Change is Where You Make it:

Constructs in Astrophysics and Metaphysics in the Jazz Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s

BRIAN CASEY, MM Jazz Studies, University of North Texas

Abstract

There are numerous writings focusing on the relationship between free

jazz and the civil rights movement in America. There is little

literature, however, addressing how many American jazz artists

focused their creative endeavors on spiritual or afrofuturist

constructs to present a different solution to the racial turmoil of

the era. This research examines the works of three significant

musicians associated with free jazz – Sun Ra, Anthony Braxton and

John Coltrane - and explores how they incorporate metaphysical and

astrophysical approaches to present to their audiences a new

perspective on how they might better understand the social

instability of their time.

Introduction

Free jazz, avant-garde, experimental music, the New Thing; applied to

the musical revolution engaged in by many jazz musicians in the 1960s

and 1970s, these terms have all commonly been treated as describing

both a major break from the jazz tradition in terms of musical

content and a significant advancement in the social significance of

jazz. The break has often been characterized as a deviation from

music's organizational concepts like tonality and swing, as though it

were a negative departure in the course of jazz history. Furthermore,

this break in musical tradition has been closely tied to the social

turmoil of race relations during this period, implying that the

societal implications of these development in jazz were primarily

concerned with affecting social change with African-Americans

integrating into established culture, in keeping with W.E.B. DuBois'

ideas or through radical and militant factions such as the Black

Panther Party. There is a clear focus in mainstream writings on this

period of free jazz as the music of the 'angry black man'; of the New

Thing in jazz as being inextricably linked to the militant aspect of

the civil rights struggle. Certainly that was a noteworthy factor in

how the music of the time was conceived and perceived. All too often

in the literature on the subject the sociological connections within

free jazz do not go beyond the link to what in the 1960s became

competing movements promoting racial equality through either the

societal integration of the Harlem Renaissance or the more radical

separatist movement codified in the concept of Black Power.

There are, however, many sociological aspects of free jazz1 linked to

prominent concepts in the music that have gone unnoticed, or at least

under-reported in the literature on the music of this period. The

purpose of this paper is to clarify and bring to light with a new

lens another way in which the free jazz of the 1960s and 1970s can

offer perspective and affect change in the struggle of the African

American in a time of turmoil and strife in America. By looking at

the works and writings of major figures in the free jazz movement –

specifically here Sun Ra, Anthony Braxton and John Coltrane– a

connection can be made to other methods of invoking social change

that involved neither integration into white American society nor

creating a separate social milieu associated with the Black Panther

Party and the Nation of Islam. These methods involved presenting to

the thoughtful listener new worlds within which their identity and

self-awareness could be considered, far removed from the oppression

and pain many found in American culture of the 1960's. These worlds

can be segmented into two distinct areas, the often utopian views of

new possibilities for oppressed people of all kinds in the

exploration of a futuristic outer space and the very private and safe

1 For the purposes of this paper, the term 'free jazz' should be considered an encapsulate term to apply equilaterally to the New Thing, avant-garde, and experimental music and its composers who have identified with the jazz traditionin America from the 1960s and 1970s.

world created through meditation and a spiritual journey into the

inner space of the mind – or, as the title of the paper suggests, new

worlds have been explored in the free jazz of the 1960s and 1970s

through astrophysical and metaphysical methods, which I aspire to

elucidate and explain in the paper that follows.

Sun Ra's Astro Black Mythology

A principle voice in the avant-garde jazz scene of the early 1960s,

Sun Ra utilizes a decidedly utopian concept he created and maintained

throughout his career as a unifying theme within all his work. This

concept is embodied in a construct characterized by Graham Lock as

Ra’s “Astro Black Mythology” (Lock 1999). The genesis of this concept

is concisely contained in Ra's own words, as quoted by John Corbett:

“We are told we have no history. Why can't we create our own future?”

