Mastery (41 page)

1. The Authentic Voice

As a boy growing up in North Carolina, John Coltrane (1926–67) took up music as a kind of hobby. He was an anxious young man who needed an outlet for all of his pent-up energy. He started with the alto horn, moved to the clarinet, and finally settled on the alto saxophone. He played for his school band, and to those who heard him play back then he was a completely insignificant member of the group.

Then in 1943 his family moved to Philadelphia. One evening shortly after the move Coltrane happened to catch a performance of the great bebop saxophonist Charlie Parker, and he was instantly transfixed. (See
here
.) He had never heard such playing, had never imagined such possibilities in music. Parker had a way of lilting and singing through his saxophone as if the instrument had melded with his own voice, and in hearing him play it seemed possible to feel what he was feeling. From that moment on, John Coltrane was a man possessed. Following in Parker’s footsteps, in his own way, would now be his Life’s Task.

Coltrane was not sure how he could reach such heights, but he knew that Parker was an intense student of all types of music and practiced the instrument harder than anyone. This fit in nicely with Coltrane’s own inclinations—always being somewhat of a loner, he loved nothing more than to study and expand his knowledge. He started taking theory lessons at a local music school. And he began to practice night and day, with such assiduity that his reeds would become red from blood. In the time in between practicing, he went to the public library and listened to classical music, hungry to absorb every conceivable harmonic possibility. He practiced scales like a fiend, driving his family insane. He took scale-book exercises designed for the piano and used them for the saxophone, going through all of the keys in Western music. He began to get gigs in bands in Philadelphia, getting his first real break in Dizzy Gillespie’s orchestra. Gillespie made him change to the tenor sax to get more of the Charlie Parker sound, and within a few months Coltrane had mastered the new instrument—through endless hours of practice.

Over the next five years Coltrane would bounce around from one band to another, each with its different style and repertoire of songs. This wandering existence suited him well—he felt as if he needed to internalize every conceivable style of music. But this also caused him some problems. When it came time for him to perform a solo, he was quite awkward and halting. He had an unusual sense of rhythm, a hopping and skipping style that was peculiar to him and not quite right for the bands he was playing for. Feeling self-conscious, when it came time for a solo he would resort to imitating someone else’s way of playing. Every few months he would suddenly
experiment with a new sound that he had heard. To some, it seemed like young Coltrane had gotten lost in all of his studying and roaming about.

In 1955 Miles Davis—leader of the most famous jazz quartet at the time—decided to take a chance and invite Coltrane into his group. Like everyone else, he knew that the young man was the most technically brilliant player around, the result of so many hours of practice. But he also detected in his work something strange, a new kind of voice straining to come out. He encouraged Coltrane to go his own way and never look back. In the months to come, Davis would have moments of regret—he had let loose something that was hard to integrate into his group. Coltrane had a way of starting chords in the strangest places. He would alternate fast passages with long tones, giving the impression that several voices were coming through the saxophone at once. No one had ever heard such a sound. His tone was equally peculiar; he had his own way of tightly clenching the mouthpiece, making it seem as if it were his own gravelly voice that was emerging from the instrument. His playing had an undercurrent of anxiety and aggression, which gave his music a sense of urgency.

Although many were put off by this strange new sound, some critics began to recognize something exciting in it. One writer described what came out of Coltrane’s saxophone as “sheets of sound,” as if he were playing groups of notes at once and sweeping the listener away with his music. Although he was now gaining recognition and attention, Coltrane continued to feel restless and uncertain. Through all of his years of practicing and playing he had been searching for something he could hardly put into words. He wanted to personalize his sound to the extreme, to make it the perfect embodiment of how he was feeling—often emotions of a spiritual and transcendental nature, and thus hard to verbalize. At moments his playing would come alive, but at other times the sensation of his own voice would elude him. Perhaps all of his knowledge was in fact cramping and inhibiting him. In 1959 he left Miles Davis to form his own quartet. From now on, he would experiment and try almost anything until he found the sound that he had been looking for.

His song “Giant Steps,” on his first major album of the same name, was an exercise in unconventional music. Using peculiar chord progressions that moved in thirds, with constant key and chord changes, the music was impelled frantically forward. (Its third-related chord progressions became known as Coltrane changes, and are still used by musicians as a template for jazz improvisation.) The album was a huge success; several pieces from it went on to become jazz standards, but the experiment left Coltrane cold. He now wanted to return to melody, to something freer and more expressive, and he found himself going back to the music of his early childhood—Negro spirituals. In 1960 he created his first huge popular hit, an extended
version of the song “My Favorite Things,” from the smash Broadway musical
The Sound of Music.
He played it on the soprano saxophone in a style that seemed almost East Indian, blending in as well a touch of Negro spirituals, all with his strange propensity for chord changes and rapid scales. It was a weird blend of experimental and popular music, unlike anything anyone else had done.

Coltrane was now like an alchemist, involved in an almost impossible quest to discover the essence of music itself, to make it express more deeply and directly the emotions he was feeling, to connect it to the unconscious. And slowly, it seemed he was getting closer to his goal. His ballad “Alabama,” written in response to the 1963 bombing by the Ku Klux Klan of a church in Birmingham, Alabama, seemed to capture something essential about the moment and the mood of the time. It seemed to be the incarnation of sadness and despair. A year later, his album
A Love Supreme
appeared. It was recorded in one day, and making the music was like a religious experience for him. It had everything he was aiming for—extended movements that went as long as it felt natural to do so (something novel in jazz), and a trance-like effect on listeners, while still containing the hard-driving sound and technical brilliance he was known for. It was an album that expressed that spiritual element he could not put into words. It became a sensation, drawing a whole new audience to his music.

