Jazz and The Living Tradition

And then there is what the practice does to the one practicing — a dimension as old as the tradition itself and as urgent as anything the present moment demands.

John Coltrane illustrates this argument vividly because his development is so well documented and so dramatic that it functions as clear evidence as the practice changes the person in real time across his recordings.1 From the hard bop period through “A Love Supreme” to the late work “Ascension” and “Interstellar Space” you are listening to a human being transformed by his own devotion to a discipline which is not reproducible by any system that does not have a self to transform.

“A Love Supreme” is the touchstone. The suite is explicitly framed as an act of devotion, and document of spiritual arrival after a period of profound struggle. Coltrane had confronted his addiction in 1957 and described the experience as a sudden awakening and a gift of faith.2 The music that followed was the working out of that faith in sound. The practice — hours of daily work on the horn, the relentless harmonic exploration, the physical and mental discipline of what critics called “sheets of sound”3 — was not separate from the spiritual life. The horn was the altar. The practice was the prayer.

Alice Coltrane, "Lord Help Me to Be," from A Monastic Trio (Impulse! Records, 1968).

This understanding of practice as transformation rather than mere preparation runs across traditions and centuries. In the Zen archer’s discipline, the goal is not a more accurate shot. The goal is the dissolution of the boundary between the archer and the act — a state of presence so complete that the self doing the practicing and the practice itself become indistinguishable.4 In the Indian classical tradition, a student may spend years on a single raga, not to master it as a performance piece but because the sustained, devoted attention does something to the person paying it. It changes the quality of their listening, their presence, their capacity for genuine response.5 In the monastic traditions of Christianity and Islam, the daily office and the five prayers are not routines. They are a technology of continuous renewal, the repetition serving as form of being remade, each time, in the act of returning.6

Jazz practice, at its deepest, belongs to this lineage. The improviser who spends years developing their ear, their harmonic vocabulary, their rhythmic sensitivity, their “sound,” in addition to accumulating tools for performance, are training themselves to be present — genuinely, vulnerably present — to what is happening in the moment. They are developing the capacity to respond truthfully rather than react habitually. They are learning, through discipline, to follow the music somewhere they did not plan to go. That is a spiritual practice as much as a musical one, and it produces a self more capable of presence, of listening, of genuine contact with another human being, which has value that extends far beyond the bandstand.

Moreover, what the individual practice cultivates in the musician, the ensemble extends into relationship — and what is cultivated there reaches out further still.

In the jazz ensemble, listening is not passive. It is the central technical and spiritual skill. The improviser who is not listening to the bassist, to the drummer’s ride cymbal, to what the pianist just left open, to the quality of attention in the room, is not really improvising. They are performing a monologue dressed as a conversation. The music may be technically accomplished. But something essential is missing: the live wire of genuine mutual response that makes the best jazz feel less like a performance and more like a conversation you are privileged to overhear.

Coltrane’s classic quartet with McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, Elvin Jones is the evidence.7 What those four men were doing together was so mutually interpenetrating, so continuously responsive to each moment as it arrived, that it becomes difficult to analyze any single part in isolation. Elvin Jones, asked about his approach, said he never played the same thing twice because he was always responding to what was happening around him.8 More than a technical achievement, that is a practice of radical presence and of subordinating the ego’s agenda to the truth of the shared moment.

What the ensemble practice cultivates is worth naming carefully, because it extends so far beyond the music. It cultivates the capacity to limit the ego’s agenda in favor of a shared truth. It cultivates the understanding that the silence in the note not played is a space left open for someone else, making it as meaningful as sound (sometimes moreso!). It also cultivates the trust that someone else’s idea might be better than yours, or that following is not weakness, or even that the best thing you can do right now might be to listen. It cultivates the discovery that the best outcomes emerge from genuine collaboration and from listening so carefully that the boundary between your idea and the group’s idea becomes productively unclear.

These are not musical lessons only. They are lessons in how to be in relationship with other people, how to be in a community, how to participate in something larger than yourself without disappearing into it. The musician who has spent decades in genuine ensemble practice has been changed — repeatedly, continuously — by the act of listening to other human beings and responding truthfully in real time. That cumulative change is in the music. The audience receives it without necessarily being able to name it, but they feel the difference between a musician who is truly present and one who is merely executing, and they in turn learn to embody the unspoken principles as well by virtue of being in the presence of such an authentic experience.9

And then there is what this practice offers the community that receives it.

Lisa Fischer performing "See-Line Woman" with the Metropole Orkest, conducted by Jules Buckley. Royal Albert Hall, BBC Proms 2019 — Prom 45: Mississippi Goddam: A Homage to Nina Simone.

Testimony is the act of standing before your community and saying “this is what I have lived, this is what I know to be true, this is what I need you to hear,” and it requires a self that has been somewhere. Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam” is not a formally sophisticated arrangement of notes. It is a human being on fire with a truth that could not be contained. The mastery is in service of the witness, and the witness is only possible because a person with a history and a body and a stake in the outcome is in the room.10

What happens to a culture that outsources its truth-telling? The algorithmic age presses that question with new urgency, and it applies across all communities. What is lost when we stop making art from lived experience and start generating it from pattern recognition? What is lost when the music no longer comes from someone who has something to say and knows why it needs to be said? AI-generated music can replicate the patterns of depth. It will soon be able to analyze the formal structures of everything Nina Simone ever recorded and produce something that bears a convincing resemblance to the surface of her work. It can reflect a culture back to itself. It cannot be responsible to that culture in any meaningful sense. It has not lived anything. It has no community to which it is accountable.11

The Art That Serves the People

The through line of this essay stretches across centuries and continents, arriving, always, at the same place.