(Corbett 1994). Ra was committed to presenting a vision of hope in a

future and otherworldly society where the oppression and despair

among African-Americans was no longer a concern. Having found a new

world in outer space, the human race could begin anew, free of the

trappings of a racially divided society. In keeping with this

concept, Ra himself identified with an extraterrestrial origin,

stating repeatedly that he came from Saturn. Furthermore, he created

a unique mode of presentation for himself and his ‘Arkestras’ – a

name for his various ensembles billed in conjunction with qualifiers

with an astrophysical bent to create band names such as the Myth

Science Arkestra, Solar Myth Arkestra, Astral Infinity and

Intergalactic Arkestras. The thematic content of Ra’s music, too,

was decidedly focused on expressing the concerns of his space-age

philosophy, engaging song titles such as ‘Astro Black’, ‘Love in

Outer Space’ and ‘Pathways to Unknown Worlds’. Because the sheer

volume of Sun Ra’s work, even a representative sample would be hard

to delineate in a paper of limited scope such as this one; those

listed above are but a few of a much wider range of song and ensemble

names that are in keeping with the concept of Afro Black Mythology.

Visually, too, Sun Ra took on a very specific set of costumes for

himself and his musicians that expressed the full range of his

concepts employing futuristic headgear and props combined with

African robes and set dressings that reflected ancient Egyptian

culture.

In a word, these connections can be described in a term coming from

the discipline of literature, afrofuturism, first coined in 1995 by

Mark Dery in his essay Black to the Future which defines the term:

Speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and

addresses African-American concerns in the context of 20th

century technoculture---and, more generally, African-

American signification that appropriates images of

technology and a prosthetically enhanced future. (Dery 1994)

Sun Ra can be considered a pioneer of afrofuturism. He was promoting

these ideas as early as the mid-1950s in conjunction with creating a

‘black knowledge society’ metaphor, also using historic Egypt as a

symbol of an African technological civilization (Kreiss 2008). This

metaphor has also been described succinctly as “demystifying through

remystyfying” (Corbett 1994). These concepts of creating a futuristic

mythology were also taken on by Nation of Islam leader Elijah

Muhammed, who is known to have frequented the same public events with

philosophical speakers as Sun Ra in mid-1950s Chicago’s Washington

Park. The Nation of Islam, however, used technological metaphors to

create a Black Muslim mythology promoting an apocalyptic future where

Allah would send to the earth a spaceship described as a half-mile

wide wheel in the sky to remove the chosen ones: those affiliated

with the Nation of Islam (Lock).

Tied closely to his utopian creation of another world which could

free African Americans from oppression in the United States, Sun Ra

used these images and concepts within his performance practice

designed to introduce to African-Americans an awareness of the

importance of and accessibility to technology. Ra knew a thorough and

active understanding of technology was going to be a defining factor

in American society and how American subcultures might come to

prominence or be left out. He used technological metaphors relating

to space travel to change consciousness about the relationship

between black America and the coming technological revolution. Again,

there is a similarity here with how the Black Muslim movement chose

to introduce technology within their message and iconography to the

same ends. The more radical Nation of Islam, however, chose to focus

on the iconic use of the gun as a primary artifact that represented

both technology and power in harnessing technology to advance their

cause in decidedly militant and radical methods.

Finally, Ra used technology in his music-making to an extent not yet

seen within the jazz tradition. Being an early adopter of using a

synthesizer in a big band context, Ra was able to emulate sounds from

outer space in conjunction with the more organic sounds his orchestra

was producing. His earliest forays into this style involve an early

Moog synthesizer with which he creates a sonic palette reminiscent of

Morton Subotnick's attempts, and were issued in stark contrast to

other tracks on the same release featuring a percussion ensemble with

log drum and hand drums and other pieces featuring woodwinds (Space

Probe 1969-70). Even the simple and often ridiculed Farfisa,

commomly used in kitchy1960s popular music becomes, in Sun Ra's

hands, a 'space organ', as listed in the liner notes to the 1972

Impulse release Space is the Place. Again, there are sounds created that

can be heard like the electronic music of the classical avant-garde

of the era. These sounds also connote cinematic effects from the sci-

fi genre, and specifically are combined with the organic sounds of

saxophones and voices chanting “Rocket Number Nine, takin' off for

the planet... for the planet... Venus” in the short set-closing

“Rocket Number Nine” (Space is the Place 1972). The sounds created

through technology also bring to mind frequent statements by Ra that

presented his musicians as 'sound scientists' and 'tone artists' who

could affect the thought of their audience through manipulation of

sound (Kriess).

