Presentation: “Rhythmic EnTranement: Coltrane’s Sonic Shamanism” Conference for the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts . Dactyl Foundation, New York City, November 6-9, 2006.

Once you become aware of this force for unity in life, you can't ever forget it. It becomes part of everything you do. In that respect, Meditations is an extension of A Love Supreme since my conception of that force keeps changing shape

–John Coltrane

During 1965, John Coltrane's musician collectives reguarly and seemingly summarily summoned a spectacular resonance. Any recorded performance testifies to this, pick any one, dial zero, and listen. For example, listen to the performances of Nature Boy transduced to tape during recording sessions that took place on February 17th and 18th, 1965, where Elvin Jones runs through tom-tom sequences, while simultaneously bringing a splash of cymbal in a different laya with McCoy Tyner's halting/lurching piano vamps, vamps that in turn seem to lead Jones' kick drum, meanwhile, bassists Jimmy Garrison and Art Davis play tag on bass, runing busy circularities around each other in the higher registers of their heaviest strings and the lower registers of the lightest strings, peeling openings for Coltrane's sax to weave through, disappear, reappear, and radiate.

When Coltrane's ensembles sampled from Eastern sacred traditions, they remixed the jazz ensemble playback format, troping it towards one of the oldest genres of  information compression, the mantra. A Love Supreme, "Evolution," "Cosmos," Om, and Meditations are at once information compression algorithms and, at the same time, a sequence of sonic snapshots that regulate and transduce Coltrane's cosmic " force of unity," which, nevertheless, like Shiva's dance, always changes--a force that sacred and shamanistic practices of rhythm have always emerged to manage and make share-able.

The rich harmonics and affective penumbra produced by mantric formula such as AUM opens up more than....well, more than words can say, semantically speaking. This "irrational," affective quality provokes our deepest feelings and makes it necessary and possible to resonate with others: it solicits sonic intelligences into being, and calls for rhythm. Coltrane's technoshamanistic ensembles continue to provide a model for diverse media ecologies moving from communciation to commons-formation, and as such, can help us tune in on the role of rhythm in diverse aspects of technocultural production. Jazz has always mixed idioms; increasingly, the discontinuities of digital culture facilitate asignifying mixtures of sacred, secular, and profane technologies. At the same time, Coltrane's sonic science, AfroFuturism, and other evolutionary discourses anticipate and emerge in digital attention economies to describe the evolutionary dynamics of these very rhythms of commons-formation and "becoming transducer."

PlayList

PbPrimer

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License.