Shakespeare writing for the masses. The griot in the village carrying the community’s memory in song. The brass band turning from the grave back toward the living. Coltrane alone with his horn in the early morning, practicing not toward a performance but toward a self. Four musicians in a room so completely present to each other that the music they make together could not have been planned. Nina Simone at the piano naming what could not be named. The Dirty Dozen in the street, playing music sophisticated enough for the academy and rooted enough for the second line. The little girl on a pew in a church full of ancestral echoes. All of it the same impulse — the impulse to make something serious and alive and true and give it to the people who need it.

The Western fine art framework is one model for understanding what serious art is and does. It has produced remarkable work, but it was never the only model, and jazz was never native to it. Jazz came from a tradition — African, communal, participatory, accountable — that held a fundamentally different understanding of what the music is for. The institutionalization of jazz brought it recognition and preservation and formal study, and those things have value, but the frame fit imperfectly, and the cost of that has been borne most heavily by the communities the music came from.

The remedy is not to abandon rigor. The artists in this lineage are rigorous. They have paid their dues technically, formally, intellectually, spiritually. Coltrane’s devotion was total. Nina’s precision was real. The Dirty Dozen’s musicianship is exacting. The remedy is to remember what the rigor is for. Mastery in service of the community. Sophistication in service of truth. Practice in service of a more fully realized self — one more capable of presence, of listening, of genuine contact with the people in the room.

The living tradition offers three things that no institution and no algorithm can replace: The community receives truth told by someone who has lived it and is accountable to them; the practitioner is transformed by the discipline of their devotion — brought closer, through years of practice, to something essential in themselves that the performance then carries into the room; the ensemble models a way of being together — listening, responsive, present, changed by what it hears — that does not stay on the stage. It goes out into the world both with the musicians who practiced it and the audiences who received it.

In a moment when so much of what we hear is being generated by systems that have never lived a day, never lost anyone, never stood in a room and felt the weight of what needed to be said, that offering matters more than ever. The question is not whether a music is serious enough for the concert hall. The question is whether the concert hall — or the academy, or the institution, or the algorithm — is alive enough for a form that has survived bondage, appropriation, canonization, and commodification, a music that stands as a testament to the resilience of the human spirit, and to the enduring power of the truths we find when we seek them together.

Read the Full Series:

Pt. 1 - Prelude: Coltrane and the Heart Sutra

Pt. 2 - The Sound that Knew Its Meaning

Pt. 3 - Music and the Measuring Stick

Pt. 4 - Music that Remembers

Pt. 5 - Benediction: Practice is the Prayer

Remedies From the Stage to the Street

The problem with musical institutionalization is that it was mistaken for the only possible relationship between rigor and community. Artists in the lineage understood both intuitively and practically that the DNA of the lineage itself says technical mastery and communal rootedness are not in tension when properly understood.

The devotional, the contemplative, the spiritually rooted stream that ran from the Spirituals through gospel and into the deepest reaches of jazz was not so easily decoded, because it addressed the more subtle matter of intention, a declaration of what the musician understood themselves to be doing — and who they understood themselves to be — when they played.

You hear the devotional ferocity in John Coltrane’s later work where the music reunites with the prayer. A Love Supreme is an act of offering that no amount of harmonic analysis fully explains. You hear it in the stillness at the center of the aforementioned Nina Simone performance — the moment before she plays, the held breath in the room, the sense that something is about to happen that is closer to worship than entertainment. You hear it in Roberta Flack’s early recordings, where the quality of attention she brings to a lyric transforms the concert hall into something that functions, for the duration of the song, like a sanctuary.

These artists did not bring the dance hall into the concert hall. They brought the church. They brought the hush harbor. They brought the long interior tradition of a music that had always known how to hold the soul while the world did what it would to the body. The concert hall, in their hands, became the right room, not because the institution deserved it, but because the artists remembered what they were really doing in it. They were not performing but bearing witness for an audience that, whether they knew it or not, was actually a congregation.

Roberta Flack, “Go Up Moses,” from Quiet Fire (Atlantic Records, 1971).

The Concert Hall Lineage — Depth Without Distance

Nina Simone studied at Juilliard. She was a serious classical pianist before she was anything else, and that training never left her. You can hear it in the precision of her harmonic choices, in the architecture of her arrangements, in the way she constructs a performance from the inside out. By any technical measure the academy would recognize, she was the real thing.1

And yet no one left a Nina Simone performance feeling lectured at. Nobody needed a program note to understand what she meant when she sang “Four Women” or “Mississippi Goddamn.”2 You did not need a musicology degree to feel the weight of what she was carrying. The sophistication of the work was in service of the truth of the work, and the truth of the work was accessible to anyone who had ever been rendered invisible by a society that did not see them.

Emotional directness without sentimentality is not a simple thing to do. Nina consistently employed her heightened ability to name the thing exactly without manipulating the listener’s response consistently, across genres, across decades, in jazz and blues and gospel and folk and classical forms that she moved between with a fluency that itself made an argument: the boxes are for critics, not for music.

