Physicist and saxophonist Stephon Alexander has argued in his many public lectures and his e-book The Jazz of Physics that Albert Einstein and John Coltrane had reasonably so much in common. Alexander in particular attracts our attention to the so-called “Coltrane circle,” which resembles what any musician will recognize because the “Circle of Fifths,” however incorpocharges Coltrane’s personal innovations. Coltrane gave the drawing to saxophonist and professionalfessor Yusef Lateef in 1967, who included it in his seminal textual content, Repository of Scales and Melodic Patterns. The place Lateef, as he writes in his autobiography, sees Coltrane’s track as a “spiritual journey” that “embraced the concerns of a wealthy tradition of carphysiopsysublime track,” Alexander sees “the similar geometric principle that motivated Einstein’s” quantum theory.
Neither description turns out misplaced. Musician and weblogger Roel Hollander notes, “Thelonious Monk as soon as stated ‘All musicians are subconsciously mathematicians.’ Musicians like John Coltrane even though were very a lot conscious about the mathematicsematics of track and consciously implemented it to his works.”
Coltrane was once additionally very a lot conscious about Einstein’s paintings and preferred to discuss it frequently. Musician David Amram remembers the Large Steps genius telling him he “was once check outing to do a littlefactor like that during track.”
Hollander carefully dissects Coltrane’s mathematics in two theory-heavy essays, one generally on Coltrane’s “Tune & Geomecheck out” and one specifically on his “Tone Circle.” Coltrane himself had little to mention publicly in regards to the intensive theoretical paintings in the back of his most renowned compositions, probably as a result of he’d reasonably they discuss for themselves. He preferred to specific himself philosophically and mystically, drawing equivalently on his fascination with science and with spiritual traditions of a wide variety. Coltrane’s poetic means of discussing has left his musical interpreters with a large variety of the way to take a look at his Circle, as jazz musician Corey Mwamba discovered when he informally polled several other players on Facee-book. Clarinetist Arun Ghosh, for examinationple, noticed in Coltrane’s “mathematical principles” a “musical system that connected with The Divine.” It’s a system, he opined, that “feels reasonably Islamic to me.”
Lateef agreed, and there could also be few who belowstood Coltrane’s manner wagerter than he did. He studied shutly with Coltrane for years, and has been remembered since his demise in 2013 as a peer or even a malestor, especially in his europeanmenical include of theory and track from all over the world. Lateef even argued that Coltrane’s late-in-life masterpiece A Love Ideally suited would possibly were titled “Allah Ideally suited” have been it now not for concern of “political againlash.” Some would possibly to find the declare tendentious, however what we see in the big variety of responses to Coltrane’s musical theory, so neatly encapsulated within the drawing above, is that his recognition, as Lateef writes, of the “structures of track” was once as a lot for him about scientific discovery because it was once a religious experience. Each for him have been intuitive procedurees that “got here into existence,” writes Lateef, “within the thoughts of the musician via abstraction from experience.”
Word: An earlier version of this publish gave the impression on our website in 2017.
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Josh Jones is a creator and musician based totally in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
