The Dionysian Free Jazz of John W. Coltrane

1. Introduction

This paper argues that the Free Jazz of saxophonist John W. Coltrane (1926–1967) satisfies criteria laid out in Friedrich W. Nietzsche and Theodor W. Adorno’s aesthetic theories to be qualified as utopian. In his later avant-garde compositions, commencing with Impressions (1961), Coltrane’s works embody a qualitative Dionysian charge, which qualifies them as utopian as per the etymological root of ‘Utopia’ as eu-topos, or a ‘good place which is no place.’ These works are Dionysian in terms of Nietzsche’s reading presented firstly in The Birth of Tragedy (1872), whereby he argues that the Ancient Greek mythical figure representative of frenzy and unbridled passion is to be introduced into a decadent, and predominantly Apollonian fin-de-siècle discourse, which is emblematized primarily through sober reason. It is considered apt to introduce into the discourse the relationship of Kairos, the Ancient Greek mythical figure representative of qualitative time, often represented like Dionysus as a mischievous child. Kairos is often depicted with a single lock of hair, symbolizing an elusive nature, and thus in juxtaposition with Chronos, or ‘old father time’, who represents the quantitative, and is linked with a sober Apollo. Traditional utopian literature is steeped in the latter category, where the good place is a chronologically plotted out space in which inhabitants live under harmonious conditions; for example, the premise of Thomas More’s 1516 De optimo rei publicae deque nova insula Utopia. In this paper, I posit the notion that Coltrane’s avant-garde works embody a Dionysian charge, to thereby manifest an iconoclastic form of kairological utopianizing which engenders qualitative aporias amidst quantitative normative discourse. Critique will focus upon the difficulty of articulating the utopian through the Dionysian in an epoch of ‘instrumentalized reason’ with reference to the cultural critiques of Jazz undertaken by Adorno.[i] A riposte will demonstrate how Coltrane’s compositions — in spite of his avowed intent to create pieces for particular purposes –adequately embody the kairological utopian through engendering Dionysian dissonance.

I will commence with an outline of Nietzsche’s aesthetic theory to demonstrate how Coltrane’s later works — in spite of certain difficulties — satisfy a criteria to be qualified as Dionysian. This is because whilst Coltrane explicitly states that his later works are composed with a clear purpose in mind, the outcome often differs qualitatively from his aims. Accordingly, he is somewhat of an unwitting Dionysian artist, which only serves to strengthen the argument that he satisfies an implicit Nietzschean criteria; for if he had attempted to explicitly create Dionysian works, he would have necessarily failed. This will be spelt out in detail during the course of the discussion, primarily through an Adornian reading of the problem of creating works which seek to be accommodated. The reader may enquire as to why Coltrane has been selected over and above his contemporaries who also created compositions of ‘free jazz’ such as Ornette Coleman, Pharaoh Sanders, or The Art Ensemble of Chicago to name a few. The reason for this is twofold: firstly, Coltrane’s biography lends itself appropriately to a Nietzschean reading insofar as he overcome great personal suffering before developing his late works, and secondly because of the overtly metaphysical and colloquially utopian themes engendered by these compositions.

It is hoped that this research appeals to scholars of Coltrane, Nietzsche, as well as utopian studies, and that it satisfies an omission in formal studies discussing the musician and writer in conjunction.[ii] In an age of neoliberalism, utopia is all too associated with Apollonian, chronologial, bureaucratic plans for social reform as opposed to the Dionysian, kairological ‘good place that is no place.’ Arguably, this is to perpetuate a disservice to an emancipatory concept which reaches beyond normative discourse. Indeed, that it is either derided amidst contemporary debates as outmoded or fantastical, or used to describe piecemeal social reforms, only demonstrates its relegation within the prevalent discourse.[iii] It is hoped that this paper will contribute to an alternative narrative of the utopian under the practice of aesthetics merged with Critical Theory.

2. Nietzsche’s Aesthetic Theory

Nietzsche declares in The Gay Science (1882 and 1887) that

“suppose we valued the worth of a piece of music with reference to how much it could be counted, calculated, or formulated, how absurd such a ‘scientific’ estimate of music would be! What would one have apprehended, understood, or discerned in it! Nothing, absolutely nothing of what is really ‘music’ in it!’’[iv]

This passage demonstrates a striving to overcome purely Apollonian interpretations and the mechanization of music to provoke the creation of superior — in effect Dionysian — compositions which in turn manifest kairological utopian ruptures. These momentary aporias are in juxtaposition with chronological Apollonian music that can be ‘counted, calculated or formulated.’ Therefore, the key element in music for Nietzsche is not that it prescribes a course of action, but rather that in its ingenuity born out of creative overflowing vitality, may engender kairological fissures which are necessarily utopian in that they go beyond rational appropriation. Nietzsche bears out this non-teleological aspect of his critical task in Human, All Too Human (1878) whereby he asserts that

‘‘whoever has attained intellectual freedom even to a small extent cannot feel but as a wanderer upon the face of the earth — and not as a traveller toward some final destination; for that does not exist.’’[v]

Hence what is necessary instead of working towards a chronologically distant utopian goal is to rupture the present through kairological aporias which manifest dissonance from consonance, and thus provide a glimpse of the utopian.

These aporias are inextricably utopian because they generate insights into that which could not have been perceived otherwise through rational discourse.[vi] In this vein, Dionysian music as Nietzsche understands it is not to be used for political ends in the manner of jingoistic national anthems, but rather to express what life could be. Accordingly, Nietzsche’s kairological fissures, as moments of utopian explosions, go beyond merely using past experience and ‘‘readymade categories of tradition,’’[vii] to instead enact moments of qualitative rupture. Every kairological fissure is thus a ‘‘moment of danger’’ to the hegemonic, chronological narrative.[viii] This is because the kairological arises through the tension between Dionysian qualitative experience and the Apollonian quantitative variant. Therefore, in terms of music, Nietzsche’s Dionysian based in moments of shock such as in Coltrane’s expressionism for example, runs counter to the experience of rhythm fundamental to modern Western music, which is very much a product of early capitalism; for example, Monteverdi’s second practice.[ix]