In early recordings from Roberta Flack such as First Take and Chapter Two,3 you find her operating in the same territory. Howard University trained, with a classical foundation that you feel in every deliberate choice she makes, she brings to her recordings a quality of stillness and intention that is its own kind of sophistication. The lyric is literature, the phrasing is the meaning, and the emotional truth arrives with a directness that bypasses the critical apparatus entirely.

This is the lineage that claimed me. My approach to music — the choices I make about what to sing and how to sing it, about where technique serves expression and where it must get out of the way — comes from sitting at the feet of these artists, absorbing not just their sound but their understanding of what the music is for. It is an understanding that holds rigor and accessibility as co-conspirators in the same project: to tell the truth in a form that anyone can feel.

The lineage extends outward from Nina and Roberta in several directions. Abbey Lincoln brought to jazz vocal performance a political consciousness and a raw human presence that refused the decorative.4 Gil Scott-Heron carried the griot tradition into the American vernacular — poetry and music fused, speaking directly to and from the community.5 Richie Havens brought the same quality of witness to folk and blues — a voice so nakedly present that artifice simply had no room. Randy Weston connected jazz explicitly and consciously back to its African roots, making the argument through the music itself.6 And folks like Rachelle Ferrell and Cécile McLorin Salvant, working right now, carries this torch with undeniable virtuosity paired with an astounding range of reference and a depth of feeling fully intact.7

The Street and the Second Line — Rigor in the Body

The Dirty Dozen Brass Band performing at Dimitriou’s Jazz Alley, Seattle, August 2012. Photo © Johan Broberg / CC BY 2.0

The Dirty Dozen Brass Band arrived at the same truth by a different road.

Where Nina and Roberta brought their classical training into the concert hall tradition and transformed it from within, the Dirty Dozen stayed in the street. They came out of the New Orleans brass band tradition — the same tradition that carried bodies to the grave and then brought the living back to themselves — but differentiated themselves by pushing that tradition harmonically and rhythmically into territory that would be recognized as sophisticated by anyone fluent in bebop or funk.8 The arrangements are serious. The harmonic vocabulary is serious. Founding member and sousaphone virtuoso Kirk Joseph says that all was achieved by bringing each member’s skillset to the table. Some brought tradition, others bebop, while Kirk sees himself as bringing the funk element. He knew they were doing something different, but once his father, respected traditional New Orleans musician Waldren “Frog” Joseph, gave them his blessing, they could be confident they were onto something. “Just play it like you mean it,” he said.

The result was communal creation that served the people, or in Joseph’s own words “It had to be for the people. If it were just for the artists we’d be starving and dead!”9 — a sentiment that in and of itself could embed a bit of double speak. The musicianship was serious, but the body was never sent away.

That, for me, is the thing about the Dirty Dozen that makes them so essential to this exploration. The technical sophistication arrives through a form the community already has a relationship with. The complexity does not announce itself as foreign, it presents as more on a continuum of something familiar, perhaps taken further than expected, which is an entirely different experience than being confronted with something that signals from the outset that it is not for you. People dance to the Dirty Dozen. People march. The music still belongs to the street that made it, even as it reaches into harmonic and rhythmic territories that would be perfectly at home in a jazz studies curriculum, and the global concert halls that house that level of sophistication.

New Orleans is the place where the origin and the remedy occupy the same geography. The city where jazz was born is also the city where the argument for a different relationship between rigor and community is still being made in real time, every second line, every funeral, every Tuesday night on Frenchmen Street. If you want to know what the music looks like when it has never been severed from the people it belongs to, you will find it there.

The contrast between these two lineages — the concert stage and the city street — is instructive not because one is right and the other is wrong but because together they demonstrate the range of what is possible when the central commitment is to the community rather than to the institution. Different forms, different contexts, different strategies. The same understanding of what the music is for.

Mardi Gras Indians on parade, New Orleans, 1982. Photo by Sydney Byrd for the U.S. National Park Service. Public domain.

Langston Hughes saw this dynamic operating on Black American art with painful clarity. In his 1926 essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,”10 he identified the pressure on Black artists to aspire toward white aesthetic standards as a kind of self-erasure — a turning away from the richest sources of their own creative power. He celebrated the blues and jazz not in spite of their roots in common Black life but because of those roots. The music that came from the bottom of the American experience, he argued, carried a complexity and a truth that no amount of formal training could manufacture from scratch. It had to be lived before it could be played.

Decades later, Amiri Baraka named the dynamic more precisely contending that the extraction of Black music from its social context — its relocation from the juke joint and the dance hall to the concert hall and the academy — was not simply a neutral act of cultural recognition but a form of appropriation, dressed in the language of honor. The music was being preserved, yes. But what was being lost in the preservation was the living relationship between the music and the people who needed it most.11

The concern was not abstract. When the institutional frame replaced the communal one, the people who had made the music felt it immediately. A working-class Black audience in 1960 sitting in a formal jazz concert was not alienated because the music had become too sophisticated for them. These were the grandchildren of the people who made the music. The alienation was produced by the institutional context that had reclassified the music as the property of a different audience, and communicated that reclassification through every detail of the presentation — the ticket price, the seated silence, the lighting, the program note written in a register designed for people with a particular kind of presumed analytical language.12

The music had not changed. The relationship had.

This is the distinction the living tradition preserves that the institution cannot: the difference between depth and alienation. Depth is a quality of the work — the precision with which it renders something true about human experience. Alienation is produced by the frame around it. Nina Simone is the proof. She was as harmonically sophisticated, as emotionally complex, as technically serious as any artist the academy has ever celebrated, and yet the people wept because the sophistication was in service of a truth precise enough to be recognized. The Dirty Dozen carry the same argument into the street. The complexity arrives as an extension of tradition, of something the community already loves. As they fulfill established rituals, any new territory serves as a welcome invitation into discovery.

