In a recent essay on the apparent oxymoron of Utah Jazz, we made the argument that it was Miles Davis’s counter-intuitive tendency to look for notes to cut–as exemplified by such ground-breaking masterpieces as Kind of Blue, In a Silent Way, and “He Loved Him Madly”–that was most of a kind with the “unspeakable gift,” the “groanings which cannot be uttered,” and “the peace of God, which passeth all understanding.” As an aside, we contrasted Miles Davis’s approach with that of, say, Ornette Coleman and the contemporaneous Free Jazz movement.
The irony, of course, is that Miles Davis was by all appearances largely indifferent to spirituality or religion (there is no Miles Davis Gospel album or Christmas album, for example), whereas the vast majority of Free Jazzers repeatedly foregrounded spirituality as the rationalization and justification for their entire anti-commercial enterprise. Davis’s own former sideman John Coltrane, for example, entitled his first full-bore Free Jazz album in 1966 Ascension–and that only a year after he named his near-Free-Jazz masterpiece A Love Supreme, itself explicitly framed as a prayer to the Almighty.
Likewise, shortly after Coltrane’s untimely cancer death in 1967 (and subsequent canonization by the African Orthodox Church), his widow Alice Coltrane converted to Hinduism and released Free Jazz albums with titles like Universal Consciousness. John Coltrane’s own biggest Free Jazz influence, Albert Ayler, also gave his albums names like Spiritual Unity. His Free Jazz contemporary Sun Ra likewise used song titles like “Of Heavenly Things.” We could go on. Even those Free Jazzers who explicitly rejected the spiritual dimensions of Free Jazz, like West German saxophonist Peter Brötzmann (whose 1968 track “Machine Gun” is legit one of the most terrifying pieces of music I’ve ever heard), could only do so within the context of the intense spirituality established by the Americans. (Or perhaps “Machine Gun” isn’t so nonspiritual after all; like Joseph Smith, Brötzmann–living as he did in the epicenter of the Cold War–saw “destruction writ large on everything we behold.”) All in all, a strong religious vocabulary threads its way throughout the early Free Jazz movement.
Before continuing, it must be acknowledged: Free Jazz is, to put it lightly, an acquired taste. If it clicks for you, it’s dazzling, liberating, ecstatic; if it doesn’t, it just sounds like a bunch of noise. Both reactions are valid. Probably the Jackson Pollock detail on the cover of Ornette Coleman’s 1960 Free Jazz LP serves as a good Rorschach test: whether you find Pollock’s paintings irritating and overblown, or hypnotic and mesmerizing, will likely double as your own reaction to Free Jazz. In any case, my goal here is not to proselytize the genre, but to consider it briefly in an LDS context.
To bounce back to Miles Davis: though he occasionally flirted with Free Jazz himself (most famously on his 1970 double-album Bitches Brew), he overall remained skeptical of the genre. As discussed last week, Davis thought the ever-increasing complexity of Jazz solos during BeBop’s 1950s heyday was making the music “thick,” that the melody was becoming lost; as such, he felt that Free Jazz was doubling-down on exactly the wrong tendencies—hence his own preference for Modal Jazz. We also compared Davis’s increasingly minimalist tendencies to that of the LDS Church’s missionary program over the past two decades (especially since the 2004 debut of Preach My Gospel), which has likewise been towards shorter discussions, less talking, fewer words. Again, to quote both Elder Holland and St. Aquinas, “Preach the gospel, and if necessary, use words.”
Yet though this move towards minimalism has been the tendency in the missionary department for years now, it most emphatically was not the tendency of the Restored Gospel in the beginning.
Consider how radically counter Joseph Smith was to the predominant trends in Christendom at the time, especially in his native New England settled by Puritans: whereas the Protestant Reformation had spent 300+ years steadfastly making Christianity simpler–cutting out the gothic cathedrals, the priests and the pageantry, the confession booths and the Apocrypha, moving instead towards a straight-forward salvation that came by grace alone, through faith in Christ alone, based on the Bible alone–Joseph Smith by contrast moved in the precise opposite direction. Suddenly there were even more scriptures, with even more Priesthood offices, with even more elaborate rituals, performed inside large-scale temples built at enormous cost, all situated within an ever-more-complicated theology–one filled with infinite gods, eternal lives, worlds without number. (Not coincidentally, the Free Jazzers also frequently combined spirituality with cosmology, from The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra to John Coltrane’s Interstellar Space).
Joseph Smith was out-Catholisizing the Catholics, out Orthodoxing the Greek Orthodox. He wasn’t simplifying the notes like the Protestants, he was adding to them—and doing so to such a radical degree that he was swiftly breaking free of all previously known forms of religious convention, in a manner calculated to offend and alienate the super-majority of the world around him while simultaneously drawing himself closer to God—again, like Free Jazz itself.
At least, that’s what Joseph Smith was doing; today it goes without saying that any comparison of the LDS Church to Free Jazz would be laughable (and not just because Smith would be the last prophet for over a hundred years to be cool with Black ordination and abolishing slavery). We went from endless innovation to instead careful conservation–again, like Jazz itself. Nowadays we take neither the Miles Davis nor the Ornette Coleman approaches, but that of Wynton Marsalis—the controversial Lincoln Center composer notoriously more interested in preserving Jazz in amber like Classical music (another genre that used to be endlessly innovative before succumbing to conservation) than in pushing its boundaries further.
Instead of an ecstatic “collective improvisation” (the subtitle to Coleman’s Free Jazz), performed within a beehive-busy United Order wherein God Himself “pour[s] out my spirit upon all flesh” (Joel 2:28, quoted by the angel Moroni to Joseph Smith directly) as we all become prophets and gods together at once, we instead have the more top-down approach of the choir director or the orchestral composer. In Deleuzian terms, we are thoroughly aborescent, not rhizomatic–hierarchical, not collective. We obey, not improvise; we go mainstream, not willfully marginal; we conserve, not innovate.
And that’s not necessarily a bad thing! Some things deserve to be conserved, especially after the initial burst of dazzling inspiration subsides. Such is the inevitable fate of most faiths, just as it is for most music genres. Hence, we as a Church may finesse around the edges and tweak the notes a bit, but largely we are just playing the standards, the same way we have been playing them for decades. We encourage personal inspiration in our individual solos, so to speak, but not in our overall arrangements.
But here’s the thing: I confess I’ve been listening to a lot more Free Jazz lately, and it’s because the wild, unrestrained chaos of that genre often seems to match the mood of our times. The chords we were playing before aren’t working anymore–not as a Church, not as a nation, not as a planet; and not only is it time to find new chords, but maybe to throw out the entire category of hierarchical, pre-determined chord structures in the first place. (It is no accident that Free Jazz emerged during the height of the Civil Rights movement–nor that Miles Davis’s own Free Jazz dalliances began in the aftermath of MLK’s assassination–they were all seeking new strategies for liberation).
Turbulent times call for a turbulent theology–and that is exactly what Joseph Smith was innovating in the final turbulent years of his life. It’s time to unleash our Free Jazz tendencies again–not just in our music, but in our spiritual lives, which for the Free Jazzers was largely one and the same.