The musical element of kairological moments is substantiated by Nietzsche in his observation in Human, all too Human that

‘‘life consists of rare, isolated moments of the greatest significance, and of innumerably many intervals, during which at best the silhouettes of those moments hover about us […] For many men do not have those moments at all, and are themselves intervals and intermissions in the symphony of real life.’’[x]

This passage emphasizes the fleeting, qualitative nature of kairological time in juxtaposition with the chronological variant. The crux of the issue is how to go about making sense using Apollonian reason to explain the Dionysian element perpetually on the horizon of chronological existence, whereby the latter occasionally intervenes in an inexplicable manner when attempting to do so by exclusively employing rational discourse. It is here that the limits of reason come to the fore through Nietzsche’s purposeful Apollonian method and positing of music as the aesthetic medium which can successfully rupture its confines. Opposed to acting within the constraints of chronological time, Nietzsche’s Dionysian inspired individuals are no longer solely restricted in the Apollonian sense of ‘‘taking place’’ in time, but rather ‘‘realize themselves in an originary positing of time’’[xi] through manifesting moments of kairological utopian rupture.

The aesthetically creative individual immersed in a Dionysian ontology — which Raoul Vaneigem argues is a ‘‘good consciousness in which to steep oneself, if only to reach the consciousness that dances and kills’’[xii] — expresses her aesthetic abundance. It is thus Dionysian music, with its affective quality — namely, the manner in which one embodies its primordial power — that is the utopian countermovement contra the decadence found for Nietzsche through ‘‘religion, morality, and philosophy.’’[xiii] Nietzsche’s promulgation of Dionysian music, with its intoxicating and primordial power clearly represents a desire to master and then traverse Apollonian limitations. This is substantiated by Jean Barraqué in his declaration that Dionysian

‘‘music is drama, it is pathos, it is death. It is an utter gamble, trembling on the verge of suicide. If music is not that, if it is not the exceeding of limits, it is nothing.’’[xiv]

Given the importance to Nietzsche’s utopian project of overcoming limits, it follows that musical dissonance is a key component of such a process in that it has a kairological charge which emphasizes the qualitative amidst the quantitative. A difficulty of engendering unadulterated dissonance, and by extension improvisation — and herein lies its utopian quality — is that it necessitates mastery at the Apollonian level, and in and of itself cannot be taught nor notated. This is corroborated in Kathleen Coessens’ claim that ‘‘instruction in kairos seems virtually impossible.’’[xv] Thus, Nietzsche exhausts the Apollonian tools of language, reason and argument at his disposal to simultaneously demonstrate through his performative method the inherent limits of them. This in turn produces a qualitative surplus, which is precisely that which cannot be elucidated sufficiently such that it can be prescribed in exclusively Apollonian terms. However, at the same time, this surplus is that which constitutes the utopian outcome of Nietzsche’s severe aesthetic theory.

Mastery of Apollonian norms allows the artist to engage in musical improvisation. For Nietzsche, this represents a striving to overcome decadence of both external and internalized obstacles. Improvisation represents using Apollonian creativity and resourcefulness, but also of going further and striving for Dionysian self-overcoming. As such, improvisation in the Nietzschean sense is not to be understood as extempore dressed up as impromptu in the manner of conventions such as a jazz drummer ‘accidentally’ dropping a stick and thus playing one handed with a cursory nod to the crowd. This for Nietzsche is analogous to the decadence of a theatrical artist like Richard Wagner.[xvi] Rather, for Nietzsche genuine dissonance and improvisation are of essential importance to the Dionysian artist in the overcoming of decadence. Linked to Dionysian frenzy in relation to Apollonian sobriety, Nietzsche’s advocacy of musical improvisation is linked to the overcoming of convention, which whilst a pre-condition for Dionysian art at all, is nevertheless also representative of stagnation and decadence if one treats it as unsurpassable;[xvii] in effect, if one becomes concerned with improvisation for its own sake. This, Nietzsche would relegate to the decadence of a pseudo-Dionysian theatrical artist such as Wagner. Instead, the genuinely Dionysian can be differentiated in that it necessarily overcomes decadence — which is exemplified for Nietzsche through religious and instrumental knowledge — through original creation.

What is needed therefore is a Dionysian individual strong enough to be able to not only tolerate the harshness of existence without recourse to religion or the morality of custom, but to will further harshness still as a means of fuelling one’s self-overcoming of internalized norms. In this vein, Maynard Solomon suggests that a vast majority of artists therefore seek to ‘‘limit the power of the imaginative to touch [them], for that may open [them] to [their] deepest fears’’.[xviii] On the other hand, in Nietzschean manner

‘‘it is only when we feel the power of […] music to bruise us that we can discover its healing power as well.’’[xix]

Healing in this sense is for Nietzsche a means to greater self-war which will in turn inspire greater artistic inspiration in a perpetual process of overcoming decadence. Having surveyed Nietzsche’s aesthetic theory in relation to utopia, the focus will now turn to demonstrating how Coltrane, both through his biography, as well as late avant-garde compositions in particular, successfully — albeit unwittingly — meets Nietzsche’s implicit criteria satisfying the requisites for Dionysian music, and thereby kairological utopia.

3. Coltrane’s Late Compositions

Born in 1926, North Carolina, John W. Coltrane played the alto saxophone, alto horn, as well as clarinet in high school, before serving in the US Navy from 1945–1946 where he performed as a musician alongside undertaking kitchen and security details. Upon his discharge from the Navy he returned to his family home in Philadelphia, and found himself in the heart of a thriving Jazz scene. Heavily influenced by the music of Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster, and most of all Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker, he began to specialize in the tenor saxophone in the early 1950s, and spent much of the decade as a member of troupes led by the likes of Jazz greats such as Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis and Thelonius Monk. However, throughout the late 1950s, his relationship with both Davis and Monk became strained owing to a heroin addiction. 1960 saw the release of the ground-breaking Giant Steps, which was the first record to exclusively include his own compositions, with the eponymous title track demonstrating a complex chord progression that came to be known as ‘Coltrane Changes.’[xx] As Lewis Porter observes, in addition to the ‘Coltrane Changes,’ what Coltrane began to do on Giant Steps was to utilize ‘‘the same phrase for the first eight measures of several choruses,’’ varying it each time, and only once presenting it in its basic form. These were thus ‘‘true variations, not just simple repetitions or inversions of his basic formulas.’’[xxi] Influenced by the burgeoning Free Jazz movement led by Ornette Coleman,[xxii] Coltrane was also particularly inspired by Sun Ra’s long time saxophonist John Gilmore, and preoccupied with technical mastery at the expense of harmony. In this way, he was not too dissimilar to Arnold Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School’s use of the twelve-tone technique. As such, like his Austrian predecessors, Coltrane was met with much public — as well as that of his previous colleague Miles Davis’s — dismay throughout the early 1960s, as many of his works — like Coleman’s — expressed technical mastery onto improvisation with seemingly little regard to satisfying the audience. In response to this, Coltrane remarked in an interview in 1963 that:

‘‘I had worked too hard to pursue my evolution, on the technical level, to stop along the way under the pretext that it would please a considerable number of people.’’[xxiii]

Having reached a level of technical mastery, in 1962 Coltrane formed what came to be known as the ‘Classic Quartet,’ who focused on employing a harmonic base as a springboard for improvisation. Sonically more palatable to a wider audience than his work in the year preceding, Coltrane’s Quartet found a mainstream following. In 1964 they produced their most commercially successful record, A Love Supreme, which delivered in four parts, was a composition conveying Coltrane’s spiritual re-birth having overcome a long-term heroin addiction. From 1965–1967, the quartet primarily recorded avant-garde works employing the use of multiphonics, whereby monophonic instruments that would usually produce one note at a time were now producing multi-notes. David Baker argues that this trope represents one of Coltrane’s most noteworthy achievements, insofar as playing several notes or tones simultaneously would create

‘‘asymmetrical groupings not dependent on the basic pulse; developing an incredibly sophisticated system of chord substitutions and initiating a pan-modal style of playing, using several modes simultaneously.’’[xxiv]

Baker continues by arguing that — again not dissimilar to Schoenberg who declared himself an heir of Bach — ‘‘all musicians should study Coltrane solos the way we now study the etudes of Bach and Brahms.’’[xxv] This use of multiphonics was accompanied by much over-blowing, screeching, and no clear musical notes to speak of, thereby evoking the Dionysian primordial amidst the Apollonian mundane. In comparison to the early 1960s works that had been seen as technically turgid, these late works were undoubtedly expressive, with no discernible central tonal key. As Davis Liebman observes, when interpreting these late compositions,

‘‘it’s really [about] looking towards what he’s [Coltrane] about to go into, which is very, very free and non-key-centred improvisation.’’[xxvi]

Displaying the hallmarks of eclecticism, Coltrane surveyed world music, as well as Eastern religions, in an attempt to develop a universal sound which could express his innermost feelings. As Porter observes in reference to 1961’s My Favourite Things,

‘‘the impact of North Indian music is reflected in Coltrane’s work over a single sustained drone, in his interest in exotic scales, and perhaps in the way he likes to repeat and develop short motives in his improvisations, which brings to mind the Indian style of sitar improvisation.’’[xxvii]

Porter continues by observing that Coltrane’s eclecticism and voracious appetite for broadening his musical and spiritual knowledge resulted in a unique sound, given that

‘‘the more widespread one’s sources, the less one sounds like any one of them. Eclecticism, it seems to me, is one hallmark of genius.’’[xxviii]

Combined with the eclecticism of his influences, Coltrane introduced a degree of spontaneity and improvisation into recording sessions with his Quartet from the outset by — following his one-time front-man Davis’s cue — ‘‘not rehearsing new music or even showing the music to his group before the recording session.’’[xxix] Accordingly, when these recordings were performed live, they were inevitably original in their range. Coltrane thus gave himself, and those in his troupe, a foundation from which to improvise and experiment as they each saw fit. As the drummer in the quartet, Rashied Ali, states in an interview about the recording of 1967’s Interstellar Space,

‘‘I’m not playing regular time, but the feeling of regular time is there. I’m thinking in time. We’d start out in three or four; five-eight or six-eight, whatever. I would anchor it in my mind, but play everything not on it, but against it. I’m hearing the beat and I’m feeling the beat, but I’m not playing it. It’s there, but it’s not there.’’[xxx]

Accordingly, Ali concisely elucidates the way in which Coltrane’s quartet would instantiate the utopian; through not attempting to present it rationally, but rather to demonstrate a mastery of form, to reveal kairological, Dionysian dissonance from pushing chronological, Apollonian consonance to its rational limits.

4. Coltrane and the Dionysian

Coltrane’s avant-garde Free Jazz is thus an appropriate example of Nietzsche’s aesthetic theory in play. This is because it explicitly demonstrates mastery of Apollonian structures to allow for Dionysian creativity which engenders kairological utopian aporias. For example, four minutes into the recorded 1964 version of A Love Supreme Part I: The Acknowledgement, after demonstrating utter Apollonian mastery of form, Coltrane continues to make sounds which no longer conform to any musical structure or notation. Instead, chronological Apollonian harmony is pushed to its rational limits to reveal kairological utopian rupture which is quantitatively temporary but qualitatively timely, before the composition reverts back into the Apollonian realm of harmony. Coltrane thus demonstrates the requisite mastery of harmony to posit time, as opposed to ‘merely taking place in time.’ This momentary depiction of originality — Dionysian dissonance from Apollonian consonance — is an example of Nietzsche’s aesthetic theory in action. Nietzsche posits in On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life (1874), that

‘‘if the value of a drama lay solely in its conclusion, the drama itself would be merely the most wearisome and indirect way possible of reaching this goal,’’

and thus he argues instead that the value of art consists ‘‘in its taking a familiar, perhaps commonplace theme, an everyday melody, and composing inspired variations on it, enhancing it, elevating it to a comprehensive symbol; and thus disclosing in the original theme a whole world of profundity, power and beauty.’’[xxxi] It is precisely these ‘inspired variations’ which Coltrane’s late works are resplendent with, and thus qualify him as a Dionysian artist. This is because given that ‘instruction in kairos is virtually impossible,’ to engender kairological utopian aporias is a hallmark of the Dionysian aesthetic. This is corroborated by Adorno, who argues that it is ‘‘not by the bare and abstract difference from the unvarying but rather by taking the unvarying into itself, taking it apart, and putting it back together again’’[xxxii] that the artwork may transcend Apollonian limits inherent in notated music. In essence, this means that Adorno’s revolutionary subject is one that undertakes an immanent critique of the Apollonian cultural material which it seeks to unravel. The subject does not claim immunity from the prevalent discourse, but rather having fettered it through a mastery, is able to transcend it, thus providing an indirect glimpse of the utopian through what it is not; namely, communicable harmonic structure.