Nina Simone “Love Me Or Leave Me” on The Ed Sullivan Show, September 11, 1960

Read the Full Series:

Pt. 1 - Prelude: Coltrane and the Heart Sutra

Pt. 2 - The Sound that Knew Its Meaning

Pt. 3 - Music and the Measuring Stick

Pt. 4 - Music that Remembers

Pt. 5 - Benediction: Practice is the Prayer

Art Music? What’s That?

Words like “art,” “fine art,” and “art music” are often used as if their meaning were self-evident, as if we should already know the aesthetic or purpose such terms refer to. Still, it may be worth acknowledging that cultural bias and assumptions play a significant role in how such words and the connotations surrounding them are interpreted. So before we can discuss where art music belongs, we should probably outline what set of assumptions we’re examining.

Fine art, in the Western critical tradition, refers to creative work made primarily for aesthetic purposes rather than functional ones. Painting, sculpture, poetry, classical music, etc. are distinguished from craft, from folk tradition, from popular entertainment by a set of assumptions deeply embedded in the culture. Fine art is assumed to be permanent, made to outlast its moment. It is assumed to be transcendent by somehow speaking to something universal in the human condition rather than something particular to a time, a place, a people. And crucially, it is assumed to be autonomous — existing independently of any social function, valuable in and of itself, requiring no justification beyond its own existence.1

Art music specifically refers to music composed and performed within this framework — music that demands serious, focused listening, that rewards study and analysis, that aspires toward complexity and formal sophistication. The concert hall is its natural habitat. The program note is its invitation, the trained critic its interpreter.2

These are not neutral definitions. They carry within them a set of assumptions about who art is for and what it is supposed to do, but in reality, when examined from three different lenses, very different postures emerge.

From the position of the elite, art music is civilization made audible. It represents the highest achievements of human creative expression — a canon to be preserved, transmitted, and protected from dilution. Its difficulty is a feature, not a bug. The demand it makes on the listener is part of its value. Not everyone will hear it, and that is acceptable. Some things are simply above the waterline.

From the position of the average person, art is something else entirely. It is the thing that names what life feels like when you can’t find the words yourself. It is emotional sustenance, both a mirror and a companion that facilitates a shared experience that makes the private feel less lonely. The average person doesn’t need a program note. They just need to feel something true.

From the position of the marginalized, art is something else entirely, something more urgent. It is, in fact, survival. It is resistance. It is testimony and the preservation of collective memory in the face of forces that would erase it. For communities whose histories have been suppressed, whose humanity has been questioned, whose voices have been systematically excluded from the official record, art is not a luxury. It is how you remain real to yourself and to each other.3

The tension at the center of these words lives in the space between those three positions. Whose definition of “fine” gets to govern? What and who gets excluded when one answer crowds out the others?

Rigor Is Not a Western Invention

The Western European tradition I was trained in offered a particular kind of intimacy — the touch, the bending of time, the hundred interpretive choices available within a single measure precisely because the larger harmonic and melodic decisions had already been made. That quality of attention was real and it taught me something I still use. But when I expressed interest in jazz piano, my major professor redirected me by offering me a monograph arguing that jazz was an inferior musical language.

In time I understood that the culture surrounding the European classical tradition employed a measuring stick for determining excellence with a different calibration entirely, one with no gradations for the emotional, spiritual, and communal information I had begun to internalize in early childhood. I also observed that the Western fine art tradition would prefer not to acknowledge that the idea of serious, rigorous, sophisticated artistry is not its particular invention or achievement. Every human culture has developed forms of demanding, complex, technically sophisticated traditions that require years of dedication and carry the full weight of meaning. What differs is not the presence of rigor but its orientation. What is the mastery for? Who does it serve? How is it measured?

In many indigenous traditions, the artist is not a solitary genius expressing a private vision. The artist is a custodian of community memory, of ancestral knowledge, of the living relationship between the people and the world they inhabit. Mastery is measured not by formal complexity alone but by how faithfully the work serves that custodial function. The most accomplished artist is the one most deeply in service.4

The West African griot tradition operates on a similar understanding, and it is worth dwelling on because it runs directly underneath the music this essay is concerned with. The griot — the musician, poet, and oral historian of the community — is accountable in the most serious sense of the word. They carry the stories of the people. They mark the significant moments of communal life. They speak truth to power and hold power accountable to the community’s memory. Their technical rigor is real and demanding, but it is rigor pressed into the service of a living relationship between the artist and the people. The Nigerian poet and scholar Niyi Osundare speaks about this continuum — the word, the music, and the community as inseparable dimensions of a single act. “Poetry is not an esoteric whisper / of an excluding tongue… / Poetry is man meaning to man.”5 It is made in, for and with the community that gives it meaning.

A Wolof griot performing with tama drum, Senegal, April 2026. Photo © Kalamuh 045 / CC BY-SA 4.0

Look eastward and you find a similar pattern. The Japanese concept of shokunin, artisan mastery, describes a lifetime of dedication to a craft in which technical perfection and humble service are not in tension but are the same thing.6 Indian classical music’s relationship to the raga is a sophisticated, demanding, formally complex tradition in which the music is both a spiritual and social act, responsive to time of day, to season, to the emotional needs of the gathered community. The raga is not performed at the audience but rather with the moment.7

The pattern across these traditions is consistent: mastery is relational. It lives in the space between the artist and the community, not in the artwork as an isolated object. Technique is a vehicle, not a destination.

