Pt. 1 – An Indo-jazz mystery: Trane’s handwritten raga notes

 

Trane left behind some cryptic, handwritten study notes entitled ‘Scales of India’. In this project, I uncover which ragas they are, where he got them from, and what he was doing with them…

—Project Home—

trane_copycut

Article sections:

• Introduction: Indo-Trane interchanges •

“I collect [Ravi Shankar’s] records…and his music moves me. I’m certain that if I recorded with him I’d increase my possibilities tenfold, because I’m familiar with what he does…” (Trane, 1961)

 

John Coltrane’s musico-mystical obsession knew few bounds. Seeking to fully integrate saxophone and self, the jazz pioneer’s restless quest led him deep into the furthest corners of sound, with lifelong study that spanned a dizzying selection of cultures, continents, and centuries. If being a ‘global musician’ is about drawing direct inspiration from all around the world, then Trane was one of the very first to really fit the bill.

 

His own esoteric creative imagination would in turn recolour the musical landscape, awakening minds everywhere to the spiritual dimensions of jazz, sound, and life itself. When I first heard My Favourite Things as a 12-year-old, I barely understood what the word improvisation meant, but still knew I’d discovered something fresh and fundamental in his playing – some new essence that compelled me to ask not just ‘what is he doing’, but also ‘why is he doing it?’.

 

Two decades on, such questions continue to fascinate. In particular, I’ve always been inexorably drawn to Trane’s Indian classical immersions – perhaps greater influences on him than any besides jazz itself and the church music of his childhood. Indeed, his overall artistic legacy – a heady blend of technique, mysticism, and deep philosophical enquiry – is unthinkable without the vast imprints of India (just ask his son Ravi…).

 

But even now, well over half a century since he blew his final living notes, we understand surprisingly little about the precise points of Indo-Trane confluence. Devotees immerse into his raga-length exhortations, with titles such as Om, India, and Meditations, and hear of his penchant for ‘exotic scales’ and saintly wisdom from the East. But, as beautiful as they are,  all such images arrive defocused. We musicians need much finer detail than this: how did Trane really draw from the world of Indian raga?

 

• What are Trane’s ‘Scales of India’? •

Here

Like many others, my Traneological searchings soon led me to pianist and scholar Lewis Porter’s meticulous biography – John Coltrane: His Life and Music – which goes deep into global archives to unravel the master’s thought and innovations. On reaching p.210, my heart jumped at the sight of a picture entitled “Scales of India, cont.” – a brief black-and-white image containing handwritten notation for six melodic patterns. They vary in format – two have no descending line, and three have an extra bar with a few individual tones picked out and played again. Tantalisingly, they were left untitled and unexplained save for a few mysterious descriptors (“Night, power & majesty”, “Evening, gay”, “Morning, sad”). What on earth were they?

 

On the next page, Porter notes that “two more pages of scales…are reproduced in Simpkins”. The Simpkins in question is Dr. Cuthbert Ormond Simpkins – student civil rights activist, Harvard-trained medical inventor, and author of the poetic, politically-charged 1975 book Coltrane: A Biography (a quick flavour from from the preface: “the concert…caused me to shake uncontrollably, and to see multicolored particles moving randomly in my mind’s eye. The next morning I declared to myself that I would write a book about John Coltrane…”).

 

I turned through as soon as my copy arrived to find 18 more scales from around the world, as well as a further list of “Church” and “Greek” modes. Though similarly sparse, these notes were accompanied by vague titles (“Arabian”, “Balinese”, “Chinese”). Three of them seemed to be of Indian derivation: “Hindustan”, “Raga Todi”, and “Raga [illegible smudge] Todi”. Here are the two images, reprinted with the kind permission [*] of both biographers:

  • [Scales of India image]

(n.b. Audio demos below, as for everything else in this article too. Indian music is an aural tradition…and, as per standard guitarist stereotypes, my own sight-reading abilities are sloppy at the best of times.)

 

Might these scrawled artifacts offer a rare, direct window into the heart of the Indo-Coltrane conflux? Musicians are what they imbibe: to learn how he learned, we should listen to what he listened to, and reanimate the abstract shapes of his theoretical study on our own instruments. As a jazz guitarist who, for a time, lived and studied in a traditional Hindustani academy, I absolutely had to find out more. So – what are these curious scales? And where did Trane get them from?

 

• Transglobal tones: listen to the scales •

Here…

Here are all nine of our Indian scales, along with what they sound like on my santoor (Himalayan dulcimer). Have a listen, and see how much your own feelings match up with Trane’s words. I’ve sometimes played them to friends without revealing the descriptors first – which, as always with such things, elicits a surprisingly broad scattering of emotional responses.