Roberto Unger develops this theme by arguing that

‘‘music is a prophecy of our power to accept ourselves by accepting repetition while making ourselves free and great by defying repetition; it is an incantation, an exulting, an arousal produced entirely out of a dialectic between the repeated and the divergent in sound. Repetition ceases in music to be a prison-house; it becomes, as it should be in our experience, the condition of the new. What seems a remote exploration of consonance and dissonance expresses a hope that is central to our humanity.’’[xxxiii]

In this vein, as Crowther argues in discussion about the Kantian sublime, what differentiates original (Dionysian) genius with ‘original nonsense’, is that the artist ‘‘must have mastered the academic rules and conventions governing his medium. This not only allows him systematically to develop his gift of originality, but also enables the observer to judge that such originality is not just a passing fluke.’’[xxxiv] In this way then, Coltrane qualifies as a Dionysian artist, who is in sharp contrast with ‘‘the sober, the weary, the exhausted, the dried-up (e.g., the scholars),’’ who ‘‘can receive absolutely nothing from art, because they do not possess the primary artistic force, the pressure of abundance: whoever cannot give, also receives nothing.’’[xxxv] Dionysian music is that which constantly looms on the Apollonian horizon, and thus acts as a counter point to reactive and decadent artistic expression. Musical dissonance is then a genuine manner through which primordial Dionysian expression is countenanced in a realm of Apollonian intelligibility. In turn, this dissonance is kairologically utopian insofar as it is not concerned with chronological duration, nor reasonableness, but rather engendering qualitiative aporias by pushing existent cultural material to its limits.

This fettering of limits in turn relates to Adorno’s conception of particular music as non-rationally utopian, which is best depicted in his oeuvre through the description of the child at the piano seeking to play the hitherto un-struck chord, or the sitar player, who having just struck the first twang signals a time when the incredible seems possible.[xxxvi] This utopian theme is echoed through Coltrane’s following comment:

‘‘I’m not sure of what I’m looking for […] except that it’ll be something that hasn’t been played before. I don’t know what it is. I know I’ll have that feeling when I get it.’’[xxxvii]

Thus Coltrane’s compositions play by rules other than those of the normative aesthetic discourse based upon harmony and resolution. As such, Coltrane’s late works possess a prescient utopian charge, for it

‘‘is only in dissonance, which destroys the faith of those who believe in harmony, that the power of seduction of the rousing character of music survives.’’[xxxviii]

In this way, Coltrane’s late compositions are emblematic of tapping into the imagination in order to break with what is supposedly fixed and finished, or objectively and independently real. Coltrane’s Dionysian music thus unmasks ‘‘false musical consciousness’’ and can potentially transform the infrastructure and the relations of production outside the ‘‘sphere of music.’’[xxxix] This transformation is enacted through manifesting dissonance, which potentially engenders shocks of perception that demonstrate alternative possibilities to the recipients, whether or not those possibilities or those recipients have an obvious relationship with the artwork in question. In this way, such works can become vehicles of the utopian because through their kairological charge, they rupture quantitative time, and can thus become part of any time; in effect, timeless works.[xl] In sum, through dissonance one comes into conflict with consonance to rupture it, and in this way, genuine aesthetic experimentation enacts a healthy violence against Apollonian rationality. Coltrane’s avant-garde works are thus essentially an exploration of the aesthetic power of the Dionysian to unsettle normative Apollonian discourse. That notwithstanding, there are some issues with attributing the label of Dionysian to Coltrane’s late works, not least of all because the saxophonist had, akin to Wagner, a clear purpose in mind when creating them.

5. Instrumental Mastery of Nature

An esoteric Christian, in his late works Coltrane was interested in utilizing his musical talent to create compositions for a particular purpose; namely, to convey the grace of God through spiritual communion. As Porter observes, in the seminal A Love Supreme, ‘‘rather than the arpeggios of major chords that are such a critical part of most Jazz — and of Western music generally,’’ the quartet delivered a composition built around ‘‘little fourth based motives’’, and the way in which Coltrane built his solos by

‘‘developing short ideas at length, repeating them in different registers and building up to higher and higher notes, ma[de] him a preacher on the saxophone.’’[xli]

This manner of delivery resulted in a serious sound, which in turn lent his music a spiritual quality. This is corroborated in the opening of Part I of A Love Supreme, in which Coltrane enters with a brief fanfare, which is itself a time honoured device functioning as a call to prayer.[xlii] Thus as Ashley Kahn asserts, Coltrane’s late compositions are not abstract, or ‘free’ in the strictest terms, but rather ‘‘dictated in part by the messages he wishes to convey.’’[xliii] These compositions are thus instrumental in that they are made with specific ends in mind, and thereby fall foul to the Nietzschean critique of being merely pseudo-Dionysian in the manner of Wagner.

Coltrane himself would argue that his late compositions are not qualitatively Dionysian, nor was that his aim. Rather his goal, explicitly stated in an interview in 1966, was to:

‘‘live the truly religious life and express it in my music. If you live it, when you play there’s no problem because the music is just part of the whole thing. My music is the spiritual expression of what I am — my faith, my knowledge, my being. When you begin to see the possibilities of music, you desire to do something really good for people, to help humanity free itself from its hang-ups. I think music can make the world better and, if I’m qualified, I want to do it. I’d like to point out to people the divine in a musical language that transcends words. I want to speak to their souls.’’[xliv]

Thus whilst noble in its endeavour, and global in its scope, owing to its religious and instrumental bent, the reading of such music as Dionysian in Nietzschean terms is rendered problematic. Frank Foster remarks that Coltrane had ‘‘done just about everything that can be done with a tenor saxophone’’ and therefore had in his late compositions used the instrument as a tool to ‘‘find oneself spiritually.’’[xlv] In effect, the creative process was no longer strictly about the music, but rather as Coltrane himself remarks above, the ‘music [was] just part of the whole thing’, meaning that it functioned as a tool of spiritual expression.