This is worth establishing clearly because the Western fine art model which treats the artwork as autonomous, the artist as solitary genius, and the audience as passive receiver, is not the universal human understanding of what serious art is and does. It is one model, but it is, by the standards of most human cultures across most of human history, a peculiar outlier.

Interior of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre during reconstruction, London, April 2001. Photo © Maschinenjunge / CC BY-SA 2.5

Even Western Art Once Belonged to Everyone

The irony is that even within the Western tradition, the elevation of art to untouchable status is a relatively recent and deliberately constructed phenomenon. The works now enshrined in the canon were not always behind glass.

Consider Shakespeare. The plays were written for the Globe Theatre, where the cheapest admission bought you a place amongst the crowd in the yard, standing in the open air. These were the working people, tradespeople, and the raucous general public of Elizabethan London who ate, drank, talked back, and laughed. The plays met them where they were — bawdy and philosophical in the same breath, the comic and the tragic folded together, the language dense with wordplay accessible at multiple levels simultaneously. Shakespeare observed no distinction between high culture and low culture in his plays, not unlike Harlem’s Showtime at the Apollo in the days of Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughn.8

On the subject of vocalists, early European opera tells a similar story when it swiftly emerged from its experimental phase once it reached Venice and its democratic audiences. The form we now associate most readily with elite cultural aspiration — expensive tickets, formal dress, the hushed reverence of the opera house — began as popular entertainment. It wasn’t until the 18th century when the raucous, irreverent Neapolitan opera buffa caused a schism that led to what became a new form being deemed opera seria. Opera buffa may have dealt in more familiar human situations, stock characters, earthy humor, but the elevation of opera to its current status was a messy process. The fact that “high” composers like Handel or Mozart were expected to write fluently in each idiom further challenged the historical, institutional, and social process by which a popular form was reclassified, refined, and gradually removed from the conditions of its origin. Indeed, from London to Vienna, works that are in Europe’s operatic canon may have resembled Shakespeare at the Globe more than anything audiences would recognize in today’s opera halls.9

This is the pattern. Elevation to “art” status is not a recognition of inherent quality that was always there waiting to be acknowledged. It is an act by which a living form is extracted from its social context, placed in an institutional frame, and reclassified as the property of a different audience than the one that made it. The process is something we might now refer to as “appropriation,” was sometimes well-intentioned, but sometimes not.

You can hear “Incantation: Libation,” my meditation honoring the griot tradition and the community that gives it meaning, on Bandcamp.

Read the Full Series:

Pt. 1 - Prelude: Coltrane and the Heart Sutra

Pt. 2 - The Sound that Knew Its Meaning

Pt. 3 - Music and the Measuring Stick

Pt. 4 - Music that Remembers

Pt. 5 - Benediction: Practice is the Prayer

I don’t remember learning that music could carry what language couldn’t hold. I remember knowing it.

I was somewhere between three and 5 years old, small enough that the hardwood floors of my father’s church felt like the world’s first drum. This was before the service properly began — before the snappier southern gospel numbers that made you move, and before the sermon that always evolved into a pretty riveting number unto itself. In the before part, the gathering part, the older men would begin to moan and stomp, slowly, the sound coming up through a hundred and thirty years old floorboards and into every nerve ending I had in me. The words weren’t always discernible to my new ears, but it didn’t need to be. What moved through that room was something older than anything I could have named then — testimony carried in the spirit before the mouth could speak it, grief and endurance and something that felt like the compressed weight of lives I hadn’t lived, transferring itself directly into mine.

I didn’t have language for what that was. I just received it.

A decade later, I heard John Coltrane’s “Alabama” for the first time. I didn’t yet know what the piece was about — only that Coltrane had named it after my neighboring state. But the music knew. The same mechanism I had learned from those church floors was at work: something moving through sound that bypassed explanation entirely and arrived, whole and devastating, somewhere below the mind. I went looking afterward and found the four little girls — Addie Mae, Denise, Cynthia, Carole — and understood that the music had already told me about them before I knew their names.

That transmission is what jazz, at its root, was built to carry. This essay is an attempt to trace where it came from, and what we risk if we stop protecting it.

On the Subject of Jazz — What It Was, Where It Lived, and What It Was For

Jazz, America’s natural born art music, did not emerge from a conservatory but from the intersection of several living traditions in New Orleans — one of the land’s most culturally complex cities where African rhythmic sensibility, blues tonality, ragtime syncopation, gospel fervor, and Caribbean and Mexican influence collided and cross-pollinated in the streets, the dance halls, the churches, and the brothels of a city below sea level, loosely held together by pirates and prostitutes, never entirely sure to which world it belonged.

The music was communal from its first breath. It was made by people who had been systematically excluded from the institutions of Western high culture and who, in that exclusion, had built something extraordinary from the materials at hand like their bodies, their voices, their collective memory, their grief, their joy, their defiance. It was music that knew exactly what it was for.

Jazz was for the funeral brass band leading the body to the grave in solemn procession, then turning on the way back to break into something that celebrated the life just lived, the community still standing, still dancing in fact; second line dancers fell in behind the band, both uninvited and essential in an effort inseparable, ecstatic bond between the music and the movement.

