I’m making dinner, stirring garlic and onions while I listen to a record that I got from the library. It’s the one with Duke Ellington and John Coltrane that “In A Sentimental Mood” is on, the black one with orange and purple text. I’m moving slow, chopping vegetables, checking on the pan, humming along with the record. The kitchen smells good. I was familiar with this record because of “In A Sentimental Mood,” but I hadn’t realized how many other beautiful standards were on it. And the solos! It is such a joy to hear Coltrane, exultant, blowing over an F blues as my dinner simmers away.
I recently returned to listening to the music of John Coltrane. I’ve always loved Trane and still consider him one of my most beloved creative ancestors. When I was in high school, I went deep into his work – transcribing full solos, analyzing triadic movements – trying to figure out how he perceived and moved around musical space. There was something sublime about the way he approached playing changes, shifting through harmony from all these different angles. I sensed a key, a secret, buried deep inside these recordings, that if only I could decipher, would open up a looseness in my playing that at the time I craved.
I relinquished my triadic obsessions when I went to college, instead finding inspiration in Coltrane’s relationship to spirituality. My freshman year I devoured “A Love Supreme” and spent a lot of time thinking about what this supreme love really was. It had something to do with God, and something to do with music as a way into that god-feeling. I stopped transcribing and just listened; to the slower tunes Coltrane would play with McCoy Tyner on piano, to my favorite John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman vinyl. I stepped away from jazz for a while after college, when I moved to Brooklyn. But for some reason, recently I’ve been gravitating back. This month I started to transcribe Trane’s solo over “Take the Coltrane” from my favorite dinner vinyl, echoing the hours of obsessive listening and analysis I used to do when I was 16 and 17, now ten years later.
This time, something new is clicking into place: the way that Coltrane navigates time. As jazz musicians know, when you’re playing changes, it’s like there’s an invisible map underneath you. You choose how you move through that landscape. The choices you make harmonically and rhythmically – whether to stick to the map, when to take a detour – determine the listener’s felt sense of time throughout the journey, depending on the way you meet or subvert their expectations. I noticed that Coltrane seemed to have a very expansive perception of time during each moment of the song. It was as if he had stepped back and was perceiving the music as a three-dimensional space – a room, a location – as opposed to being pulled along by the seat of his pants through the changes. As if he were walking in the woods and decided to climb a tree, in order to see the horizon. I sensed that he had a longer view of the landscape he was moving through, a wider aperture of the present moment, which gave him an intuitive, deft freedom to anticipate, echo, or lead us astray. Though he often veered off course, he clearly always knew where home was. I started to think: this wide sense of time and space is what distinguishes musicians who are free, and those who are not.
Photo © by Michelle HuAs an educator, I often wonder: how do I teach this inner temporal flexibility? It’s not an easy thing to explain, nor an easy thing to get good at. It comes up a lot when I teach students how to play over changes (how to improvise over the chords of a song), which brings up the question of “horizontal” and “vertical” playing, as musicians call it. Horizontal playing keeps an eye on the “weft”: the voices or threads that run through the harmony, rather than the “warp” – the moment-to-moment “chunks” that, when put back to back, organize the harmonic and temporal sequence of a song. Approaching the changes vertically might look like learning what kinds of patterns or scales sound good over each individual chord, and “plugging them in” as you move through the song. Approaching the changes horizontally might look like finding melodies or guide tone lines that traverse the harmony in a compelling way, or it might look like finding alternate pathways through the chords that still carry the listener with the same gravity. Usually, I resist the vertical chord/scale method that many folks learn when they are first studying jazz, knowing from experience how lackluster it can sound. Instead, I start with the horizontal, trying to get my students to weave their own way through a piece.
One rebbe of horizontal playing is J.S. Bach, another beloved creative ancestor. The other day, I was examining a measure from The Well-Tempered Clavier (BWV 846–893) prelude when suddenly I realized – this is what Coltrane was doing! In the measure at hand, Bach kept adding a “dissonant” note each beat, one that didn’t fit into the previously implied key center and implied a shift to a new center. But on the next beat he didn’t resolve to the implied new key; he added another “out” note, so that the listener never actually reached a harmonic resolution but rather experienced a series of escalated temporal expectations. We kept expecting a landing, but received only a shift, a turn. I was entranced. In delaying the harmonic resolution again and again, Bach was stretching time, pulling the fabric as far as it could go. Here was the kind of temporal slipperiness that seemed to hold all the secrets I longed for.
