Racism and Resistance (London: Redwords, 2001), 58. 357 Fu-‐Kiau, 139.

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was also expressed through his devotion to an ideal of purity and spirituality that led him to devote his life and work to the service of God and the human community. And, of course, he did all of this in a community of friends and peers, in the context of work environments and formal contracts involving financial rewards, critical evaluation, travel, family, home and so on. In this sense, Coltrane’s sound of freedom, his infamous quest for perfection and ceaseless search for the “right sound” is, I think neither mysterious nor otherworldly—but rather it is, I believe, he actual work of making freedom, useful for his time (and ours) through making a life and making a living which is extraordinary as it is routine. It is through this sense of his own practice . . . that the example of Coltrane the artist (and not just Trane the mythological figure) is important.358

That Coltrane understood the power of music and their abilities to support his

community is understood in relation to his position in the vanga. The moment of

the sun that correlates to the vanga is the luvemba. This process Fu-‐Kiau notes, “is

associated with the nganga, specialist or healer.” Coltrane in 1962 explained in

part that: I want to be able to bring something to people that feels like happiness. I would love to discover a process such that if I wanted it to rain, it would start raining. If one of my friends were sick, I would play another tune and immediately he would receive all the money he needed. But what those pieces are, and what way do you have to go at to arrive at knowing them, I don’t know. The true powers of music are still unknown. To be able to control them should be, I think the ambition of every musician. The knowledge of these forces fascinates me.359

358 Herman Gray, “John Coltrane and the Practice of Freedom,” John Coltrane & Black America’s Quest for Freedom, 36-‐37.

359 John Coltrane interview with Jean Clouzet and Michel Delorme (Paris, 1972). In Chris DeVito, ed., Coltrane on Coltrane: The John Coltrane Interviews (Chicago: A Cappella Books, 2010), 182.

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His training with elder musicians also embedded Coltrane with a strong

understanding of what musical limits he could break through. Karlton Hester

notes: Now fluent in all aspects of the jazz language, Coltrane’s propensity towards emphasizing harmonic motion seems highly germane to the overall balance of elements for the composer at this phase of development. As a Hard Bop player, he had totally digested the linear concepts of Bebop and had evolved his saxophone technique to a point where it could no longer be confined by the notes that comprise even the divisions of the beat. This music began to involve a rich instrumental timbre and the polyrhythmic complexity of African music . . . .”360

Coltrane as a specialist—as a master, fulfilled the requirement of the community.

Within the Bantu-‐Kongo society an individual in the community were only

accepted as members in the community if they demonstrated that they bring

something for the wellbeing of the kanga. Coltrane would also serve as protector

of the culture. Having been exposed to the precious resources of the musical

culture, Coltrane was entrusted with protecting it from outsiders. In many

settings the outsiders were the music critics. In June 1962, Coltrane responded to

Down Beat magazine editor Don DeMichael. DeMichael mailed Coltrane a copy of

Music and Imagination, by Aaron Copland. Leonard Brown asks, “Why would

DeMichael send such a book? Despite the fact that Coltrane had mentored under

Joe Webb, King Kolax, Dizzy Gillespie, Eddie Vinson, Earl Bostic, and Johnny

Hodges, had been asked twice by Miles Davis to perform with his groups and

360 Karlton Hester, The Melodic and Polyrhythmic Development of John Coltrane’s Spontaneous Composition in a Racist Society (Ontario: Edwin Mellen Press, 1997), 30.

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sought out by Thelonious Monk . . . it appears that DeMichael still had to impose

his authority as a critic.”361

Several insiders have used Coltrane’s response to DeMichael to demonstrate

his positions about African culture, African people, civil rights, and freedom

struggles, and to highlight his commitment to, and protector of the music. On

June 2, 1962, Contrane wrote DeMichael:

June 2, 1962 “Dear Don, Many thanks for sending Aaron Copland’s fine book, Music and Imagination. I found it historically revealing and on the whole, quite informative. However, I do not feel that all of his tenets are entirely essential or applicable to the “jazz” musician. This book seems to be written for the American classical or semi-‐classical composer who has the problem, as Copland sees it, of not finding himself an integral part of the musical community, or having difficulty in finding a positive philosophy or justification for his art. The “jazz” musician (You can have this term along with several other that have been foisted upon us.) does not have this problem at all.” At this juncture, Coltrane connects the lived practice of African culture with deeper concepts of musical production tied to moral and ethical values: “We have absolutely no reason to worry about lack of positive and affirmative philosophy. It’s built in us. The phrasing, the sound of the music attest this fact. We are naturally endowed with it. You can believe all of us would have perished long ago if this were not so. As to community, the whole face of the globe is our community. You see, it is really easy for us to create. We are born with this feeling that just comes out no matter what conditions exist. Otherwise, how could our founding fathers have produced this music in the first place when they surely found themselves (as many of us do today) existing in hostile communities where there was everything to fear and damn few to trust. Any music which could grow and propagate itself as our music has, must have a hell of an affirmative belief inherent in it. Any person who claims to doubt this, or claims to believe that the exponents of our music or freedom are not guided by the same entity, is either prejudiced, musically sterile, or just plain stupid or scheming. Believe me Don, we all