Jazz was for the dance hall, where the negotiation between the ensemble and the floor was constant and alive. The band read the room, the room fed the band, the whole thing functioning as a single organism. It too was for the juke joint, where the blues sat closer to the surface and the music was intimate, raw, close to the bone. It was for the church, a terrain that became its own conservatory over time, where the same musical vocabulary found a different spiritual container of the same communal fire.

Each context asked something different of the music. The dance hall demanded the body through tempo, groove, and the physical conversation between what the musicians were playing and what the people on the floor were doing. The juke joint asked for, or maybe even demanded confession through the truth of hard living delivered without ornament. The church called forth transcendence where the same rhythmic energy of those Saturday night confessions were directed upward. These were not different musics. They were different inflections of the same root language, responsive to the needs of the moment and the people in the room.

Hence, the participatory ethic at the heart of jazz is not incidental to the music’s meaning. It is the meaning. Call and response, foundational structure of African musical tradition, is not just a compositional technique but a philosophical position. It says: the music is not complete until the community answers. The artist is not performing at the audience. The artist is in conversation with them. The boundary between performer and listener is porous by design.

But the dance hall and the second line tell only part of the story. Running alongside the kinetic, communal, body-centered tradition was another stream — quieter in its surface expression, no less powerful in its cultural work — and to miss it is to misunderstand how the music arrived at some of its most significant destinations.

The Spirituals, or sorrow songs as dubbed by du Bois,1 were nothing short of a technology of survival — one of the most sophisticated and consequential artistic traditions in American history, developed under conditions of extreme duress by people whose inner lives were systematically denied by the society that held them in bondage. In the field, in the brush arbor meeting, in the hush harbor where worship happened in secret, the Spiritual performed a function that the dance hall could not: it held the interior life of a people. It said, in the only language available, that the soul was its own sovereign territory; whatever was being done to the body, whatever was being taken, the inner life, the devotional relationship with something larger than circumstance, could not be breached.

These songs found their way to the concert halls through ensembles like the Fisk Jubilee Singers,2 and later through opera icons like Marion Anderson and Leontyne Price paving the way for future masters like Mahalia Jackson, Nina Simone, Roberta Flack and others who spoke the interior transparently, laying bare personal experiences rich and seemingly indestructible.

The Spirituals also carried meaning on multiple levels. On the surface, they were devotional songs of faith, longing for heaven, or trust in divine providence. Underneath they encoded practical information, political resistance, and a running commentary on the conditions of life that could not be stated plainly without mortal risk. “Wade in the Water” served as directions. “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” was a signal. The congregation and the folks in the field knew what they knew. The overseer heard something else entirely.3This double tradition of communication that passed between initiated ears while presenting an innocent surface to those who would suppress it, was not unique to the Spirituals. It ran through the storytelling culture of the same period with equal sophistication. The Brer Rabbit stories, carried from West African trickster traditions into the American context, operated on the same principle. Brer Rabbit, apparently weak, foolish and occupying the lowest position in the social order, consistently outmaneuvered the bear, the fox, the wolf through indirection, encoded intelligence, and the strategic deployment of apparent helplessness. The stories could delight children while simultaneously instructing adults in the survival strategies of the oppressed: how to move through a hostile world by appearing to be less than you are, how to encode your real intention within an acceptable surface, how to win by appearing to lose.

Dr. William J. Faulkner, "The Days When the Animals Talked." Recorded 1970, re-released on Elysium House Records, 2020. Dr. Faulkner was the author's great-grandfather. These stories were learned from Simon Brown, a formerly enslaved man.

In The Signifying Monkey,4 Henry Louis Gates Jr. entered this practice of signifyin’ into academic theory. Saying one thing while meaning another and repeating a form with a crucial internal difference that changes its meaning entirely, encoded critique, resistance, and cultural solidarity within apparently conventional expression. Gates traces the tradition from its West African roots through centuries of African American vernacular culture, literature, folklore, and music, mapping a continuous, evolving, deeply intentional cultural practice that carved out a way of staying alive through language when the language of power granted you none.

Bebop is possibly where that tradition arrived in its most concentrated musical form — and understanding it this way changes what bebop means.

The standard history of bebop focuses on the technical rebellion: Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and their collaborators in the early 1940s,5 deliberately driving the music into a harmonic and rhythmic complexity that the swing era’s commercial machinery could not easily co-opt. The tempos were too fast. The chord substitutions were too dense. The melodic language too oblique. The music that had been straightened and sweetened for white ballrooms and radio play was being reclaimed through sheer difficulty made, once again, undeniably Black, undeniably serious, undeniably on its own terms.

That reading is accurate. But it is a surface reading. It describes the strategy without accounting for the tradition that produced it.

Bebop was encoding. It was the double speak of the Spiritual and the trickster story arriving in instrumental music — a language that operated on multiple levels simultaneously, that rewarded deep initiation while presenting a surface that the uninitiated could hear but not fully enter. Parker’s melodic lines contained quotations, jokes, references, and challenges audible only to those fluent in the tradition. The rhythmic displacement Monk practiced was a form of strategic misdirection where the beat was implied but never stated, requiring the listener to bring something of their own to find it. The music said: you are welcome to listen. But you cannot own what you cannot fully hear.

This is the Brer Rabbit strategy applied to harmony and rhythm. This is the Spiritual’s double meaning translated into instrumental language. The complexity was not ornamental but protective, political, and the continuation, by musical means, of a centuries-old practice of maintaining a sovereign interior space that the dominant culture could not fully penetrate or possess.