In another 1966 interview, Coltrane responded to the question of what he hoped to be in five years’ time by answering simply: ‘‘a saint.’’[xlvi] He saw the saxophone as his quasi-staff of knowledge, and sought to use it to enact a mastery of nature. For example, he declared in 1965 that a goal of his musical expression would be to arrive at a point where he could ‘‘grasp the essence of a certain place and time, compose the work and play it on the spot naturally.’’[xlvii] In this way, Coltrane declared that ‘‘the true powers of music are still unknown. To be able to control them must be, I believe, the goal of every musician.’’[xlviii] His late works were thus part of a project of self-mastery onto an instrumental ability to control nature. Such an endeavour falls into the realm of the pseudo-Dionysian for Nietzsche. Moreover, given Coltrane’s religious leanings, his iconoclastic musical expression is — in the Nietzschean reading — a decadent one because of its aim of domesticating nature. On the one hand Coltrane’s late works appear Dionysian through their abstraction. On the other hand, these compositions appear to be only pseudo-Dionysian, and instead rather Apollonian in the manner of an expressively dramatic artist like Wagner. This is corroborated by Coltrane himself, as well as subsequent observers including Porter, who argue that the saxophonist ‘‘was perfectly aware of what he was doing. Even though it gave an impression of freedom, it was basically a well thought out and highly disciplined piece of work.’’[xlix] This in turn confirms the — akin again to Wagner in its radicalness and demonstration of genius — chronological and Apollonian element of Coltrane’s late works, and further disputes the claim that they are either Dionysian in the Nietzschean reading, or kairologically utopian. Rather, as Nietzsche recognized in The Birth of Tragedy, the necessity of the Apollonian as the manner in which meaning is symbolically conveyed in the phenomenal realm of sense experience renders Coltrane’s spiritual aim as strictly Apollonian insofar as he seeks to enact a mastery of nature such that his musical expression may lead him onto sainthood through his ability to gauge how to control a particular contingent state of affairs. This instrumental spiritual aim is substantiated in a repeated observation by his fellow saxophonists that Coltrane’s late compositions can be labelled both as ‘Free Jazz’, but paradoxically also ‘‘frightfully controlled music’’ akin to ‘‘geekdom’’ in their expression of desire to shape and control forms.[l]

This critique may be extended through Adorno, who illustrated the difficulty of enacting genuine improvisation using Apollonian symbolical representation. He deemed the best one could do is to — like Bach and Schoenberg — produce works which were indirectly Dionysian insofar as they pushed Apollonian logic to its limit. Whilst Coltrane arguably undertakes the latter, crucially, because he has clear supra-musical goals in mind, he does not satisfy Adorno’s criterion for Dionysian music of enacting purposiveness without purpose. It is only through the latter that one may create works which are genuinely Dionysian from within the Apollonian discourse, and not in the Wagnerian or late Coltranian manner of dramatization. Adorno argues that whilst there can be no doubt regarding the emancipatory African elements of African-American Jazz, it is apparent that the ‘foreign’ elements of the music become subservient to the strict scheme of the western canon into which they seek to be accommodated. As such, Adorno deems that Jazz’s

‘‘rebellious gestures are accompanied by the tendency to blind obeisance, much like the sado-masochistic type described by analytic psychology, the person who chafes against the father figure while secretly admiring him, who seeks to emulate him and in turn derives enjoyment from the subordination he overtly detests.’’[li]

This damning critique demonstrates Adorno’s nuanced reading of the potentiality of Jazz, but at the same time its limitations.

Whilst Adorno’s critique of Jazz has itself come under criticism over the past five decades, Michael Thompson argues in his favour in that composers such as Debussy and Beethoven anticipated harmonic Jazz elements such as rhythmic syncopation — for example, see Beethoven’s Piano Sonata op.111 — and in doing so demonstrated ‘‘merely another dimension of musical language to be explored and used.’’[lii] For Thompson this multi-dimensionality in classical and romantic works is juxtaposed with the Jazz tradition in that the latter is comparatively static, as its ‘‘language of syncopation, harmonic structure, and so on do not allow it to move beyond a relatively tight circumscribed musical vocabulary’’, and thus ‘‘it is unable to break out of the limitations of its own formal language.’’[liii] It would follow then that in Coltrane’s late works, any improvisation and experimentation is necessarily limited by the genre of musical expression that he attempts to work through. Thus the issue for Adorno with much quasi-Dionysian improvisation is that it itself becomes necessarily standardized, and therefore pernicious as opposed to liberating. Nonetheless, there are issues to be taken up with the above Adornian critiques, which as written before the explosion of the Free Jazz movement, did not anticipate the improvisational and kairologically utopian sonic ruptures that Coltrane’s late quartet were able to engender.

6. ‘Coltrane Changes’

Like Wagner, Coltrane had an ideological and religious agenda, but unlike his predecessor, he was not stanchly Christian in a traditional sense, nor did he harbour any animosity toward other faiths, but rather through his musical expression, sought to better real world relations for all people. As stated in an interview, Coltrane muses that:

‘‘I am [Christian] by birth; my parents were and my early teachings were Christian. But as I look upon the world, I feel all men know the truth. If a man was a Christian, he could know the truth and he could not. The truth itself does not have any name on it. And each man has to find it for himself.’’[liv]

Linked to Nietzsche’s mouthpiece Zarathustra, who beseeches his followers to find their own way, given that ‘the’ way does not exist,[lv] here Coltrane demonstrates a similar sensibility. This above musing combined with his earlier stated desire to ‘help humanity free itself from its hang-ups’ alludes to a — whilst teleological — non-prescriptive mode of expression in juxtaposition with Wagner’s pseudo-Dionysian Götterdämmerung.