Anthony Braxton's Tri-axium Writings

Beginning in the mid-1960s, Anthony Braxton, a chief exemplar of the

avant-garde and the New Thing in jazz, developed his own sense of

tradition and his relationship to it. While not utilizing overt

references to space travel or other afrofuturist constructs

specifically as Sun Ra is presented as having done above, Braxton’s

intellectual bent leads him to write both music and literature on

music from a highly informed, scientific point of view. Braxton

recorded his thought processes in a literary sense in what he termed

his Tri-axium Writings, which he began working on in 1973 but didn't

publish until 1985, at which point he released a three-volume set

spanning over a decade of production. These writings are a

combination of compositional notes and comments from an artist on the

nature and perception of his own art and that of his chosen field in

general. In the Tri-axium Writings he describes wanting to gather an

“axium of tenets from the past and the present in order to get to the

future” (Lock 1999). Braxton's music and writing in the 1960s and

1970s are not overtly concerned with manifestation of an

astrophysical nature, but he does reference extraterrestrial

influences, characters and potential audiences through his career. In

the composition notes for his 1978 ‘Composition 82 for 4 Orchestras’,

he describes his intent as being one of universality in a physical

sense in that he was looking for the sound of all his compositions

playing throughout the physical universe. Village Voice critic Chip

Stern went so far as to describe the sonic content of Braxton’s music

as ”interstellar background music” and referred to Braxton as the

Buckminster Fuller of jazz ( quoted in Lock 1999).

The concepts Braxton started to explore amid the social upheaval in

the 1960s continued to influence his work, well into the 1970s and

beyond. In a 1978 interview, he describes his music as being more

traditional in relation to 'free jazz', which he sees as heading

toward anarchism, in that he's attempting to initiate “alternate

languages as a means to reconnect to what I call the meta-reality

implications of world culture” (Enstice and Rubin 1992). Part of this

meta-reality involves synaesthesia, utilizing diagrams which combine

a scientific perspective with a futuristic tendency in relation to

his compositions. Again, while not making as direct a connection to

science fiction and concepts of an astrophysical nature, Braxton's

work in these areas employ a methodical, generally algorhythmic

approach frequently overlooked when assigning attributes to avant-

garde jazz of the 1960s and 1970s. These perspectives also earned

Braxton harsh criticism from supporters of the separatist movement,

such as Amiri Baraka and even jazz critic Stanley Crouch, who Braxton

recalls considered him, in effect, not 'black' enough because of the

modes within the jazz idiom with which he chose to express himself

(Lock 1999).

Braxton's later work, into the 1970s and 1980s, which were a natural

development in the concepts he was exploring in the 1960s, did take

on an aspect of science fiction and astrophysical constructs, as

foreshadowed in his earlier work. His 1980-90's opera series

Trillium, each installment an act or set of acts within the series

released individually, invokes characters in the distant future on

earth, extraterrestrials, and even contructs from the distant past,

such as hieroglyphics, an allusion to the same Egyptian forces Sun Ra

focused on through much of his work. Braxton supports these other-

worldly additions to his libretti with synaesthetic models that

invoke 3D geometric shapes, maps, charts and diagrams of the worlds

he has created for the characters of Trillium. The characters also

find themselves navigating the scores of the music being performed as

maps for the compositions, bridging the constructs of distant worlds

and planes of existence with the present time in our own world. All

of these constructs throughout his work are described by Braxton to

present a culture of transformation, prepared by for ritual and

ceremony as seen in his works. The transformation desired, according

to Braxton, is not related to racial considerations, but to value

systems in the Western world that are the core of all racial

conflicts in our society, among other trials. Braxton, like Amiri

Baraka and the Black Nationalists, see black music as having the

power to affect social change, but Braxton uses his music to present

an alternative, much like Sun Ra. Where Sun Ra presents the utopian

distant world in outer space, Braxton presents new worlds from within

his imagination that are more transparently allegorical than Ra's

place in outer space.

