Physicist and saxophonist Stephon Alexander has argued in his many public lectures and his book The Jazz of Physics that Albert Einstein and John Coltrane had rather a lot 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 music as a “spiritual journey” that “embraced the concerns of a wealthy tradition of autophysiopsystylish music,” Alexander sees “the identical geometric principle that motivated Einstein’s” quantum theory.
Neither description appears misplaced. Musician and weblogger Roel Hollander notes, “Thelonious Monk as soon as stated ‘All musicians are subconsciously mathematicians.’ Musicians like John Coltrane although have been very a lot conscious of the mathematicsematics of music and consciously utilized it to his works.”
Coltrane was additionally very a lot conscious of Einstein’s work and favored to speak about it frequently. Musician David Amram remembers the Big Steps genius telling him he “was attempting to do somefactor like that in music.”
Hollander carefully dissects Coltrane’s mathematics in two theory-heavy essays, one generally on Coltrane’s “Music & Geometry” and one specifically on his “Tone Circle.” Coltrane himself had little to say publicly concerning the intensive theoretical work behind his most well-known compositions, probably as a result of he’d fairly they communicate for themselves. He preferred to specific himself philosophically and mystically, drawing equally on his fascination with science and with spiritual traditions of all types. Coltrane’s poetic manner of communicateing has left his musical interpreters with a large variety of how to have 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 fairly Islamic to me.”
Lateef agreed, and there could also be few who beneathstood Coltrane’s methodology wagerter than he did. He studied shutly with Coltrane for years, and has been remembered since his dying in 2013 as a peer and even a malestor, especially in his eumenical embrace of theory and music from around the globe. Lateef even argued that Coltrane’s late-in-life masterpiece A Love Supreme might have been titled “Allah Supreme” have been it not for concern of “political againlash.” Some could discover the declare tendentious, however what we see within the big selection of responses to Coltrane’s musical theory, so nicely encapsulated within the drawing above, is that his recognition, as Lateef writes, of the “structures of music” was as a lot for him about scientific discovery because it was a religious experience. Each for him have been intuitive course ofes that “got here into existence,” writes Lateef, “within the thoughts of the musician by abstraction from experience.”
Observe: An earlier version of this submit appeared on our web site in 2017.
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Josh Jones is a author and musician primarily based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