In late Coltrane, there is definite mastery of the existing Apollonian cultural material which engenders kairological utopian fissures through pushing notated composition to its rational limits. There is thus a form of immanent transcendence when reading Coltrane’s late compositions in strictly formalist terms; that is, to study them as compositions without considering the author’s instrumental goals, no matter how noble. It is thus to take Coltrane’s following dictum earnestly: ‘‘I’d really rather not talk about my music. If the music doesn’t speak for itself, no words can help it.’’[lvi] As mentioned above, whilst Coltrane does not declare himself to be, nor attempting to be, a Dionysian artist in the Nietzschean mould, when his late compositions are read through a formalist trajectory, and not through what the author wants them to convey, what results are works demonstrating mastery of Apollonian symbolic representation; in effect, of notated music, to thereby engender kairological fissures that reveal utopia in an indirect manner. Steve Reich remarks that what strikes him about Coltrane’s late compositions, and in particular a specific rendition of his A Love Supreme, is that:

‘‘he’s the most harmonically static player and the most harmonically adventurous at the same time. I was listening to it and that one point just made me wonder, ‘what is he doing?’ So I went back and wrote some of it out, about fifteen different times that he played it. I couldn’t figure out any particular pattern. But what really strikes me is the tension between a very tonally fixed anchor and finding out that that anchor makes it possible to go literally anywhere in the twelve keys and return. That’s a worthwhile lesson.’’[lvii]

In this way, Coltrane demonstrates a formalist mastery onto genuine experimentation through non-tonal-key centred improvisation. With reference to the above description from Adorno whereby the child seeks to hit the hitherto unstruck chord, in late Coltrane, owing to his formalist training and grounding, he is able to utilize his technical mastery to enter into hitherto uncharted territories, all the while paradoxically still using the cultural material to hand. His late works thus substantiate Aldous Huxley’s observation that ‘‘it is by long obedience and hard work that the artist comes to unforced spontaneity and consummate mastery.’’[lviii] This spontaneity is a hallmark of a non-prescriptive Dionysian aesthetic, which engenders kairological utopia from within the normative, chronological and Apollonian discourse.

Once more then, it is only by way of technical mastery that Coltrane qualifies as an unwitting Dionysian artist. Coltrane counters Adorno’s exacting critique of Jazz by genuinely improvising in a non-key centred manner. Bill Kirchner observes that the

‘‘miracle of Coltrane’s playing was that he could do this with both immense passion and the logic of a mathematician. While his passion was immediately obvious, it obscured for some listeners the music’s more cerebral qualities.’’[lix]

This in turn repeats the observation by his peers that his later works were paradoxically both ‘free’ as well as renditions of ‘utter control’. Whilst this paradoxically passionate logic satisfies a pre-requisite of genuine improvisation, the critique that what Coltrane was doing was thoroughly planned out still appears to withstand scrutiny. The defence of Adorno’s critique of Jazz above by Thompson would — if accounting for Coltrane’s mastery of form — argue that owing to the limitation of its language, the saxophonists relative achievement is not enough to qualify his music as either Dionysian or kairologically utopian.

That notwithstanding, Adorno’s critiques were made before Coltrane’s appearance onto the popular music scene, and therefore do not apply wholesale to the saxophonist’s late work, nor the post-Bebop Jazz developments of artists such as Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago for example. Coltrane’s late works are far removed from Jazz conventions such as major 7th/ 9th chord extensions, but rather with creations such as the ‘Coltrane Changes’ discussed above, he enacts progressions ‘‘so original that not even Adorno’s idols such as Mozart or Bach anticipated’’ them.[lx] Crucially in the Adornian reading of genuinely utopian music, Coltrane does not prescribe what ought to be done, but rather, through exhausting the limits of Apollonian, chronological logic, engenders Dionysian, kairological ruptures which can in turn paradoxically inform what ought to be done.

7. Conclusion

To conclude, in spite of his explicit aims of mastering nature and being able to produce musical works for specific purposes, Coltrane’s late compositions can be qualified as genuinely Dionysian, and thereby enacting kairological utopian aporias from within the chronological socio-historical narrative. The shock of awareness that is engendered in dissonance through mastery of Apollonian harmony renders these compositions as able to — as per Adorno’s comment above — potentially transform the socio-political infrastructure, and thereby also the ‘relations of production outside the sphere of music.’ As Jacques Attali argues ‘‘no theorizing accomplished through language or mathematics can suffice any longer; it is incapable of accounting for what is essential in time — the qualitative and the fluid, threats and violence.’’[lxi] This brings to the fore the contemporary relevance of Coltrane’s late compositions whereby utopian thought is governed through a rational, Apollonian and chronological discourse. Hence the value of Coltrane’s avant-garde pieces is that they are more than just a body of work, but instead enact kairologically utopian ruptures of normative discourse. These late compositions embody active and immanent resistance to — in allusion to Freud and Marcuse — a repressive reality principle.[lxii] The socio-political challenges of 1960s USA in which Coltrane’s quartet produced their late works is reflected in the music, although in a non-explicit manner; that is, the compositions speak for themselves as immanent critiques of the material mode of production in which they were created. This research thus has relevance in contemporary debates surrounding the possibility of the utopian contra instrumental reason without repeating the violence of the rational discourse which it seeks to unsettle. Coltrane’s late works therefore do — in spite of his explicit aims — successfully embody a kairological and Dionysian charge to render them utopian, and are thus as relevant today as they were fifty years ago.

