Lessons for an improvised life

Spring is officially here and the weather in New York has been so inviting that, coupled with the increase in vaccine availability, one might almost believe that life is starting to return to what we knew before. I was caught by a touch of spring fever, craving to be outside with other people soaking in the slim, teasing rays of sunshine that can make you feel categorically hopeful about almost everything. So I went out walking on the city streets a few times last week, stopping to sit at a sidewalk café for a leisurely cup of coffee. The first time I’ve done that in over a year.

I was aware of watching, hawk-like, every movement the barista made, tracking where her hands touched, and if she slipped on gloves before making my coffee. The truth is nothing will be like we knew it before and, regardless of the weather and the ongoing vaccine registrations, the streets are still empty by New York standards.

I stop into my scheduled appointment to see a new exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and as I stare at the same canvas as someone else, there’s an awkward sense of proximity. We want to be friendly, smile and have a human exchange. But it doesn’t seem like anyone is truly ready to be social again. After living our separate, secluded lives, we are not the same people we were a year ago. And now we’ve all got this deer in the headlights look, like the possibility of returning to public life finds us in unanticipated circumstances, and we can’t quite figure out the next safest move.

It’s curious to think that the heart of the pandemic fell in the middle of Lent last year and, this year, our hoped-for release might find us in the springtime and in the midst of the six-week season of Easter, moments of renewal and new life. It’s got me meditating on the idea of resurrection, a word we most readily associate with Easter, but which is rooted in the Latin resurgere, meaning to rise again, to reappear, to be restored and revived. What lies before us is the invitation to rise up and reveal ourselves again. But how do you say yes to emerging from a now familiar isolation and fumbling into the light of day, into the contours of our new lives?

A couple of weeks ago, while doing some research, I was listening to John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, the legendary album that he composed in his Long Island home back in 1964. It was the background sound for a small stretch of my afternoon. I like jazz but I’m not an aficionado by any stretch. I don’t know how to listen to it the way I know how to look at a painting, to recollect my breath and recalibrate myself. But I’ve been fascinated by the album since I learnt that Coltrane composed it as a sort of prayer of gratitude to God after surviving the dark and debilitating reality of a heroin and alcohol addiction.

I wanted to try to hear what one man’s experience of resurrection and renewal could sound like

In 1957, after being kicked out of Miles Davis’s band because of his substance-abuse problem, Coltrane tried to go cold turkey and experienced what he describes in the album notes as “a spiritual awakening, which was to lead me to a richer, fuller, more productive life”.

A Love Supreme is a musical suite written in four parts: “Acknowledgement”, “Resolution”, “Pursuance” and “Psalm”. The first three titles suggest the steps Coltrane went through on his journey into that fuller life: the years after 1957 still had their ups and downs. The last track is the instrumental rendition of a poem Coltrane wrote and also included in his liner notes. The words read like a psalm of adoration to the supreme love that sustained him.

This week, as I thought about how we’re all trying to navigate a kind of re-entry into our lives, I sat down and really listened to the album, gave it the attention I would a painting. I wanted to try to hear what one man’s experience of resurrection and renewal could sound like. It will be enough to tell you about the first track, “Acknowledgement”.

It starts with a gong, a bright bold clarion call, with an undercurrent of tinkling soft piano keys by pianist McCoy Tyner, while Coltrane plays briefly on the saxophone, an introduction to listen because something is coming. Then drummer Elvin Jones brushes his cymbals into a drumroll that slowly fades out the other instruments, before bassist Jimmy Garrison begins what will become a repetitive four-note riff carried throughout the track.

I played the song again and again, finding myself overcome with unexpected emotion, straining my ear to isolate sounds, so I could catch each instrument building on the other, the layering of bass and piano and drums and sax. I imagined an artist choosing his colours and layering them in contrasting shade and texture to one another on the canvas, building the composition and drawing my eye to one or two focal points, just as Coltrane was drawing my ear now to his saxophone coming in strong, laying heavy over everything else for almost four minutes, the central message. The rise and fall of tempo in his playing making me think of an African-American preacher giving an impassioned sermon, working with the call and response of the other instruments, dipping and straining his pitch to underscore the emotion of whatever he’s saying.

I think of this entire album and its call to an acknowledgment that it will be a new life

And as I thought of the impetus for this album, and listened to the confluence of sound, I imagined what Coltrane might be saying is that charting new life is not linear, is not predictable, is not without its own reorientations and adjustments. But what may seem or sound chaotic and without form to the novice can begin to make sense as you lean into it, listen to it, adjust yourself to its new rhythms. We can find our way again in the unknown.

At some point as I listened to the album, my mind flashed with an image of the painting “Jazz on Easter Sunday”, by Sam Middleton. I had seen it during one of my recent deep dives into researching black abstract painters. A native New Yorker, born in the middle of the Harlem Renaissance, Middleton’s artistic interests were heavily influenced by the growing New York jazz scene of his childhood. This 1961 painting is alive and frenetic with colour: blood red, glowing yellows, luminous whites. Some parts of the canvas are brushed over with black paint, a fitting inclusion: though astonishing, resurrected life is still complex. There are partially visible collaged words that look like newspaper clippings. The painting has an element of the wild vibrancy of Easter Sunday, the day celebrated for unimaginable new beginnings.

There is nothing neat and tidy about Middleton’s work. But there is a coherence you can feel even if you can’t delineate it. It is repetition of colour and of abstract forms. And the repetition is the grounding. It pulls me back to Coltrane and his use of the four-note riff in “Acknowledgment”.

Repetition is at the heart of all mantras, sacred utterances we use to ground us in some universal acknowledgment of love, peace, hope and belonging. I think of Coltrane’s album as a call to accept that ours will be a new life. It will be likely to require some improvisation, some learning to make beautiful what may at first seem without form. And we’ll need to patiently but intentionally find our focal points as we feel our way around the new reality of our lives. And that is the psalm, living our lives with courage, open to fumbling, layering one element on another as we learn to recognise it for the sacred song it already is.

Enuma Okoro is a writer and speaker

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