Which makes the subsequent canonization of bebop one of the more difficult ironies in American cultural history. When bebop entered the curriculum the chord substitutions were analyzed, transcribed, and taught in university jazz programs; when the encryption was decoded and distributed; when the music that had been designed to resist appropriation became the foundation of an official American art form, something of its original function was quietly lost: the exclusivity of the initiated. The music that was built to be simultaneously open and encoded became everyone’s in the academy’s hands. The double door became a single door. The protection dissolved into the very recognition it had spent decades resisting.

What happened over the course of the twentieth century was a gradual hardening of the boundary between the co-created experience and the institutionalized performance. While Jazz moved from the street to the club, from the club to the concert hall, from the concert hall to the academy, each move may have brought forth things like stability, critical recognition, formal study, and the potentially much needed preservation of a complex and beautiful tradition. But each move also cost something. The seated audience replaced the dancing body. The hushed reverence of the concert hall replaced the call and response of the dance floor. The program note replaced the shared cultural knowledge that needed no explanation, and all too often, all of these replaced the interior and spiritual striving.

The legitimacy earned by the canonization of jazz that accelerated in the 1980s and 1990s came at a price.6 It came in a frame built for a different music, designed by institutions with their own histories and their own hierarchies, and it asked jazz to sit still in a way that jazz had never been designed to do. Moreover, it divorced jazz of the responsibilities it inherited from its ancestral griots. It was no longer expected to facilitate community or hold the stories, intentions and aspirations of its people, often even abandoning its meditative, spiritually informed roots.

Read the Full Series:

Pt. 1 - Prelude: Coltrane and the Heart Sutra

Pt. 2 - The Sound that Knew Its Meaning

Pt. 3 - Music and the Measuring Stick

Pt. 4 - Music that Remembers

Pt. 5 - Benediction: Practice is the Prayer

I wasn’t awestruck at first. I was pissed.

Furious, actually.

Liz and I had arrived several hours late to a Buddhist retreat center tucked into the Rocky Mountains of northern Colorado, just a few miles south of the Wyoming border. Instructions for finding our tent had been taped to the registration office door, so we loaded ourselves back into our Subaru Forester (aka Stella the Moonbeam) and crept down a winding dirt path in the dark looking for our campsite.

We got settled in. I stepped outside. Then I looked up.

It felt obscene that I had lived my entire life beneath a sky like that without ever really seeing it. Like someone had stolen something ancient from me and convinced me not to notice its absence.

The moon felt close enough to touch. The Milky Way looked less like a celestial object than something poured directly overhead. I remember standing there with this strange combination of grief and indignation, realizing I had spent my entire life under a sky I had apparently never seen.

How a girl like me ended up living in a tent in the Colorado wilderness and walking to outhouses in the middle of the night is difficult to summarize cleanly, but let’s just say I had to go see about a girl.

The short of it is my now wife Liz wanted to get into wilderness therapy and I wanted to find out whether we had the bones of a sustainable relationship. So love did what it does and dragged me into the mountains.

I wasn’t there looking for a new religion. That’s probably important to say.

There are well documented problems that seem to surround these Western “intentional” communities, and this one was no exception. I sensed fairly quickly that there were things happening around me that I did not entirely trust. But human transformation is strange. Sometimes wisdom still arrives through compromised vessels. Sometimes beauty survives contact with institutions. Sometimes a place can alter the course of your life even while you remain skeptical of parts of its mythology.

And that place altered mine.

It was there that I realized I had spent so much of my life preparing to die that I had not actually begun discovering how I intended to live.

It was there that I experienced what I now understand as my first known panic attack. I had been standing in the shower when I was suddenly overtaken by something I did not yet have language for. At the time, I didn’t understand that I was living with cPTSD. That realization would come much later.

It was also there that I met the “life coach” I refer to as my beloved Paul (though he’s known as The Executive Shrink online), but it would take another 5 years before he and I would begin the arduous work of untangling my internal mess.

And it was there, too, that Liz and I got “gay married” as we stood before a fire pit on a cold March morning to make our first attempt at vows. Even if they weren’t legal vows, they were community vows — the kind you make before witnesses and weather and uncertainty.

So yes, even in fragments, the place transformed me.

One of the fragments I carried away from that mountain was a small book called The Sacred Path of the Warrior.

Now, over the years I’ve grown more cautious with language like warrior. The word lands differently depending on who is being asked to carry it. Black women in America, for instance, have historically been expected to endure impossible burdens under the guise of strength. We are often praised for survival while being denied softness. Praised for resilience while being refused rest. We were raised as warriors, and it was often killing us. Still, the lens I carried away from that book had less to do with battle than with wakefulness, with refusing to turn away from the path of growth, which for me has ultimately yielded profound stillness in my many swirls of distress.

With all the magic material that moved in, around and through me in my time there, right now I find myself appreciating the fact that it was somewhere on that mountain that I began to understand my path as an artist differently.

From a certain lens, the artist has the ability to document events in the context of their cultural milieu. But historians can do that. Journalists do it too. What I started to understand under that vast starry sky was that the artist carries something more volatile and difficult to preserve: emotional memory.

We hold the resonance of what happened. We carry the trembling after impact — sometimes through language, sometimes through movement or color or negative space, and sometimes through frequencies that bypass speech entirely and travel directly into the body through synapse and chemistry within a matrix of kaleidoscopic circuitry.