361 Brown, 17.

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know that this word which so many see, to fear today, ‘Freedom’ has a hell of a lot to do with this music.” Returning to the comparison of his musical genealogy to the “lessons” of Copland book, Coltrane writes, “ Anyway, I did find in Copland’s book many fine points. For example: ‘I cannot imagine an art work without implied convictions’—Neither can I. I am sure that you and many others have enjoyed and garnered much of value from this well written book.” Coltrane finishes the letter by suggesting that more comparative study be done, but that it be done from a multi-‐centered perspective that values all cultural traditions and seeks larger “truths” emerging from the comparison: “If I may, I would like to express a sincere hope that in the near future, a vigorous investigation of the materials presented in this book and others related will help cause an opening up of the ears that are still closed to the progressive music created by the independent thinking artist of today. When this is accomplished, I am certain that the owners of such ears will easily recognize the very vital and highly enjoyable qualities that exist in this music. I also feel that through such honest endeavor, the contributions of future creators will be more easily recognized, appreciated and enjoyed; particularly by the listeners who may otherwise miss the point (intellectually, emotionally, sociologically, etc.) because of inhibitions, a lack of understanding, limited means of association or other reasons. You know Don I was reading a book on the life of Van Gogh today, and I had to pause and think of that wonderful and persistent force—the creative urge. The creative urge was in this man who found himself so much at odds with the world he lived in, and in spite of all the adversity, frustrations, rejections and so forth—beautiful and living art came forth abundantly . . . if only he could be here today. Truth is indestructible. It seems history shows (and it’s the same way today) that the innovator is more often than not met with some degree of condemnation; usually according to the degree of his departure from the prevailing modes of expression or what have you. Change is always so hard to accept. We also see that these innovators always seek to revitalize, extend and reconstruct the status quo in their given fields, whenever it is needed. Quite often they are rejects, outcasts, sub-‐citizens, etc. of the very societies to which they bring so much sustenance. Often they are people who endure great personal tragedy in their lives. Whatever the case, whether accepted or rejected, rich or poor, that are forever guided by that great and eternal constant—the creative urge. Let us cherish it and give all praise to God. Thank you and best wishes to all.

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Sincerely John Coltrane362” Coltrane’s response to DeMichael illuminates his training and

apprenticeship and that in his vanga stage he “stood straight”. His unapologetic

reply was seasoned with wisdom reflective of historical memory. Hester notes,

“First of all, he [Coltrane] realized that he (like his forefathers) was creating music

in a hostile environment (America) where trust could be placed in very few

individuals because of the racist legacy that has been perpetuated throughout the

history of the culture.”363 Coltrane’s pertinent points did not suggest the he felt a

need to defend Black culture to DeMichael. Instead he sought to explain and set

the record straight regarding how Blacks in America saw themselves in relation to

the dominant culture. Hester again notes, “Second, Coltrane’s trenchant

declarations regarding the validity, philosophical stability, and positive purpose of

his art, demonstrate a realization of the futility of outside criticism by people such

as DeMichael on the “indestructible truth” contained in his music.”364 Fu-‐Kiau

surmises that in the vanga stage, “To stand well inside this scaling Vee is to be able

not only to master our lives, but to better know ourselves and our relationship

positions with the rest of the universe as a whole.”365 Coltrane’s salient points in

his response to DeMichael stemmed from his gathering of the experiences not just

362 C.O. Simpkins, Coltrane: A Biography (New Jersey: Herndon House, 1975), 159-‐61. 363 Hester, xxv. 364 Ibid., xxvi. 365 Fu-‐Kiau, 141.

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of his time but of the past and present lived conditions of Africans globally

throughout time and space.

Before proceeding to Coltrane’s final Vee stage—the vunda let us first

consider the intellectual and cultural importance of John Coltrane’s music and its

meaning making through selected compositions as they relate to conceptual ways

of knowing and cultural meaning making. This will aid in our understanding of

the significance of African music.

Proverbial Retentions Within The Music

The cosmogram of the Bantu-‐Kongo is governed by sets of prescribed

principles. These inscriptions are forged in the spiritual world—the kundu. The

kundu is made up of humans, ancestral lived experiences, and the mpeve—

body/mind experiences. These collective experiences are an accumulation of the

long memory of history. Fu-‐Kiau suggest, “This lived accumulated experience-‐

knowledge may be positive or negative for the social life in the community

depending on the kind of leadership it has.”366 What can be concluded from this

understanding of the kundu are its similarities to the use of proverbs. Opoku states,

“merely reading a proverb, however well translated, does not bring the reader

[listener] to its full force and impact.”367 The cosmogram serves a similar purpose

366 Ibid., 38. 367 Opoku, xxii.

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to that of African proverbs; to express the accumulated wisdom and experiences of

a people.368

The Ki-‐Kongo expression, bambuta bata ngana—proverbs or theories said

by ancestors, references the long historical memory of philosophical, social,

dialectical, theoretical, legal, and judicial assertions.369 The cosmogram as

proverbs is used to teach and explain core concepts through knotting and

unknotting—what Fu-‐Kiau classifies as coding and decoding.370 However, Opoku

states that, “Proverbs are not only expressed in words, they are expressed in the

language of the drums and the sounds of the horns.”371 Here in lies the connection

to the compositions of John Coltrane. Coltrane’s music continues the tradition of

transmitting collective wisdom and experiences of African historical memories.

His music preserves the cultural aesthetics of proverbs, coded-‐languages and

resistance.