Thus, not only sonically, but also historically and socially, Coltrane is a key figure in the landscape of the second half of twentieth century USA culture. This is because, along with the social upheaval occurring amongst the African-American community with the civil rights movement and the growth of the Nation of Islam, he was at the pinnacle of the musical revolution taking place through the development of radical avant-garde Free Jazz, which revolted again the harmonic standards of the era preceding it, most notably recognizable through Swing and Bebop. As Cornel West observes: ‘‘Trane introduces a blue note into American harmony’’ in his late works, through his micrological personal struggle which represents a ‘‘story of a people against institutional crime, to forge a sense of self full of integrity and dignity.’’ In doing so, West deems that Coltrane was a man very much a result of a fusion of the Blues along with Jazz, who shined a light on truth by — in Adornian vein — ‘‘allowing suffering to speak.’’[lxiii] As Amiri Baraka notes,

‘‘so much is made of Trane’s link with Malcolm [X] in the sixties, because those periods are when art of that kind does emerge. You have social upsurges, and for every social upsurge, there’s an artistic upsurge that corresponds with that.’’[lxiv]

Similarly, Attali argues that: ‘‘every major social rupture has been preceded by an essential mutation in the codes of music, in its mode of audition, and in its economy.’’[lxv] Hence like Coltrane, Malcolm X who was born two years earlier, and who also died in his fortieth year, similarly overcome a life of narcotic addiction to find a calling through which to express his genius. As Edward Mendelowitz notes, Coltrane’s personal struggles with addiction are informed in his later works, most overtly in A Love Supreme, and demonstrates an act of Nietzschean self-overcoming which merits taking ‘‘seriously the physical and psycho-spiritual ordeal that this sort of struggle entail[ed].’’ Mendelowitz continues by remarking that Coltrane’s personal and artistic development was nothing short of a metamorphosis and a sort of etherealized love such that the final ten years were artistically ‘‘breathtakingly resplendent.’’[lxvi]

8. Key Compositions

The below is a selection of key late compositions by Coltrane’s ‘Classic Quartet’, with the year of recording listed in brackets. These works, particularly those from 1966–1967 are not what could be considered ‘easy listening.’ As A. B. Spellman observes in discussion of 1966’s Ascension, ‘‘there is impact and release, communion and response; the emphasis is on the unmentionable, on what I call the Marvellous: it is not intended that Ascension will be background music for polite dinner conversation.’’[lxvii] These recordings certainly exemplify the arguments made above, and have much that is rich to proffer to the contemporary discourse of the utopian.

Coltrane, J. (1960) Giant Steps (Atlantic LP 1311)

Coltrane, J. (1961) Coltrane ‘‘Live’’ At The Village Vanguard (Impulse! A-10)

Coltrane, J. (1961) Impressions (Impulse! A-42)

Coltrane, J. (1964) Crescent (Impulse! A-6)

Coltrane, J. (1964) A Love Supreme (Impulse! A-77)

Coltrane, J. (1965) The John Coltrane Quartet Plays (Impulse! A-85)

Coltrane, J. (1965) Transition (Impulse! AS-9195)

Coltrane, J. (1965) Om (Impulse! A-9140)

Coltrane, J. (1965) First Meditations (For Quartet) (Impulse! AS-9332)

Coltrane, J. (1965) Meditations (Impulse! A-9110)

Coltrane, J. (1965) Sun Ship (Impulse! AS-9211)

Coltrane, J. (1966) Stellar Regions (Impulse! IMP-169)

Coltrane, J. (1966) Ascension (Impulse! A-95)

Coltrane, J. (1967) Interstellar Space (Impulse! ASD-9277)

Coltrane, J. (1967) Expression (Impulse! A-9120)

A version of this article appeared in Telos, Spring 2020, pp.136–156 (DOI: 10.3817/0320190136)

[i] 1933: ‘‘Farewell to Jazz;’’ 1936: ‘‘On Jazz;’’ 1953 ‘‘Perennial Fashion-Jazz’’.

[ii] Mendelowitz’s is the only piece explicitly linking Nietzsche and Coltrane that I encountered during the literature review for this paper: Edward Mendelowitz, ‘‘Humanitas #7: Sun Ship, the late recordings of John Coltrane,’’ Society for Humanistic Psychology Newsletter, December 2011, accessed November 18, 2014, http://www.apadivisions.org/division-32/publications/newsletters/humanistic/2011/12/humanitas.aspx

[iii] This problem is expounded upon by the predominant reading of it as per Jameson’s observation as ‘‘a code word on the left for socialism or communism; while on the right it has become synonymous with ‘totalitarianism’ or, in effect, with Stalinism,’’ in Fredric Jameson, ‘‘The Politics of Utopia,’’ New Left Review 25 (2004): 35–54 (p.35).

[iv] Friedrich W. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Thomas Common (New York: Dover Publications Inc., 2006), p.190.

[v] Friedrich W. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p.203.

[vi] Elizabeth Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), pp.21–22.

[vii] Eric Charles Wright, Kaironomia: On the Will-To-Invent (Ithica; Cornell University Press, 1987), p.14.

[viii] Peter Sloterdijk, Thinker On Stage: Nietzsche’s Materialism, trans. Jamie Owen Daniel (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p.21.

[ix] Namely, in the transition from Renaissance to Baroque, whereby in 1605 Montiverdi explicated the difference between the first and second practices. The basis of the distinction being that in the former the music dominated the text, whereas in the latter the text dominated the music.

[x] Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, p.189.

[xi] Howard Caygill, ‘‘The return of Nietzsche and Marx,’’ in Nietzsche, Feminism and Political Theory, ed. Paul Patton (New York: Routledge, 1993), 189–203 (p.195).

[xii] Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life (London: Rebel Press, 1983), p.269.

[xiii] Friedrich W. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kauffman, trans. R. J. Hollingdale and Walter Kauffman (New York: Random House, Inc., 1968), p.419.

[xiv] Jean Barraqué, ‘‘Propos impromptus,’’ Courrier musical de France 26 (1969): 25–80 (p.78), quoted and trans. in James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (New York: Anchor Books, 1993), p.80. Appropriately enough, Barraqué was within the Darmstadt, total serialism movement, thus Dionysian moments emerged from within his compositions by pushing Apollonian rational analysis and control of music to its extreme, which then resulted in violent dissonance.

[xv] Kathleen Coessens, ‘‘Musical Performance and ‘Kairos’: Exploring the Time and Space of Artistic Resonance,’’ International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 40:2 (2009): 269–281 (p.277).

[xvi] Nietzsche and Wagner had a tumultuous relationship, with much literature on the topic. For the purposes of this paper, it suffices to say that the mature Nietzsche found Wagner’s music to be powerful, although theatrically decadent, propagandist and abound with self-glorification. See Friedrich W. Nietzsche, The Case Against Wagner, trans. Anthony M. Ludovici (Honolulu, Hawaii: University Press of the Pacific, 2003).

