A Sax Divine

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Many Christians have criticized St. John's for granting sainthood to a jazz musician and former addict; but given Coltrane's spiritual impact on the African American community and beyond, the decision isn't so strange. In many ways, mainstream Christianity's refusal to consider canonizing exceptional people like Coltrane parallels the dominant Western culture's assertion that the only truly 'classical' music is by Beethoven, Mozart, and other white Europeans. Yet the music of Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Billie Holiday, Bob Marley, and, yes, John Coltrane is equally 'classic'--or more so, some would argue.

On another level, the service at St. John's challenges mainstream assumptions about worship itself. While people around the world spend hours, if not days, celebrating their spiritual traditions, North American churchgoers often get irritable if services last more than an hour. At St. John's, the hours of worship filled with unsettling sounds are a challenge to mainstream churches that have conformed in many ways to the dominant paradigms of Western society: consumerism instead of personal sacrifice, entertainment instead of prophecy, the individual instead of community.

In the coming decades, as the center of Christianity moves from Europe and North America to Africa, Asia, and Latin America, other cultural expressions of worship are destined to become more influential. St. John's is an indication of that trend. Indeed, the cultural reshaping of spiritual expression has been going on as long as humans have gathered for religious worship. Still, many find it hard to equate worship with 'ugly' music, which is how some would describe much of Coltrane's later work. Can art that challenges our sense of aesthetics be said to inspire us? Or can only the art we consider beautiful and attractive lift our hearts and souls toward the divine?

Coltrane's later work is, in fact, beautiful, at least for many who have delved deeply into it. Some Coltrane critics have called it 'anti-jazz,' but others would disagree. In his recent biography, John Coltrane: His Life and Music (University of Michigan, 1998), Lewis Porter, professor of jazz theory at Rutgers University, explores one of Coltrane's most obtuse works, 'Venus,' recorded in 1966 with drummer Rashied Ali. Porter concludes that 'Venus' is an exceedingly complex study of chord contortions based on systematic, almost mathematical, musical theory.

But what Coltrane was doing went far beyond technical virtuosity. After recording A Love Supreme in 1964 (a work he said had come to him as a vision from God), Coltrane stated that 90 percent of his playing was actually prayer. 'I know there are bad forces, forces that bring suffering to others and misery to the world,' he once said, 'but I want to be the opposite force, I want to be the force which is truly for good.' By all accounts a humble and gentle man, Coltrane no doubt would have been uncomfortable being called a saint. But he surely would have been happy to hear his music moving people toward a deeper relationship with the divine.

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