The Akan found wisdom everywhere—in the environment, in the human

body, in trees, birds, and animals, in the skies etc. To stress this note what Amon

Saakana states, “In the African context music making was an aesthetic attempt to

express the sounds in nature. These sounds from the lion, the elephant, the bird,

368 The Kongo cosmogram is not the only iconography in African cultures that can be understood as non-‐written proverbs. The adinkra symbols of West Africa, of the Akan, Twi speaking peoples are understood as proverbs as well that through images encapsulate ideas, wisdom and collective historical thoughts of the community. See G.F. Kojo Arthur, Cloth as Metaphor Re-‐Reading the Adinkra Cloth Symbols of the Akan of Ghana, 1st ed. (Centre for Indigenous Knowledge Systems, 2001); W. Bruce Willis, The Adinkra Dictionary: A Visual Primer on the Language of Adinkra (Pyramid Complex, 1998); Heike Owusu, Symbols of Africa (Sterling, 2000).

369 Fu-‐Kiau, 92. 370 Ibid., 72. 371 Opoku, xx.

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the wind, the river, thunder, etc., became the principal for artistic formulation and

expression.”372

The compositions of John Coltrane, much like the proverbs of the Akan

served as a social aesthetic. They expressed and contained the collective

experiences and wisdom of a people. When we consider his compositions:

Africa/Brass, Reverend King, Dial Africa, Oomba, and Gold Coast, we derive that

these were conscious decisions to express the contemporary and long history of his

Pan-‐African community. Note what Coltrane’s pianist McCoy Tyner conveyed

about his music, “To me, this is our system of music, the Afro-‐American system of

music. This is the African system of music…. A lot of these expressions-‐ jazz, avant

garde – came about because of our environment. As musicians began to think

more about our heritage, they began to refer to it more and more as black music.

Buts it’s always been the music of black musicians. It is an extension of the whole

body of black experience.”373 When we consider the proverbs of the Akan and by

extension the compositions of Coltrane they are as Jack Daniels states, “an index of

cultural continuity and interaction – they provide a mirror to the world of African

and Diasporic people, they continue to exist in Black popular culture and bear

directly on the issue of African survivals in the New World.”374

372 Amon Saba Saakana, “Culture, Concept, Aesthetics: The Phenomenon of the African Musical Universe in Western Musical Culture,” African American Review, no. 29.2, (1995): 330.

373 Frank Kofsky, 402. 374 Jack Daniel, “Makin’ a Way Outa No Way: The Proverb Tradition in the Black Experience,” Journal of Black Studies 17, no. 4 (June, 1987): 484.

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Coded Language Of African Music

As previously mentioned the Akan say, Oba nyansafo wobu no be na wonka

no asem—the wise person is spoken to in proverbs, not in plain talk. In African

societies no one can be considered educated or qualified to take part in communal

discussions unless she is able to quote the proverbs relevant to each situation. In

the Bantu-‐Kongo community proverbs represented a special or coded language.

Fu-‐Kiau notes that sometime proverbs were used by members of the community to

“prevent the leak of fundamental principles of the society.”375 This is done to avoid

outsiders from accessing basic systematic concepts of their society, in particular

their secrets. Fu-‐Kiau admonishes that this is done because, “African people are

very sensitive to what touches their conceptual bases.”376

The continuity of coded languages couched itself in the creation of new

musical productions by trained musicians in the Americas. I suggest then that the

musicians consciously performed and composed music with the idea of not

alienation of any particular group but instead an inclusion of those who needed to

know. This conscious aesthetic production retained the tonal concept of African

language but as an extension the instrument if not vocal substituted and was

transferred to the horns, drums, bass, piano, etc. And because of its tonal variance

375 Fu-‐Kiau, 93. 376 Ibid., 94. Fu-‐Kiau’s instance upon this observation is noted in the forward of his 2nd edition to his text. He states regarding the expansion of his work, “This expansion includes a brief description of the Bantu-‐Kongo concept of mapping the universe [kayengele/luyalungunu] and a new chapter on the “Vee,” one of the most secret aspects of the Bantu teaching among the Kongo people.” Fu-‐Kiau, 13.

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the saxophone in particular was a logical extension to communicate messages,

make ones presence known or simply express emotions.

Bebop for instance became a response to jazz that was easily played and

composed during the big band era. It was coded music. The change from big

band, to be-‐bop, to hard bop, to free or new music was not accidental or simply a

series of genius creation. To the contrary it was a conscious production of a

collective shift in consciousness.377 This difference between the wise and foolish

person in regards to proverbs highlights my belief that jazz compositions, in

particular the so-‐called Bebop and Free Jazz periods, retained this idea of a coded

language. This is demonstrated by the fact that BAM artists composed music that

was not easily performed, composed or listened to by some. As such it separated

the wise from the foolish. Seba Art Blakey stated, “The title of the songs and albums

were oblique enough to get past the record company executives and most music

reviewers. But they were obvious to those who needed to know.” Interestingly, as

the musicians stretched and pulled at the limitations of their compositions, in

particular the bebop, hard-‐bop and free periods a larger amount of critics, and

audience and fans rejected or at the very least longed for the earlier periods. This

is reflective of Bebey’s observation, “that African musicians do not attempt to

combine sounds pleasing to the ear. Their aim is simply to express life in all its

aspects through the medium of the sound.”378

377 For further instances of this see Henry Dumas’ short story Will the Circle Be Unbroken?. 378 Bebey, African Music, 330.