[xvii] Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p.428.

[xviii] Maynard Solomon, Mozart: A Life (London: Pimlico, 1995), p.378.

[xix] Ibid., p.378.

[xx] These came to be identified by chord progressions based upon key centred movements by thirds, rather than the usual fourths and fifths of standard progressions. See Masaya Yamaguchi, John Coltrane Plays Coltrane Changes (Milwaukee: Hal Leonard Corporation, 2003).

[xxi] Lewis Porter, John Coltrane: His Life and Music (Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan University Press, 2000), p.153.

[xxii] The term ‘Free Jazz’ was popularized following the release of the Coleman’s 1960 album Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation. Nonetheless, it was the earlier 1959 work, The Shape of Jazz to Come, which is retrospectively seen as the first pioneering ‘Free Jazz’ record.

[xxiii] Jean-Claude Dargenpierre, ‘‘John Coltrane: Un Faust modern,’’ Jazz (France) (January 1962): 24, quoted and trans. in Porter, John Coltrane, p.191.

[xxiv] Mendelowitz, ‘‘Sun Ship.’’

[xxv] Ibid.

[xxvi] Dave Liebman, interview, DAT recording, April 16, 2001, quoted in Kahn, A Love Supreme, p.103.

[xxvii] Porter, John Coltrane, p.209. This in turn is reflected in the fact that Coltrane named one of his sons — who has himself gone on to become a celebrated Jazz saxophonist — after the Indian sitar player Ravi Shankar.

[xxviii] Ibid., p.216.

[xxix] Porter, Op. Cit., p.214.

[xxx] Rashied Ali, liner notes to Interstellar Space, Impulse! A-95, 1967. Ali joined the ‘classic quartet’ as a second drummer in 1965.

[xxxi] Friedrich W. Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp.92–93.

[xxxii] Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, eds. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Continuum, 2002), p.312.

[xxxiii] Roberto M. Unger, The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), p.169.

[xxxiv] Paul Crowther, The Kantian Sublime: From Morality to Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p.156.

[xxxv] Nietzsche, Will To Power, p.422.

[xxxvi] See Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p.32. and p.135.

[xxxvii] John Coltrane, liner notes to Giant Steps, Atlantic LP 1311, 1960.

[xxxviii] Theodor W. Adorno, Dissonanzen (Giitingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1963) quoted in Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p.43.

[xxxix] Ibid.

[xl] Maxine Greene, Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Change (California, Josey-Bass Inc., 2000), p.19.

[xli] Porter, John Coltrane, pp.216–17.

[xlii] Ashley Kahn, A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane’s Signature Album (New York: Penguin, 2002), p.97.

[xliii] Kahn, A Love Supreme, p.138.

[xliv] Paul D. Zimmerman (with Ruth Ross), ‘‘The New Jazz,’’ Newsweek, December 12, 1966: 108, quoted in Porter, John Coltrane, p.232.

[xlv] Frank Foster, interview, DAT recording, September 6, 2001, quoted in in Kahn, A Love Supreme, p.182.

[xlvi] Mendelowitz, ‘‘Sun Ship.’’ There is in fact, a contemporary (as of 2017) Church of St. John William Coltrane African Orthodox Church in San Francisco. See The Church of Saint Coltrane, dir. Jeff Swimmer, 1996.

[xlvii] Michael Delorme and Claue Lenissois, ‘‘Je ne peux pas aller plus loin.’’ Jazz Hot (France) (September 1965), quoted in Porter, John Coltrane, p.248.

[xlviii] Jean Clouzet and Michael Delorme, ‘‘Entretien avec John Coltrane,’’ Les Cahiers du Jazz (France) (August 1963), trans. Jonathan Matz, quoted in Kahn, John Coltrane, p.192.

[xlix] Porter, John Coltrane, pp.226.

[l] Mendelowitz, ‘‘Sun Ship.’’

[li] Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shiery Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), p.121.

[lii] Michael Thompson, “Th. W. Adorno Defended against His Critics, and Admirers: A Defense of the Critique of Jazz,’’ IRASM 41 (2010): 37–49 (p.46).

[liii] Thompson, ‘Adorno Defended’, p.46.

[liv] John Coltrane, liner notes for Live in Japan. Impulse! GRD-4–102, 1991.

[lv] Friedrich W. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1969), p.213.

[lvi] John Coltrane, liner notes to Giant Steps, Atlantic LP 1311, 1960.

[lvii] Steve Reich interview, DAT recording, October 12, 2001, quoted in Kahn, A Love Supreme, p.102.

[lviii] Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (London: Chatto & Windus, 1946), p.135.

[lix] Bill Kirchner, liner notes to Impressions, Impulse! A-41, 1961.

[lx] John Levi Masuli, ‘‘Adorno VS Jazz!’’(blog), Signals, February 9, 2012, https://johnlevimasuli.wordpress.com/2012/02/09/adorno-vs-Jazz/.

[lxi] Attali, Noise, p.4.

[lxii] See Sigmund Freud, New introductory lectures on psychoanalysis, trans. W. J. H. Sprott (New York: Norton, 1933) and Herbert Marcuse, Eros and civilization : a philosophical inquiry into Freud (London: Allen Lane, 1969) in particular for an introductory discussion about this concept.

[lxiii] Cornel West, John Coltrane, American Transcendentalism, Jazz, Radical Politics, accessed 15 April, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMA5xFuNuws. The Adorno reference West alludes to is: ‘‘the need to lend a voice to suffering is a condition of all truth,’’ in Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London, Routledge, 1973), p.17.

[lxiv] Amiri Baraka, ‘‘Tell Me How Long Trane’s Been Gone,’’ part 1 of 5 Radio documentary, co-prods. Steve Rowland and Larry Abrams (2001), quoted in Kahn, A Love Supreme, p.160.

[lxv] Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p.10.

[lxvi] Mendelowitz, ‘‘Sun Ship.’’ This has connotations of Nietzsche’s notion of the three metamorphoses of the spirit as outlined in: Friedrich W. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1969), pp.54–56.

[lxvii] A. B. Spellman, liner notes to Ascension, Impulse! A-95, 1966.