There’s something about horizontal playing that opens up music as three-dimensional space. When you’re playing vertically, you have your eyes on your feet – you know where you are each moment, and if you’re prepared, maybe what’s coming one or two moments ahead. It’s like walking along a tightrope – there’s something narrow, startlingly present, and a little nervous about it. There’s always this fear of falling off, of losing your place. But when you play horizontally, there’s a little more space. You can never really get lost if you can see your wider surroundings. I think it’s important to be able to play in both ways. I’ve found that if I teach students only to think horizontally, it can be hard for them to ever get truly comfortable with the chords – but I’m also wary of students getting too used to the vertical way of thinking. There’s a crucial element of horizontal awareness in vertical playing, and of vertical awareness in horizontal playing. They rely on each other.
One of the ways I was taught to learn Bach by my old teacher Angelica Sanchez is called outlining. Originally conceived by piano teacher extraordinaire Abby Whiteside and passed down through the famed Sophia Rosoff (from whom Angelica learned this technique), outlining is a method of internalizing music not from point A to point B, left to right, but from the inside out, from the most vital beats of a song to the least vital. There are different ways to outline, but essentially, first you learn the material on beat one, which is considered the strongest, most vital beat. Then you learn beat three (the next strongest beat), then beat four, and finally, beat two. You outline a stretch of two or four measures, and then you join these sections in order of the piece (or backwards or beginning with your favorite section). It’s a way of visualizing the skeleton of a piece in its totality. For Bach, the skeleton lies in the downbeats. And though not all pieces of music rely on downbeats as their landing points, every song has landmarks of some sort, whether they be snippets of melody, particularly potent lyrics, or places of rupture.
Maybe, I thought, outlining is a way you can reconcile both horizontal and vertical ways of thinking, developing a wider sense of time and space while also staying close to the music as it happens. When you outline, you have to zoom out andzoom in, getting to know a piece much more intimately than if you learned it start to end. I often compare learning a piece of music to walking through a forest. If you really know your surroundings, you can get from point A to point B in the dark, thousands of different ways. Leaping over familiar puddles or passing a telltale knot twisted in a tree. It’s very different from needing Google Maps and a paved road to get to where you’re headed. I wondered if maybe getting to know a song like a place – spending time in it, knowing how the shadows move, how it smells – if that might be part of developing this temporal freedom that both Bach and Coltrane seemed to wield so effortlessly.
In a few of the choruses of “Take the Coltrane,” an F blues, Trane plays a gorgeous approximation of an F#m triad right before the Bb7, the IV chord. Whenever he makes this strange slanted move, I sigh. Each time, it is so beautiful. An F#m is an unusual way to approach a Bb7 chord; when it first hits the ear, it feels out of place. But in Coltrane’s conception of harmony, it’s a triad that contains a real pull towards the Bb7 chord, much like an F7 might. He knows the IV chord is where he’s headed, and it doesn’t really matter how he gets there, as long as the shapes he outlines harmonically fall towards the landing with the right momentum. It’s as if the F blues is a little solar system, with several planets that Coltrane is in orbit around. Though he’s being pulled through space, he has some room to stretch, to diverge from his track. And with his F#m, he ducks under the Bb7 and soars in from behind, a stray meteor that still hits its mark.
Photo © by Michelle HuOver the past two years I have struggled with time. I have struggled generally, I should say, but time and the way it passes seems to be at the core of this journey I have been thrust on. It began with a break in my trust in my own intuition. What do you do when different parts of your intuition are at odds, especially a gut feeling about the long term versus what feels right day to day? How do you move? Who do you trust?
Out of the blue, the writing of Ursula K. Le Guin found its way into my life in the midst of my turmoil. During a particularly banal artist date, I stumbled upon The Left Hand of Darkness at the Crown Heights library. Thank God! Something about Le Guin’s writing soothed my soul. She could describe exactly how I felt with so few words and such little fanfare. Her characters were quiet, kind, fiercely determined, and struggling with the same questions that I was. Early winter of last year, I devoured The Dispossessed and was a changed man. I don’t want to do a whole synopsis – go read it! – but the thing that stuck with me the most was, you guessed it, a question on time.