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Proverbs And Coded Language In Coltrane’s Compositions

History is not static. Though the development of the African proverbs are

rooted in the beginnings of their civilization they continue to change. Obviously

there are modern examples of the verbal proverbs: Your word is your bond; Two

heads are better than one; Never trouble trouble till trouble troubles you. As Opoku

states the proverbs are also told through the drum and horn. The contemporary

retentions of the Akan proverbs though verbal can be detected in the recordings

and compositions of John Coltrane. Much like our ancestor’s production of

proverbs, Coltrane found wisdom everywhere throughout the environment. The

originators of the proverbs were very keen observers of nature, and, in a sense, the

whole environment was an open book.379 Ravi Coltrane speaking about his father’s

compositions states, “It’s important to emphasize that he was so aware of things

around him-‐ in nature, art, science, and even numbers that he felt compelled to

mirror in his music what he studied and what he came to know.”380 There is

wisdom and collective experiences found within the music of John Coltrane. Of

his many compositions two of Coltrane’s recordings will be considered to highlight

their proverbial retentions. Alabama his 1963 recording details the collective

experience of a people. Secondly, his 1964 recording A Love Supreme highlights

the continuance of the collective wisdom of previous generations and their

379 Opoku, xx. 380 Ravi Coltrane, Liner Notes in John Coltranes, A Love Supreme: Deluxe Edition (Impulse Records, 2002).

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spiritual understanding. I will first start with Alabama to demonstrate how it

details the collective experiences of a people.

Proverbial experiences, Opoku states, “express some cultural or infinite

truth, they bring special meaning to certain situations and point up the kernel of

an idea with vivid clarity.”381 No other collective experiences in the last 50 years of

the African experience in America has received the attention and demanded

change, as did the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. Numerous historical

texts have recorded the events that occurred during these movements. However

very few texts attempt to detail the narrative that connects these events. For

instance many of these texts do not fully explain the chain of events or the climax

that was the start of the Civil Rights Movement. One of the major moments that

influenced the rise of the Movements was the murder of Addie Mae Collins,

Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Denise McNair—four Black girls, ages 11-‐ 14.

On the morning of September 15, 1963, several sticks of dynamite were placed in

the basement of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. The bomb went

off; killing the four young girls.

Coltrane standing in his Vanga Vee understood that it was his responsibility

to respond to the lived conditions of his people. Martin Smith notes:

Coltrane wrote the song Alabama as a response to the bombing and murders. He patterned his saxophone playing on Martin Luther King's funeral speech. Midway through the song, mirroring the point where King transforms his mourning into a statement of

381 Opoku, xx.

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renewed determination for the struggle against racism, Elvin Jones's drumming rises from a whisper to a pounding rage. He wanted this crescendo to signify the rising of the civil rights movement.382 [see Figure 8]

Coltrane’s recording of Alabama is that kernel of experience that Opoku spoke about.

It is the central or most important part of something the essence, gist or core.

In addition to collective experiences, proverbs also express the collective

wisdom of a community. Coltrane’s recording of 1964’s A Love Supreme

encapsulates the morals, social structures, and spiritual systems of thought within

the long memory of African people. The composition, which began as a poem to

The Creator in part as an acknowledgement of what, Coltrane notes as a ‘grace

from God, a spiritual awakening which led to a richer, fuller, more productive life.’

The poem was then composed into musical notes and served double duty, “as

prayer to the Divine and a libretto for the final musical section of A Love

Supreme.”383 [see Figure 9]. It highlights the spiritual connections and

continuance of the collective wisdom of previous generations. What Coltrane

accomplished in his musical aesthetics is similar to that of the Akan in expressing

their collective wisdom through proverbs. Note the similarities that exist in the

explanation of Opoku and the observation of Ravi Coltrane in the following chart,

[see Table: 2]—especially the bolded area.

382 Martin Smith, John Coltrane: Jazz, Racism and Resistance, 86. 383 Ashley Kahn, A Love Supreme, 144.

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Table 3.

According to Coltrane, the goal of a musician was to understand these forces,

control them, and elicit a response from the audience. Coltrane understood that

with wisdom came the necessity of understanding the importance of a spiritual

relationship with the Creator. When we consider the intellectual and cultural

importance of proverbs we understand the significance of John Coltrane’s music.

Notwithstanding, Opoku states, “merely reading a proverb, however well

translated, does not bring the reader [listener] to its full force and impact.”384

Coltrane’s music was a continuation of the process of transmitting collective

wisdom and experiences. His compositions considered: Ways of knowing and

systems of thought as well as the ways in which African communities moved and

inscribed memory by answering the following two questions: How music was used

as an extension of the intellectual understandings of his community and their ways

384 Opoku, xxii.

The Akan ancestors found wisdom

everywhere in the environment, in

the human body, in trees, birds,

and animals, in the skies etc. The

originators of the proverbs were very

keen observers of nature, and, in a

sense, the whole environment was an

open book.

—Opoku

—Opoku

What I do know is that these cells are but one example of a deep symbolism in his composition, a code that reached beyond the music itself. It’s important to emphasize that he was so aware of things around him-‐ in nature, art, science, even numbers-‐ that he felt compelled to mirror in his music what he studied and what he came to know.