In addition to the scientifically-conceived constructs that Braxton

presents as models of transformative progress, he also wrote words

and music of a more metaphysical nature, linking his work to the

inner space that other more spiritual thinkers in free jazz explored.

In the Tri-axium Writings, Braxton qualifies his lexicon with three

categories of 'language music'; concrete/poetic, abstract/mundane and

abstract/metaphysical (Lock 1999). The poetic vocabulary is seen in

his synaesthesia, and the mundane abstractions are those of a

scientific nature described above. The metaphysical language has more

to do with Braxton's stated spiritual aims. These aims are related to

justice in what he refers to as cosmic and vibrational principles,

but have little relationship to the militant struggle for justice in

the form of racial equality seen in the work of the Black Panther

Party and among the Black Marxists and Nation of Islam. Braxton's

transformation is centered around what he considered an ethical

conflict, not a racial conflict, and one that was essentially a

choice in value systems between the spiritual and the materialistic.

He first presented these concepts in his 1968 debut recording with

Leroy Jenkins, Leo Smith and Muhal Richard Abrahms in Chicago

released under his leadership as 3 Compositions of New Jazz. In these

works, Braxton explores new textures, and describes his compositions

and orchestration choices as representing the choices we all can make

within society; that concepts such as unification and an equitable

balance between the individual and the collective can affect the

social change within American society in the late 1960s. Braxton sees

these concepts as essential to the African-American tradition and

states in his Tri-axium Writings that “black music is spiritual

music” (Lock 1999).

The Inner Space of John Coltrane

In the liner notes of John Coltrane's iconic mid-1960s recording A

Love Supreme, Coltrane himself wrote a heartfelt message to those

interested in his music, which begins with the intonation:

Dear Listener:

ALL PRAISE BE TO GOD TO WHOM ALL PRAISE IS DUE.

Let us pursue Him in his righteous path.

Such is the tenor of Coltrane's searching music from 1964 until his

untimely passing in 1967. His important recorded work for the most

part was a pursuit of something spiritual; of a path promoting love

and awareness of others toward an understanding of a better

possibility that he wanted to present to the world. He spent this

period investigating the 'Inner Space' of his own mind and spirit. It

was an exploration of something beyond religion, and more of a search

for a level of spirituality that he had found missing in his life

prior to the mid-1960s; a pursuit of finding a way to live in Western

society with dignity, hope, love, compassion and serenity. In fact,

less than a year after recording A Love Supreme, Coltrane recorded the

music for what became the Impulse release Meditations with selections

titled Compassion, Love, and Serenity, as well as the more dogmatic The Father

and the Son and the Holy Ghost and the cautionary Consequences. Subsequent

recordings with spiritually-derived titles like Ascension, Selflessness,

and Om betray Coltrane's decided focus on spiritual concerns.

Musical statements with little formal harmonic direction, or even

formal guideposts of any kind, that were informed by the free jazz

ethic of exploring jazz with fewer and fewer boundaries were the

theoretical basis of Coltrane's recordings on Impulse Records from

1964-1967. His compositions and performances of this period invoked

the widest possible range of modes of expression within his

ensembles, from solo instruments playing figures in quiet, slow

succession to flurries of sound, with all players exploring the

dynamic and sonic extremes of their instruments. The more lyrical and

serene moments were more accepted by critics and listeners as musical

evidence of Coltrane's spiritual aims. But the louder, more

aggressive points in his music gave critics grist for the mill of

building up Coltrane as a leading exponent of the militant and

radical struggle for racial justice and societal change.