How does time move, and how does that change the way we live? In The Dispossessed, Shevek, the main character, is a physicist trying to come up with a new theory of time. He hopes to reconcile the school of Simultaneity: the idea that all of time is already written out, like one great book; and Sequency: the idea that we move from moment to moment, past to present to future, like an ant on a string. Shevek begins to understand that these two ways of feeling time don’t have to be at odds with one another. One of the central themes Le Guin keeps coming back to is this idea of return, which she defines as being able to go back home if you understand that home will never be the same as it was when you left. Le Guin suggests to us that the nature of coming home must, crucially, possess an element of being different than we were before. That, somehow, change is actually a fundamental part of the connection, recognition, or consistency we experience in any sort of return.
Perhaps – I began to realize – Sequency and Simultaneity were like vertical and horizontal playing. The former placed you smack in the moment, and the latter took a step back, viewing time in its totality. I felt that Sequency – the way that most of modern Western culture views time – was easier to wrap my head around but only scratched the surface of how reality functions; Simultaneity felt more mystical and elusive, but truer somehow. Ursula seemed to suggest that both ways of feeling time needed the other to exist. It was like playing changes: moving horizontally gave you more freedom to roam around with ease, but moving vertically was important, too, for keeping your grounding. Perhaps finding a way to trust both, at the same time, was the key.
Somehow, this realization was of great comfort to me. I am someone who relies a lot on their intuition, especially my instincts around the longer arc of life. At the time of feeling a break in my intuition, I couldn’t reconcile the long-term gut feeling I had with the day-to-day reality of my life. I still feel this way sometimes, that I’m living someone else’s life, waiting for the different, better life I sense is around the corner. In my mind, Simultaneity was always the truer, more evolved way of viewing things. But what The Dispossessed taught me is that my life is what is happening right in front of my face. The boring, random, stupid, weird shit of daily existence. And that putting on my Sequentist glasses – engaging with honesty and curiosity with the daily muck, even if it feels so different from what I sensed what once was, or what might come, was actually a necessary part of trusting in my inner Simultaneist.
Photo © by Michelle HuThe other day, my best friend Maya and I were running in Prospect Park. Suddenly she slowed to a halt, and said, breathlessly – woah. It feels like fall. I exclaimed – I was just feeling that! Oh my god! We were gleeful and a little unnerved that we had both perceived the exact same thing at the same time. It was late afternoon in mid-July, but the light was dimmer and more golden than usual, leaning and melancholy. There was a slight chill and an old, burnt smell in the air. For some reason both of us felt that something was changing, a sudden tilt forward in the slow churn of the seasons. And as we ran, we were silent.
I’ve started to think that God makes its presence known in echoes and spirals, and the fractures in time that occur upon retracing these cycles. It happens when Coltrane and Bach pull open the seams of time in their music; it happens when I experience déjà vu, or a kind of “future déjà vu” I don’t know exactly how to explain, a feeling that I’m in the future and having a memory of this moment. It happens when I go back to old apartments I’ve lived in, walking old paths I used to take. There is something quite numinous (a word Jung uses to mean touching the divine) about tracing spirals through the nebulous cloud of time. For a moment, we see the truth: that time is not fixed, but that the past, present, and future are a little more blurry and tangled up than we thought. What was once a clear, solid story now has some smears, some fissures.
I’m still trying to figure out why I am chasing the secrets of Coltrane’s playing. I guess I am facing the question of how to live a life gracefully – how not to fight what comes my way; how to rely on my inner Simultaneist, that operates on the scale of years, of lifetimes, and also to listen to my inner Sequentist, who helps me every day with the little questions I face about how I can move closer to whom I’d like to be. It feels easier knowing that there is an enormous, ancient current flowing all around us that I can pay attention to, even if the way is murky. To me, this way of moving doesn’t feel exactly like faith, or trust, which at times seem too flimsy and optimistic to cope with struggle that lasts a long time. It feels less sentimental and more scrappy – like whirling through an F blues, riding the changes; running through a forest you know like the back of your hand. Standing back and seeing the big picture but also being pinned to each moment, knowing that both ways of being depend on each other. And with this knowledge – developing a patience, a steadfastness. Stretching open the gaps for God to come through.
Thank you to my mom, Michelle Hu, for these “Cloud Report” photos.