—Ravi Coltrane

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of knowing and how they responded to conditions as they presented themselves;

and how music was used to explain these experiences. Only the wise person will

understand the meaning and translation of the proverb. However if close

attention is paid to them the listener will remain connected and centered within

the African worldview and is able to comprehend their collective cultural

experiences and wisdom. Such wisdom and experiences are found within the

music of John Coltrane.

The Vunda Stage: Coltrane’s Decline Into Mukulu

Coltrane’s moment in the Vanga stage—the moment that he proved his

ability to stand vertically—demonstrated that he was not only a master of his own

life but also understood his relationship with the rest of the universe. In addition

Coltrane grasped the array of conceptual ways of knowing produced by his people

through improvisational acts in America.

Coltrane’s descent into the ancestral realm took place in July 1967. I

consider his recordings beginning with A Love Supreme 1964385 and up to his death

as evidence of him becoming an nganga—master, doer, and a specialist, within his

community prior to his death. Note the titles of his albums386 between 1964 and

1967:

1. Crescent

385 As it relates to Coltrane personal life I consider 1957 to be his rise into his vanga. 1957 would mark the moment when he breaks his drug addiction and turns his life over to the Creator. It is during this time that he composed A Love Supreme—he would record it seven years later in 1964. See J.C. Thomas’ Chasin the Trane for the narrative of his break from drugs.

386 This list does not include reissues, “best of compilations,” or live albums.

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2. A Love Supreme

3. Dear Old Stockholm

4. Transition

5. Om

6. First Meditations

7. Meditations

8. Sun Ship

9. Interstellar Space

10. Stellar Regions

11. Expression

The intentionality of these album titles can be considered as reflective of

Coltrane’s last ideological shift. These shifts were reflective in his personal life but

also in his musical career. Coltrane once stated that all he would say would come

through his horn. In 1966 he stated to Frank Kofsky that he intended, “to make a

trip to Africa to gather whatever I can find, particularly the musical resources.”387

Coltrane’s future plans for his music echoed his drummer, Elvin Jones’ recollection

about the music that they created. Jones recalled, “I think even Indian music has

its origins in the African art form. You can see the influences. Whatever we do, it

can be traced back to some of the African forms.”388

As a master musician Coltrane was charged with the responsibility of

understanding the needs of his community. Music became the lens through which

cultural production and African retentions were examined. Note the recollections

of Coltrane’s pianist McCoy Tyner:

387 Pauline Rivelli and Robert Levin, Giants of Black Music (New York: Da Capo Press, 1979), 29. 388 Kofsky, 217.

181

Mostly, black musicians feel they can better relate to Africa… because a lot of musicians are realizing that this is where the roots of the music came from, as far as this music is concerned. To me, this is our system of music, the Afro-‐American system of music. This is the African system of music . . . . A lot of these expressions—jazz, avant-‐garde—came about because of our environment. As musicians began to think more about our heritage, they began to refer to it more and more as black music. Buts it’s always been the music of black musicians. It is an extension of the whole body of black experience.389

As previously mentioned he had to communicate to his community through his

music the aesthetic vernacular of Black culture. One way that Coltrane intended to

do this is demonstrated through his future goals, he stated in 1962, “Maybe when

I’m sixty Ill be satisfied with what I’m doing, but I don’t know . . . I’m sure that

later on my ideas will carry more convictions. I know that I want to produce

beautiful music, music that does things to people that they need. Music that will

uplift, and make them happy—those are the qualities I’d like to produce.”390

In spite of Coltrane intense practice and playing schedules there was still so

much more that he felt needed to be accomplished. A major consideration of John

Coltrane’s life by fans, scholars and biographers is what direction would his music

have taken if it was not cut short at forty. His drummer, Rashid Ali, recalls

Coltrane saying, “I ran out of things to play on my horn” in reply to Ali asking why

he sometimes would scream into the microphone and bang a tambourine or on his

chest in concert. One thing that we do know is that Coltrane’s music was moving

389 Ibid. 390 Valerie Wimer, “Conversations With Coltrane,” Jazz Monthly (February, 1962): 7.

182

to closer to non-‐Western standards of music and was shifting and exploring in

these ideas. As he rounded the cosmogram surely his mastery stage imbued him

with a sense of longing and a desire to understand and create further. Like all

great musicians, Coltrane expressed these desires through his innate talents

coupled with his understanding of his place in the universe.

His shifts away from prescribed standards continued to push him more in

the direction of African music. During his final years Coltrane began to spend

time with the master drummer Babatunde Olatunji. It is no secret that Coltrane

was searching in his music for more and so he went to one of the sources of

traditional African music. In fact his last live recording—April 23, 1967—was a

benefit concert for the Olatunji Center of African Culture. Karlton Hester curios

about Coltrane’s musical directions, his interest in Africa, and if his composition,

Interstellar Space was any indication of his future musical ideas reached out to

Olatunji. Hester states, “I asked M. Babatunde Olatunji for comments that might

shed light on these questions. According to my findings, Mr. Olatunji appears to

be the person Coltrane confided in candidly.”391 Olatunji’s response to Hester is

recorded in its entirety below:

April 13, 1990 Dear Mr. Hester Pursuant to receipt of your written inquiry relative to John Coltrane, his personal association with me, and his interest in African music, I have prepared the following responsive paragraphs: To the best of my knowledge, John Coltrane’s interest in African music dates back to the early 1960’s. He first came to my attention when I discovered that he was present at most

