In yesterday’s post I expressed a question from within my constellation of continued meditations:

Why was Schoenberg compelled to ostensibely leave the path of his hallowed mentor – why do McCoy Tyner and Bill Evans seem in some ways closer to Mahler than does Schoenberg?

And today I returned once more to Eric Nisenson’s book about the making of Kind of Blue, this time to read about John Coltrane:

After the spiritual awakening that occurred while going through withdrawal, Coltrane felt even stronger about the healing and saving grace of music. At first his path seems rooted in harmony and the world of chords. At the core of bebop is the challenge of creating fresh melodic ideas through complex and difficult chord progressions … The European classical tradition was seen by the boppers as a kind of “church,” and Western harmony was a kind of catechism, one that laid down the ultimate laws of music, which were ironclad. The challenge for a jazz musician is to create idiosyncratic music and fresh melodic ideas within the boundaries of Western theory.

– Nisenson, The Making of Kind of Blue, p. 81 (emphasis is mine)

And earlier!

For [Coltrane], playing improvisational jazz became a journey within, an attempt to use the intensity that he brought to his music as a form of trance. To be more precise, he played in order to sustain that inward journey, seeking nothing less than the mind of God. That is why he played solos of such great length (half an hour, sometimes even much longer) and with such apocalyptic fury. It was impossible for those in the audience to be merely passive observers, all one could do was hold on for dear life.

– Ibid., p. 76 (emphasis is mine)

This “apocalyptic fury” (and such) reminds of McCoy Tyner’s solos and also (more poignantly) of the experience I had of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring; something beyond “merely classical music” – beyond tradition – something lost, “of the depths”.