People who saw his live performances in this period proclaimed the uniqueness of the experience. As the saxophonist Joe McPhee described it, “I thought I was going to die from the emotion…I thought I was just going to explode right in the place. The energy level kept building up, and I thought, God almighty, I can’t take it.” Audiences would go wild, some people screaming at the intensity of the sound. It seemed as if the music from Coltrane’s saxophone was a direct translation of some deep mood or feeling of his, and that he could move the audience in whatever direction he wanted with it. No other jazz artist had such an effect on audiences.

As part of the Coltrane phenomenon, every change he introduced into jazz was suddenly adopted as the latest trend—extended songs, larger groups, tambourines and bells, Eastern sounds, and so on. The man who had spent ten long years absorbing the styles of all forms of music and jazz now had become the trendsetter for others. Coltrane’s meteoric career, however, was cut short in 1967, when he died at the age of forty of liver cancer.

In Coltrane’s era jazz had become a celebration of individuality. Players like Charlie Parker made the jazz solo the centerpiece of any work. In the solo, the player would pour out his own unique voice. But what is this voice that comes through so clearly in the work of the greats? It is not something we
can exactly put into words. Musicians are expressing something deep about their nature, their particular psychological makeup, even their unconscious. It comes out in their style, their unique rhythms and phrasings. But this voice does not emerge from just being oneself and letting loose. A person who would take up an instrument and try to express this quality right away would only produce noise. Jazz or any other musical form is a language, with conventions and vocabulary. And so the extreme paradox is that those who impress the most with their individuality—John Coltrane at the top—are the ones who first completely submerge their character in a long apprenticeship. In Coltrane’s case, this process can be broken up neatly—just over ten years of an intense apprenticeship, followed by ten years of perhaps the most amazing creative explosion in modern music, up until his death.

By spending so long learning structure, developing technique, and absorbing every possible style and way of playing, Coltrane built up a vast vocabulary. Once all of this became hardwired into his nervous system, his mind could focus on higher things. At an increasingly rapid pace, he could bend all of the techniques he had learned into something more personal. In being so open to exploring and trying things out, he could discover in a serendipitous fashion those musical ideas that suited him. With all that he had learned and mastered, he could combine ideas and styles in unique ways. By being patient and following the process, individual expression flowed out of him naturally. He personalized every genre he worked in, from blues to Broadway show tunes. His authentic voice—with its anxious, urgent tone—was a reflection of his uniqueness at birth, and came to him in a lengthy, organic process. By expressing his deepest self and his most primal emotions, he created a visceral effect on listeners.

Understand: the greatest impediment to creativity is your impatience, the almost inevitable desire to hurry up the process, express something, and make a splash. What happens in such a case is that you do not master the basics; you have no real vocabulary at your disposal. What you mistake for being creative and distinctive is more likely an imitation of other people’s style, or personal rantings that do not really express anything. Audiences, however, are hard to fool. They feel the lack of rigor, the imitative quality, the urge to get attention, and they turn their backs, or give the mildest praise that quickly passes. The best route is to follow Coltrane and to love learning for its own sake. Anyone who would spend ten years absorbing the techniques and conventions of their field, trying them out, mastering them, exploring and personalizing them, would inevitably find their authentic voice and give birth to something unique and expressive.

2. The Fact of Great Yield

For as long as he can remember, V. S. Ramachandran (b. 1951) has been fascinated by any kind of strange phenomenon in nature. As narrated in
chapter 1
(see
here
), at a very young age he began collecting seashells from beaches near his home in Madras. In researching the subject, his attention was drawn to the most peculiar varieties of seashells, such as the carnivorous murex. Soon he added these unusual specimens to his collection. As he got older, he transferred this interest to abnormal phenomena in chemistry, astronomy, and human anatomy. Perhaps he intuited that these anomalies fulfilled some kind of purpose in nature, that what does not fit the pattern has something interesting to tell us. Perhaps he felt that he himself—with his passion for science when other boys were attracted to sports or games—was a bit of an anomaly as well. In any event, as he matured his attraction to the bizarre and abnormal only grew.

In the 1980s, as a professor of visual psychology at the University of California at San Diego, he came upon a phenomenon that appealed to his interest in anomalies in the deepest way—the so-called phantom limb syndrome. In this case, people who have had a limb amputated continue to experience sensation and pain where the limb used to be. In his research as a visual psychologist, Ramachandran had specialized in optical illusions—instances in which the brain would incorrectly fill in information from what the eyes had processed. Phantom limbs represented an optical illusion on a much larger scale, with the brain supplying sensation where there could be none. Why would the brain send such signals? What does such a phenomenon tell us about the brain in general? And why were there so few people interested in this truly bizarre condition? He became obsessed with these questions, and read everything he could about the subject.

One day in 1991, he read about an experiment conducted by Dr. Timothy Pons of the National Institute of Health that astounded him with its possible ramifications. Pons’s experiment was based on research from the 1950s in which the Canadian neurosurgeon, Wilder Penfeld, had been able to map the areas of the human brain that regulate sensation in various body parts. This map ended up being applicable to primates as well.