That’s what I mean by beautiful, more lyrical —John Coltrane

Crescent, Live at Sankei Hall, Tokyo / July 11, 1966

Moon hive, crescendo-sent, not drooping but dripping of its void. Not equivocating like the gentle leader might when asked if there is strategy and deliberation behind his voicings on tenor, or if he’s just playing everything he can hear—ugly, angry, greedy for the lyricism at the end of experiment. This Crescent waxes, spearheaded by Jimmy Garrison on bass, soloing but really accompanying his own shadow in a ballad for strings that functions more like a manifesto on the power of feigned restraint, like theft, platonic seduction into a landscape the rest of the band would only disrupt. Garrison makes us fugitives from the group, running barefoot through a rhapsodic forest while humming memorized directives to ourselves to stall and scare the hunters. Peripatetic, errant, following a benevolent hijacker: a suffocating canary bribed skyward by strings. And your own sky-like nature emerges to mediate in time for Garrison’s whispered transfer from finger to bow, arco from pizzicato. It’s an invited heist; I could listen to Jimmy solo for the entire fifty-four minutes of this version of a composition that spans a restrained eight minutes on the original 1964 recording. Garrison is the leviathan that was held under on the record, now impossible to submerge. Finally he turns the bass into an urgent wood-winded drum and mutters wordless vocal accompaniments so emotive the audience interrupts to clap, then back to pizzicato, tremolo, now holding us under so he can emerge. I would follow him anywhere, but he’s so effective because he presents no doctrine or destination, just the authentic stirrings of a vigilante we didn’t realize was watching us so closely and thus tuned to our yearning, the intense romance of hermetic daydreams unmasked. Someone in the audience screeches like a churchgoer pleading the blood of Christ—salvation. Jimmy grunts back mercifully, athletically, then plays mirth, then recoils and you hear Rashied Ali’s brushes first, tentative caress, like the cool half-embrace of a distant cousin at a family reunion, unfamiliar familiarity, gradual ambush, then the cymbals and rousing applause for Jimmy, for the breach in tension that tells us it was real. Trane’s tenor emerges with the phrasing we recognize from the original Crescent recording, almost plaintiff, almost vanquished by what preceded it were it not so robust and human a howl as to scoop limp spirits off the ground and reconfigure them to accommodate his will, his wounds. This is my favorite Coltrane sound, my favorite ensemble of his. Alice on piano as levitation device, John tricking us into thinking we’re somewhere calm and serene only for his characteristic buttressing into erratic blunted screams, Ali’s cascading time-keeping, and Pharoah Sanders, Little Rock, doubling the tenor like a fraternal twin here to rescue his kin from the abyss.

Carcinoma, the cancer that Trane dies of three years following this recording, has a crescent lurking in it, adjacent phonemes, a structure that begins slivered and grows until it can hold no more shadow. And he’s a confessional player; his intuition confesses what he’s too cerebral to tell directly. And quiet as it’s kept, he’s tormented by contradictions. He hasn’t always been this clean or lucid, nor this upstanding and disciplined. He was addicted to heroin alongside his peers; he also suffered from alcoholism… kicked both habits in 1957… Sobriety and an attendant retreat from the jazz social scenes that fostered those habits seemed to override his past, perhaps because he was quiet, not too flashy in style or affect, and married, making domestic life his muse and new alibi between marathon rehearsals in the family attic. The shell of light this extended Crescent pursues is redemption’s armor, repentance, someone brave enough to ask the right questions and force him to release some of the stiffness and composure of his conversational style and reveal, to himself, to listeners, that he could indulge the hysterical cries in some of his playing off the bandstand, outside of the studio, that he could falter and be whole and confrontational, a diva himself in spite of himself, the most unassuming celebrity jazzman in his category, the most reticent, copacetic, restless. When he died at forty, between the assassinations of Malcolm X and MLK—and they were all that same age when taken—I saw them from the future in triptych, three messianic souls subjected to public ritual sacrifice, the will of the state or divine leverage overriding theirs, preempting a mass awakening to black spiritual sovereignty, proving their messages unfit to follow if you wanted to survive, thankless paths to righteous suicide at the hands of flippant detractors, samsara in the glare of false enlightenment. Which is not to say that these three men are false messiahs or decoys, but that messiah and savior seeking is fatuous and comes with backlash, even for the self- or peer-appointed, to be a black prophet is to be in part a martyr, something in you has to die and it feeds your blood and ideas back to the prophecy, at least for these three men. What if the hijacker has more to tell us than the pilot? With Trane, the sinister aspect, the cosmic ambivalence, seems internal, like he ate himself alive on his vain quest for the cathartic, or like he was masking incommunicable resentments that manifested in the flesh, that he was not meek and cordial or aloof as he often presented, that he was turbulent and insatiable, realer than we’ve made him. His performance of equanimity was the tenderness that comes from the pain of dissimulation, neurotic privacy, from hiding, hoarding one’s feelings in a regime too strict to survive. May we liberate him from sainthood and hyper-purification, may we let him bend the tongue in the bell of his sound till it hisses and rebels. I yearn to invoke a version of John Coltrane the man that affords him the same unapologetic abandon as John Coltrane the musician, indulges the same turmoils his offstage diffidence now hides, and comes out smiling, relieved of perfectionism ahead of the kiss of death.

This live Crescent, his autobiography in moonshine, the arresting syncretism of its textures, on its knees supplicating, then leaping, whincing, resolving, offers an epic in seven cycles, lunar itself. Would that he could have remained here, a refugee in Tokyo with the best quintet he ever assembled. Would that he could have been less upstanding and more of a disaster, more like himself, less concerned with being good, as easygoing about his vices as the others on the stand had been, and no less effective a witness for it. Would that we could ask him now, what it was like to be tortured by a decency projected back and forth, neutered, grandson of ministers on both sides, never quite recovered from the pulpit or their influence, heroic for this very reason, nudged into respectability mania and left for dead at its epicenter and altar right when we could have assuaged his rage with our own, been his proxies, reciprocating his grace. A cracked hourglass, baffled disapproval. He wanted to be a force for real good he put it once, and this was not naive or dull as an aim, it’s just the kind of wish that’s easy to undermine with unspeakable pain; it’s just the kind of inverted self-criticism that carries a built-in negation, injustice against the flawed human soul in effort to be impeccably just. What I mean by beautiful is less eager to please and serve, less frustrated by self-imposed constraints, lyrical yes, but never clawing its way there, and more haunting, more terrible, truer to the self that isn’t always enforcing good, more of a hypocrite, the kind of man who lives long enough to disappoint us, to misplace his own intentions, the harvest moon spirit that drives him into the light of the worlds. It’s hard to reconcile so much good as a product of early retreat, as a spectacle of absence immortalizing his unfinished goodbye.