Conference Agenda

As the last piece fades on Alice Coltrane’s Cosmic Music (1968)—her first record after John Coltrane’s death (1967), in which her tracks alternate with his—there is a brief silence. From this gap comes a heartrending call: “Alice?” The infinitely deeper silence following John Coltrane’s spectral voice sets the stage for the most intense trial of Alice’s life: two brutal years of tapas, or divine sufferings (1968-1970). Documented in excruciating detail in her book Monument Eternal (1977), this interstitial “break” (Moten 2003) is structured by her recollection of the void: a universal memory of “impenetrable darkness” and silence that “concealed” Being. Her task, from this null point, was “succession.” After the conclusion of tapas, she released Infinity (1972), her second and final LP explicitly grappling with John’s death. Drawing on the same recording session as Cosmic Music, Coltrane drastically changed methods, layering her music—to mainstream critics’ horror—on top of John’s (Berkman 2010).

Traced across these stunning records is, I suggest, Alice Coltrane’s novel configuration of an improvised music and subjectivity that could do justice to her late husband and their shared musico-spiritual project. That is, this period marks a site of struggle against, more broadly, the “exnomination” (suppression, revisionism) of the black avant-garde, metonymized by John Coltrane (Lewis 1996, 2009). Cosmic Music and Infinity contain not only love and grief, but also, building on recent scholarship, fragments of an unattended to philosophy of history working toward subjectivizing the denied being (Fanon’s n’est pas) of the black artist (Brown 2021, Marriott 2023, Gallope 2024). Framed by interventions in Lacanian psychoanalysis, I analyze Coltrane’s music-philosophy in these records as a bulwark against the “perversion”—a radicalization of “exnomination”—of the (black) dead and (black) history (Marriott, Lacan-Noir 2021; McGowen, Racist Fantasy 2022). Coltrane’s resistance arises from that which chronologically bisects the records: her centralization of absolute silence in Monument Eternal. Denied by the “Eurological” avant-garde, absolute silence was embraced by Coltrane’s metaphysics. I outline how this allows her to range across two positions in the Black Radical Tradition, the “black heretic” and “black prophet” (Bogues 2003), and, through them, respond to John’s haunting call—“Alice?”

Miles Davis’s album Aura (1989) has been regarded variously as the “most important recording” of Davis’s final years and as “an over-blown fusion piece.” This contradictory reception is matched by the convoluted production history of the work. Aura began as a commission to the Danish composer Palle Mikkelborg on occasion of Davis receiving the Sonning Music Prize in Copenhagen in 1984 and ended up as an album without Mikkelborg’s name on the cover.

The first part of the paper presents new source material from Danish archives that has yet to be part of international, English-language research on Miles Davis. The research charts the complicated production process behind Aura and shows how Davis’s collaborators in Denmark had to navigate both Davis’s mercurial persona and the expectations associated with a prize that was usually awarded to classical music composers/performers (e.g. the awardees immediately before and after Davis were Rafael Kubelík and Pierre Boulez, respectively). By incorporating new Danish source material, the paper significantly broadens and deepens our knowledge of a major work in Davis’s career.

In the second part of the paper, I propose five ways of interpreting the album: 1) A biographical portrait, based in Mikkelborg’s tone row signifying the letters M-I-L-E-S-D-A-V-I-S; 2) A big band composition in the tradition established in Miles Davis’s partnership with composer-arranger Gil Evans in the 1950s; 3) A bid to place jazz in general and Miles Davis specifically in the highbrow canon represented by the Sonning Music Prize; 4) A transatlantic partnership harking back to Davis’s soundtrack for the French film Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (1958); and 5) A work of so-called late style, marked by Davis’s “creaking” notes which the producers tried to limit in post-production. All of these elements are rooted in the history of Davis’s career, stretching further back than the context of Davis’s jazz-rock fusion period in which the work is usually read. I argue that Aura can be interpreted as a retrospective album that summarizes Davis’s career and music.

When jazz bassist Charles Mingus heard the cover version of his composition “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” by rock guitarist Jeff Beck, he offered the scathing critique that it sounded like “money,” specifically because Beck abandoned the tune’s complex chord changes. Mingus’s critique of the commercialization of jazz suggests an Adornian critique of the fetishization of popular music. Adorno’s (2002, with Horkheimer 2007) believed that capitalism/liberalism produced a “pseudo-individuality” that only allowed subjects to express themselves in ways deemed fit by the market. While scholars note the similarities between Adorno’s critique of jazz and capitalism, his writings on popular music also mirror his critiques of phenomenology. Adorno (1940) believed that Husserlian phenomenology lapsed into idealism, but always maintained some hope that a post-capitalist world would allow for a true phenomenological engagement with the world (Sherman 2008, Gordon 2018). I connect Adorno’s critiques of jazz, liberalism, and phenomenology, arguing that the standardization of popular music listening habits restricts our ability to phenomenologically engage with music. I argue that we describe regressive listening as a form of what Sartre (1993) describes as “bad faith,” or lying to oneself. Being unable to perform a proper phenomenological analysis of the world is a form of bad faith. In this sense, popular music’s drive towards standardization encourages listeners to hear in bad faith, denying the novelty of a piece of music. By reading Sartre in dialogue with Adorno, we come to a more holistic account of the latter’s view of popular music.

To support my argument, I analyze Mingus’s (1959, 1961, 1980) and Beck’s (1976) recordings of “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat.” Although a 12-bar blues, Mingus’s versions drastically alter the traditional harmonic blueprint of a 12-bar blues. Mingus’s composition attempts to reorient the listener away from hearing the standardized aspects of the form. However, Beck’s recording drastically simplifies the harmonies, sacrificing many of the complexities of Mingus’s composition. The reason Beck’s version “sounds like money,” is because it causes the listener to focus on its standardized chord progression, causing the listener to hear in bad faith.