Bob Thiele, Coltane's producer at Impulse records, analyzes

Coltrane's connection to the Black Power movement by positing that

the literary circle led by Amira Baraka, among others, who were

advocating a more militant response to affecting social change

adopted Coltrane's mid-1960s music as an expression of that

militancy. “I mean, Leroi Jones could feel the music was militant,

but Coltrane didn't feel that way” (quoted in Kahn 2006), Coltrane's

concern by this time was in exploring his own concept of spirituality

through his music. While he was certainly aware and concerned about

the increasingly violent episodes of racial tension, he chose to

focus his music on spiritually affirming concepts of love and

compassion. Even so, critics and writers connected Coltrane directly

to the radical element of the civil rights movement. As an example,

Baraka-aligned Frank Kofsky uses Coltrane as a figured head of the

Black Music Revolution, even after Coltrane states in an interview

with Kofsky himself that he doesn't subscribe to labels or concepts

in that manner (Kofsky 1970 and Woidek 1998).

By 1966, the New Thing in jazz, or avant-garde or whatever the writer

or listener cared to call it, was becoming inextricably linked to the

black nationalism and anti-establishment rhetoric. John Coltrane,

because of his significant influence on the jazz record business and

on musicians within the New Thing, was similarly connected to those

political concerns, even though he was decidedly not concerned with

affecting social change through politics or any other means other

than by trying to make the most beautiful, engaging and spirit-

lifting music he could. The irony is that as pacifistic and

apolitical as he may have been, he was adopted by the revolution and

those writing about it as an iconic figure in the movements. No

doubt, the aggressive moments in his searching music had an impact on

this, but he is quoted as saying of his musical emotion, “Maybe it

sounds angry. I'm trying so many things at one time, I haven't

sorted them out” (quoted in Kahn 2006).

Listening to the recorded output of John Coltrane between 1964 and

his death in summer of 1967, it is clear that his concern was an

internal search. He was searching for something new musically, and at

the same time searching for new links to spirituality. Constant among

these recordings were attempts at new modes of expression in jazz,

song titles and concepts having to do with spirituality and self-

communion, and forms created over long periods, which implied a sense

of meditation in the approach to many of his recordings. Many of

these recordings were from live performances, where Coltrane and his

new quintet, augmented frequently with additional musicians, would

explore long distances of time and space in their improvisations.

Starting with A Love Supreme and ending only with his passing, John

Coltrane's last period was dedicated to the pursuit he intoned in his

letter introducing that 1964 landmark recording – to follow God in

his righteous path.

Conclusion

The relationship between jazz music and the social upheaval in

American culture in the 1960s and into the 1970s is a broad, complex

and often controversial subject. There are many angles, approaches

and theories at play addressing how society and jazz as an art form

may have influenced each other. What is rarely in debate is that

there is a connection between free jazz and the racial turmoil in

America. Organizations like the short-lived Black Art Movement led by

Bill Dixon in New York and the Association for the Advancement of

Creative Musicians led by Muhal Richard Abrams in Chicago defined

their missions as giving African American jazz musicians working

outside the mainstream a collective community in which they could

express their thoughts and ideas. Often those ideas were aligned with

or in certain cases linked directly to Black Power organizations. Two

of the subjects I’ve focused on in this essay were early members of

these two organizations – Sun Ra with BAM and Anthony Braxton with

AACM – but broke their ties with those organizations to find their

own paths of expression and their own methods of showing the audience

of such music a different way to consider themselves in a racially

contentious society. John Coltrane is similarly credited with

bringing to mass attention outspoken Black Power advocates Archie

Shepp and Albert Ayler, while through his music and writing, he

proposed a different agenda, less militant and more pacifistic. The

three musicians I’ve profiled above held strong views about the role

of Americans of African descent, but they are three among many others

that chose to present a different solution to the problem black

Americans face. They presented these solutions through spiritual

awareness and an exploration of an inner space, or by using the

metaphor of outer space, and more importantly awareness of the

importance of understanding science and technology, to ensure that

African American culture had the spiritual strength and technological

savvy to minimalize the marginalization the culture has suffered

until the 1960s in America.

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