John Coltrane
Sun Ship

When Céline in Journey writes, in the African section, that there an open can of sardines at noon emits so many reflections and colors that it assumes the importance of an event, the gloomy Frenchman uses the concept to give an idea of that tropical characteristic he calls hysteria, a boiling fibrillation of reality that drives the poor European escaping the war out of his mind. “Daytime carnival, nighttime sieve, a muffled war.” It wasn't much use escaping the filthy army eager to carve itself on German bayonets, since from the cutting board Ferdinand falls directly into the colonies' fire, a place where the pale European fears the strong light that illuminates the world, the things it shows to his civil and foggy mind.

Obviously, this is the conclusion of an unhappy soul, uncomfortable in contact with specificity, with the moment, with the single revealing instant, attracted as it is to the general concept, to scornful categorization, to the arrogance of one who doesn't want to feel at home except in his own court, and I don’t mean France. A dynamic that I, with scornful categorization, could extend for a moment to art: the more cerebral, general in its embrace, high in purpose the work will be (practically the closer it gets to philosophy), the more fragile the artist and his thought will be. On the contrary, to sum it up: aiming at the entity simply by embedding oneself in the existent without superstructures will be the sign of an artist of the opposite, (pro)positive, indomitable, illogical sign. Superhuman for the nihilists among the nihilists.

A perfect example to juxtapose with Céline would be Szymborska, but since I’m an unhappy soul, I keep the former at home, not the Polish one. Since I would have to resort to Google, let's forget about it.

A completely wrong reasoning, mine, but it means there is some truth in this discourse. In 1965 Coltrane with his takes a maximalistic and very calculated approach with his left hand and a wild and promiscuous minimalism with his right, and he works magic. European-style free, blobs on a wall, cannot compete with such a refined freedom acclimatized to itself, even if the quartet goes even beyond, because you can hear the tendons snapping like electric shocks as they seek the beyond of form, but also the regular and anxious breaths of thieves pulling off the heist of a lifetime. The hints of the pieces are reduced to next to nothing, however studied. The music clings desperately to the composition, floundering and writhing at the mercy of solar radiation, a banner now stretched like a slab, now jumbled like a whim. The beauty and happiness of an instant collide with the poignant melancholy of a lifetime, orange black orange black orange black. McCoy Tyner, mixed terribly, hails on the rhythm like a boxer high on ketamine, while Elvin Jones officiates the arrival of a god who has forgotten how to perform miracles. Behind, Jimmy Garrison conceives towers of vertigo. Coltrane sets fire. He has torn the wood from his heart, the sparks from his brain, and gifts them to the world by throwing the incinerated confetti of a brilliant project into the air.