391 Hester, 134.

183

of my appearances in theatres and night clubs in the metropolitan New York City area: especially at Birdland and at the Village Gate. He always found the time not only to congratulate me and the band, which included Yusef Lateef on saxophone and Chris White on bass, but to repeatedly express both his interest in African music and a desire to study with me. The driving force in Coltrane’s music can easily be identified as being African derivative when you listen to his unique style of phrasing, his dynamics, and the intensity he generates when playing his instrument. There is a distinctly African rhythm and timing in his improvisation. His instrument becomes the voice of a traditional town crier who, through the controlled use of his own natural voice (from its highest to its lowest pitch), informs the villagers of what is happening or is going to happen. His music, like African music, is captivating, pulsating and energizing. As my dream to establish a Center For African Culture became a reality because of the money saved from my appearances at the 1964-‐65 World’s Fair in New York John Coltrane’s interest in both my work and in the Center’s plan to disseminate information about the rich and vital cultural heritage of Africa was reflected not only in his monthly financial contribution, but by his plans to study Yoruba language and to visit the Motherland with me, He believed that this visit would provide him with a spiritual rebirth and help exorcise from his own mind some of the myths and stereotypes about all Africans: native expatriate and those whose families had lived for generations on foreign soil. He wanted to trace his African heritage and establish a lasting relationship with his ancestors: particularly those from West Africa. Coltrane believed that side-‐men should be paid more money than the generally accepted standard fees. He believed Booking Agents did not do enough to promote the Artists they represented. He was also generally unhappy with the management if Recording Companies because of their policy of paying little or no advance monies to their artist: except for a very few select personalities. Because of these predispositions, Coltrane approached Yusef Lateef and me and suggested we form our own company and promote our own efforts. In those days, Yusef, as great as he was, could hardly get any bookings for work until he became the musical director of my Afro-‐Jazz Band: A band that enjoyed twelve to thirteen weeks of work each year just at Birdland alone. We met, the group was formed, and I was elected its Secretary/Treasurer. The first concert was booked for January 1968 at Avery Fisher Hall, in New York. The concert was to feature three groups: One led by John, one by Yusef, and one by me. We had organized to subsequently tour the United State, Canada, Japan and Europe. The money raised from these concerts was to be used to help establish African Cultural Centers in major cities in the United States. The purpose of these centers would be to educate, promote cultural exchanges, and create research programs for those interested in the study of African languages, history, music, art, and dance. It was our hops that these Centers would become channels to bridge the gap between Africans at home and those

184

abroad, and that they would also serve to promote a better understanding of Africans and their contributions to world culture. John Coltrane was a visionary: a quiet determined courageous man. He was and still is an irresistible force. I truly hope that my comments on John Coltrane, and on my past relationship with him, will be of service to you. Sincerely, M. Babatunde Olatunji392

What Olatunji expresses about Coltrane reveals the man. Coltrane in this

light is seen as an African in constant gaze of the past with the future always in

tow. Coltrane in his vanga stage descending into his vunda was set on correcting

the challenges of the Black community. That his focus would be on cultural

developments is understood given his talents. However, as his interest in

establishing African Cultural Centers—read plural—was demonstrated we

understand that he appreciated that conceptually systems of thoughts and cultural

meaning making were intertwined. Consider again the purpose of the centers:

education, cultural exchanges, and research in African languages, history, music

art and dance. Coltrane’s commitment to African peoples advancement globally

throughout his life but in particularly as reflected in his deeds towards the end of

his vanga stage guaranteed that he would become a Mukulu—a spiritually deified

ancestor. And so as he left the physical world and reanimated in the world of

living energy—the spiritual world beneath the kalunga line Coltrane’s music, life

examples, cautionary tales, and ideologies would be transmitted, gathered and

used by future BAM musicians as they began their turn around the universal

cosmogram.

392 Hester, 134-‐36.

185

Imperialist domination, by denying the historical development of the dominated people, necessarily also denies their cultural development. It is . . . understood why imperialist domination, like all other foreign domination, for its own security, requires cultural oppression and the attempt at direct or indirect liquidation of the essential elements of the culture of the dominated people . . . . [I]t is generally within the culture that we find the seed of opposition.

—Amilcar Cabral393

Sometimes, if they dreamed, things would come to them out of Africa, things they’d heard about or had seen. And when he [Omar] got to the South, when he was a slave, just before he was waking, before the sun rode out in the sky, when there was just morning silence over the fields with maybe a few birds in it—then, at that time, he was back there again, in Africa.

—Sidney Bechet394

CHAPTER 8

CONCLUSION

This study set out to develop new methodological research approaches to

African musical cultures. The impetus to the proposed methodology derives from

a lack of effective African-‐centered epistemological devices to analysis and

research music and musicians. Chapters one and two of this study considered the

importance of this work as well as the relevant literature that and history of

African music and research. The works of both continental and diasporic African

writers were reviewed in the consideration of their contributions to the fields of

393 Amilcar Cabral, “National Liberation and Culture,” in Return to the Sources (Africa Information Service, 1973), 42-‐43.