I’ve heard it said that music connects directly to some of the oldest structures in the human brain. Maybe that’s why I find it so difficult to use music to tell lies. Even when facts become obscured or contested, the emotional record remains embedded somewhere in the sound itself.

I experienced as much upon first encountering John Coltrane’s “Alabama.1”

When I first heard it, I didn’t yet know the full story behind the composition, just that Coltrane had named the piece of music after my neighboring state.

But artists leave breadcrumbs. So eventually I went looking.

I’m a little ashamed to admit it, having grown up so close to ground zero for the devastating event, but that’s actually how I learned about the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham where four little girls — Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, and Carole Robertson — were tragically murdered in an act of racially motivated domestic terror.

No one had thought to teach me that story directly but Coltrane had through his grief translated into sound.

John Coltrane Quartet, "Alabama." Jazz Casual, December 7, 1963. Jimmy Garrison, bass; Elvin Jones, drums; McCoy Tyner, piano; John Coltrane, tenor saxophone.

It stayed with me. It penetrated me, so years later, while living on that mountain, on a land that asked me to meditate and to contemplate, I should not be surprised that I found myself wanting to engage with composition more intimately. That meant I wanted to give it something of myself, meet myself where it lived, enter into conversation with it and sit beside it for a while.

I knew almost immediately that I wanted to approach it using only voices, so I turned the cabin I lived in at the time into a pop-up studio and went to work. The cabin in question had long since been swallowed by a larger house built around it. What had once been exterior walls was now nestled downstairs like a preserved interior artifact where I was told Teddy Roosevelt had frequented while retreating in the Rockies. True or not, the place carried the kind of mythology that felt appropriate for the project at hand — buried histories encased in newer realities, memory surviving through containment.

I arranged and recorded what I thought to be a fairly evocative a cappella rendering of the piece. But there was still the problem of McCoy Tyner’s piano part which was dominated by this low rumbling pedal point that grounded the work so completely that it felt almost geological. It sounds like despair gathering mass or like history’s unsettled ghosts reawakening to unsettle the ground.

I could not figure out how to reproduce that particular sensation with my voice, but then one night I had a dream of Tuvan throat singing.

If you’ve never heard throat singing before, it can sound almost impossible at first — a human voice somehow splitting itself open, carrying both drone and overtone simultaneously, because one body is producing multiple frequencies at once. The sheer supernaturally disorienting nature of it (at least to Western sensibilities) is probably exactly why I woke up convinced it would be the solution.

But something completely inexplicable happened: that very next evening, an eighteen-year-old self-taught throat singer named Bobby arrived on the land and showed up at the house that I shared with some folks who were hosting a weekly open mic. From my little wooden room, I was suddenly stunned to feel that unmistakable low frequency rumble of overtones being chanted right upstairs.

I came to learn that Bobby had spent time in a Zen monastery in Japan where they had taught him exactly four chants: one to invoke the ancestors, one devoted to compassion, one for protection, and the Heart Sutra, that bottomless, paradoxical ode to emptiness:

“Listen Shariputra, this Body itself is Emptiness and Emptiness itself is this Body…

Listen Shariputra, all phenomena bear the mark of Emptiness; their true nature is the nature of no Birth no Death, no Being no Non-being, no Defilement no Purity, no Increasing no Decreasing

That is why in Emptiness, Body, Feelings, Perceptions, Mental Formations and Consciousness are not separate self entities….2”

This was exactly the material I needed.

Life had arranged itself with a symbolic precision that exceeds my preferred level of skepticism, but there we were.

Still, the Heart Sutra did (and does) challenge me, because it required that I both deepen and loosen around what my story meant to me. It asked me to consider that things both my trauma and my country had trained me to accept as givens — that I was a second-class citizen both as a woman and as a Black person, or that some people simply inherited inferiority and that it had always been that way and always would be that way — were not ultimate truths, even if they had been imposed upon us with enormous force and consequence. But I had to loosen. I had to widen my lens. I had to breathe into the spaces where I knew that to be true, and lift my gaze to hold space for the possibility that my reality could be larger than the structures I inherited.

Our lives and experiences are mere convergences.

Temporary agreements masquerading as inevitabilities.

That does not mean suffering is unreal. God knows it’s real. History leaves marks on the body. Trauma leaves grooves in the nervous system. Entire societies can organize themselves around lies so thoroughly that those lies begin to feel fixed.

But perhaps what we take for permanence is often only momentum.

Perhaps reality is more relational and unstable than perception would have us realize.

I say all this as I feel the weight of my traumatic memory, whether personal, generational or societal. Through my art I sing into those spaces to mark what we’ve been through, to try and delineate what we’re made of, and to reach for the impossible possibilities of what we could become.

I mean, if everything we’re experiencing is a function of convergence, then in some ways all things are still possible. Still, it’s a slippery slope to become too fruitional in any of this so I offer this up with a very light touch: yes, all things possible, and all hope abandoned to the world beyond my understanding.

Gate Gate Parasamgate.

You can hear my a cappella arrangement of Alabama, recorded in a cabin in the Colorado Rockies, on Bandcamp.

Read the Full Series:

Pt. 1 - Prelude: Coltrane and the Heart Sutra

Pt. 2 - The Sound that Knew Its Meaning

Pt. 3 - Music and the Measuring Stick

Pt. 4 - Music that Remembers

Pt. 5 - Benediction: Practice is the Prayer