394 Sidney Bechet, Treat It Gentle: An Autobiography (New York: Da Capo Press: 1978), 7.

186

history, ethnomusicology and African studies. In chapter three the necessity of

beginning African music research with Pharaonic Egypt is underscored. In

addition specific architectural findings and primary texts sources were utilized to

show the continuation of African musical functions, forms and initiation rites

across the continent. Chapter four began the development of the methodological

device that would be used throughout this study. The Bantu-‐Kongo’s cosmology

as the epistemological device for this study was explained and demonstrated.

Aesthetic values and linguistic usages were developed in chapter five. As this

study sought to center its approaches and analysis within African normative

practices the imperative to break from the Western aesthetic cultural contract was

reinforced throughout this and the subsequent chapters. Chapters six and seven

utilized John Coltrane’s musical career and personal life to demonstrate the

proposed usage of the Bantu-‐Kongo’s cosmograph as an effective tool in the

research of African music and musicians.

Our imperative is clear at this crucial moment in history. We must not

abdicate our culture to outsiders. Culture if considered as reservoirs of our coded

memories must be guarded, utilized and transmitted to the next generation. In

this era of a hyper-‐sensationalized society it is paramount that our musicians

either write their own stories or that we as African-‐centered scholars scribe their

narratives. These narratives must include the vastness of African historical

memories. We must develop and use methodologies that allow the ways of our

ancestors to speak. African music and musicians must be written as a part of and

187

within the wide canon of meaning makers who in spite of flaws were agents of

change and keepers of valued memories. Bernice Johnson Reagon charges us as

such, “We as serious scholars have to be about the business of studying, analyzing

and presenting the experiences of phenomena in a way that makes it accessible to

our people wherever they find themselves.”395 Proper effective research and praxis

of African musical usage and inscriptions of its producers thusly as a ritual process

will aid in the examination of our problems and help us to get them straight.

We must allow ourselves to be enveloped with the wisdom of our ancestors.

As they lived and transmitted knowledge and deep thought we have to on our way

around the life cycle engage these tools that have been left for us. We must use

only the best ways possible to reconnect with our history. This includes “the best

of words, the best sounds, phrases, pauses, sentences, images, figures” and the best

and maybe new methodological approaches. The Bantu-‐Kongo cosmography is

one such device tools that will enable this process to flourish.

Our role as African-‐centered scholars whose work considers the

connections between intellectual developments and African music must make use

of the vast traditions of Black culture. We must also take the charge in

establishing the necessity of effective methods to engage the research. Portia

Maultsby suggests that we start this process by, “creating space for the popular

395 Bernice Johnson Reagon, “Developing Black American Cultural Programs: Negotiating the Distances Within and Between,” 97.

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music tradition in our research and in our teaching. To accomplish this, we first

must develop new attitudes about its significance within culture.”396

Lastly our work must demonstrate a commitment to content mastery. We

must use the best of our expressive arts to imagine new ways to analyze out vast

historical memories. Seba Armah’s words in closing are worth noting at length:

Writers wishing to operate out of a deeper consciousness of African identity now have intellectual tools unavailable to Senghor’s generation. If we study the available information, then use it in our own work as writers or critics or teachers, we will create conditions for the birth of a new generation of African intellectuals immune to the crippling effects of an education designed to poison our minds with too little information, of unconscionably low quality.397

Our studies, our lives, our writings must be dedicated to the continued

existence of African people wherever they find themselves. Our reclamation of

ancient ways of knowing tethered to improvisational tools will guarantee our

survival thrust and an eventual turn towards our traditions as vehicles for

liberation.

396 Portia Maultsby, “The Role of Scholars in Creating Space and Validity for Ongoing Changes in Black American Culture,” 23.


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APPENDIX ADDITIONAL FIGURES

Table 4.

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EULOGY FOR THE YOUNG VICTIMS OF THE SIXTEENTH STREET BAPTIST CHURCH BOMBING

This afternoon we gather in the quiet of this sanctuary to pay our last tribute of respect to these beautiful children of God. They entered the stage of history just a few years ago, and in the brief years that they were privileged to act on this mortal stage, they played their parts exceedingly well. Now the curtain falls; they move through the exit; the drama of their earthly life comes to a close. They are now committed back to that eternity from which they came. These children-‐unoffending, innocent, and beautiful-‐were the victims of one of the most vicious and tragic crimes ever perpetrated against humanity. And yet they died nobly. They are the martyred heroines of a holy crusade for freedom and human dignity. And so this afternoon in a real sense they have something to say to each of us in their death. They have something to say to every minister of the gospel who has

remained silent behind the safe security of stained-‐glass windows. They have something to say to every politician [Audience:] (Yeah) who has fed his constituents with the stale bread of hatred and the spoiled meat of racism. They have something to say to a federal

government that has compromised with the undemocratic practices of southern Dixiecrats (Yeah) and the blatant hypocrisy of right-‐wing northern Republicans. (Speak) They have something to say to every Negro (Yeah) who has passively accepted the evil system of segregation and who has stood on the sidelines in a mighty struggle for justice. They say to each of us, black and white alike, that we must substitute courage for caution. They say to us that we must be concerned not merely about and unrelentingly for the realization of the American dream. And so my friends, they did not die in vain. (Yeah) God still has a way of wringing good out of evil. (Oh yes) And history has proven over and over again that unmerited suffering is redemptive. The innocent blood of these little girls may well serve as a redemptive force (Yeah) that will bring new light to this dark city. (Yeah) The holy Scripture says, "A little child shall lead them." (Oh yeah) The death of these little children may lead our whole Southland (Yeah) from the low road of man's inhumanity to man to the high road of peace and brotherhood. (Yeah, Yes) These tragic deaths may lead our nation to substitute an aristocracy of character for an aristocracy of color. The spilled blood of these innocent girls may cause the whole citizenry of Birmingham (Yeah) to transform the negative extremes of

a dark past into the positive extremes of a bright future. Indeed this tragic event may cause the white South to come to terms with its conscience. (Yeah)

And so I stand here to say this afternoon to all assembled here, that in spite of the darkness of this hour (Yeah Well), we must not despair. (Yeah, Well) We must not become bitter (Yeah, That's right), nor must we harbor the desire to retaliate with violence. No, we must not lose faith in our white brothers. (Yeah, Yes) Somehow we must believe that the most misguided among them can learn to respect the dignity and the worth of all human personality.

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May I now say a word to you, the members of the bereaved families? It is almost impossible to say anything that can console you at this difficult hour and remove the deep clouds of disappointment which are floating in your mental skies. But I hope you can find a little consolation from the universality of this experience. Death comes to every individual.

There is an amazing democracy about death. It is not aristocracy for some of the people, but a democracy for all of the people. Kings die and beggars die; rich men and poor men die; old people die and young people die. Death comes to the innocent and it comes to the

guilty. Death is the irreducible common denominator of all men. I hope you can find some consolation from Christianity's affirmation that death is not the end. Death is not a period that ends the great sentence of life, but a comma that punctuates it to more lofty significance. Death is not a blind alley that leads the human race into a state of nothingness, but an open door which leads man into life eternal. Let this daring faith, this great invincible surmise, be your sustaining power during these trying days. Now I say to you in conclusion, life is hard, at times as hard as crucible steel. It has its bleak and difficult moments. Like the ever-‐flowing waters of the river, life has its moments of drought and its moments of flood. (Yeah, Yes) Like the ever-‐changing cycle of the seasons, life has the soothing warmth of its summers and the piercing chill of its winters. (Yeah) And if one will hold on, he will discover that God walks with him (Yeah, Well), and that God is able (Yeah, Yes) to lift you from the fatigue of despair to the buoyancy of hope, and transform dark and desolate valleys into sunlit paths of inner peace. And so today, you do not walk alone. You gave to this world wonderful children. [moans] They didn't live long lives, but they lived meaningful lives. (Well) Their lives were distressingly small in quantity, but glowingly large in quality. (Yeah) And no greater tribute can be paid to you as parents, and no greater epitaph can come to them as children, than where they died and what they were doing when they died. (Yeah) They did not die in the dives and dens of Birmingham (Yeah, Well), nor did they die discussing and listening to filthy jokes. (Yeah) They died between the sacred walls of the church of God (Yeah, Yes), and they were discussing the eternal meaning (Yes) of love. This stands out as a beautiful, beautiful thing for all generations. (Yes) Shakespeare had Horatio to say some beautiful words as he stood over the dead body of Hamlet. And today, as I stand over the remains of these beautiful, darling girls, I paraphrase the words of Shakespeare: (Yeah, Well): Good night, sweet princesses. Good night, those who symbolize a new day. (Yeah, Yes) And may the flight of angels (That's right) take thee to thy eternal rest. God bless you.

Figure 7. Eulogy given by Martin Luther King.

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A LOVE SUPREME398

Figure 8. John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme Poem. 398 John Coltrane, A Love Supreme, Poem in Liner Notes (Impulse Records, 1964).

I will do all I can to be worthy of Thee O Lord It all has to do with it. Thank you God. Peace. There is none other. God is. It is so beautiful. Thank you God. God is all. Help us to resolve our fears and weaknesses. Thank you God. In You all things are possible. We know. God made us so. Keep your eyes on God. God is. He always was. He always will be. No matter what . . . it is God. He is gracious and merciful. It is most important that I know Thee. Words, sounds, speech, men, memory, thoughts, fears and emotions—time—all related . . . all made from one . . . all made in one. Blessed be his name. Thought waves—heat waves—all vibrations— All paths lead to God. Thank you God. His way . . . it is so lovely . . . it is gracious

It is merciful—Thank you God. One thought can produce millions of vibrations and they all go back to God . . . everything does. Thank you God. The universe has many wonders. God is all. His way . . . it is so wonderful. Thoughts—deeds—vibrations, etc. They all go back to God and He cleanses all. He is gracious and merciful . . . Thank you God. God is. God loves. May I be acceptable in Thy sight. We are all one in His grace. The fact we do exist is acknowledgement of Thee O Lord. Thank you God. God will wash away all our tears . . . He always has . . . He always will Seek Him everyday. In all ways seek God everyday. Let us sing all songs to God.

To whom all praise is due . . . praise God. No road is an easy one, but they all go back to God. It is all with God. It is all with Thee. Obey the Lord. Blessed is He. We are all from one thing . . . the will of God . . . Thank you God. I have seen God—I have seen ungodly—none can be greater—none can compare to God. Thank you God. He will remake us . . . He always has and He always will. It is true—blessed be his name—Thank you God. God breathes through us so completely . . . so gently we hardly feel it . . . yet, it is our everything. Thank you God. ELATION—ELEGANCE—EXALTATION—All from God. Thank you God. Amen.

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