 

It’s easy to imagine that Trane did much the same with his own sonic companions. After all, his quest for ‘musical universals’ required access to open-eared, unprimed listeners, who felt free to respond subjectively to the new sounds. Only then can the deeper, more fundamental patterns of human perception emerge. Doubtless, Trane would only want you to have your own personal reaction to the scales: not his, or that of his mysterious source. As long as you really open yourself to the sounds, then all musical reactions are absolutely valid – and each is valuable too.

 

Some of Trane’s notes are analogous to well-known Western modes (e.g. 2 and 8 fit the Phrygian), while others are uniquely Indian – scale 9 (“Todi”) is famous in the Subcontinent, but I’ve never encountered it anywhere else in the world yet. Whether you care for the theory or not (…and this article requires zero prior knowledge of any), it’s worth heeding Trane’s words on the subject: “The emotional reaction is all that matters. As long as there’s some feeling of communication, it isn’t necessary that it be understood”. 

 

(To any Indian classical shishyas, gurus, or rasikas reading: have a guess at which ragas they might be, based on this info alone. Some are fairly straightforward, and others near-impossible: partly due to the quirks and inaccuracies of Trane’s source. All will be revealed below…)

 

Porter’s ‘Scales of India’ (John Coltrane: His Life & Music, p.210)

  • 1 – ‘Night, Power, & Majesty’: SRmPNS | SGm
  • 2 – ‘Morning, Sad’: SrgmdnS | SndPmgrS | gmd
  • 3 – ‘Night’: SRmPnS | SnDnPmRS
  • 4 – ‘Evening & Night, Praise’: SRGmPDS | SNnDPmGRS | PDS
  • 5 – ‘Evening, Gay’: SmgmdnS | SndmgS
  • 6 – ‘Night, Melancholy’: nSrgmPdn | ndmPg(r)S

Simpkins’ raga scales (Coltrane: A Biography, p.113)

  • 7 – ‘Hindustan’: SRGmPdnS
  • 8 – ‘Raga [Hamant] Todi’: SrgmPdnS
  • 9 – ‘Raga Todi’: SrgMdNS | SNdPMgrS

(n.b. For reasons of clarity – and also due to gaping holes in my transglobal musical knowledge – this article focuses only on the nine Indian scales. But I’ve also had a crack at decoding Simpkins’ other 15 ‘global modes’, tracing (most of) them back to the cultures they originally came from, along with sound samples and some quick intervals analysis. See John Coltrane’s global scales: what are they? – linked again at the end. See if you can help me out with the remaining few – full credits given!)

 

“Sometimes I wish I could walk up to my music for the first time, as if I had never heard it before. Being so inescapably a part of it, I’ll never know what the listener gets, what the listener feels…” (Trane, *)

• First impressions: why the puzzle? •

Here…

According to Porter, he got hold of the scales via Carl Grubbs, Trane’s long-term sax student – and the cousin of Naima, his first wife. From Porter’s book: “Grubbs visited Coltrane’s place in Queens [and] noticed a page of Indian scales…[he] made his own hand copy”. Simpkins’ modes, however, are in Trane’s own handwriting, having been posthumously scanned from his personal notes [*].

 

The three Simpkins scales were identifiable at first glance. “Hindustan” matched with Charukeshi, a distinctive major-minor mode with origins in Carnatic (…not Hindustani) music, while the smudged “Raga [Hamant] Todi” had to be Hanumatodi, another famous South Indian form. And “Raga Todi” was unmistakably Miyan ki Todi, a North Indian raga named after Miyan Tansen, a legendary 16th-century innovator fabled to have summoned fire and rain by singing long-lost ragas at Emperor Akbar’s royal court. (In terms of enduring compositional and formal influence, Tansen is probably the closest there is to a ‘Hindustani J.S. Bach’).

 

The six Porter scales were, however, much more ambiguous. Only the second (“Morning, sad”) seemed to be a specific, indisputable raga match – both its descriptors and its precise melodic path fit with Bhairavi, a famous North Indian dawn form named after the Hindu goddess of destruction (“…who wears red garments, and a garland of severed heads around her neck, and her head is adorned with a crescent moon…”).

 

Others were suggestive rather than conclusive: the first (“Night, power & majesty”) hinted at several possibilities, including the folksy, patriotic Desh – and the third (“Night”) suggested the monsoon-bringing Malhar family, without quite matching with any particular raga from this group. Some were more confounding still: the descent line of the fourth (“Evening & night, praise”) contained an unbroken four-semitones-in-a-row sequence, something I’ve never come across in traditional raga summarisation theory. Likewise, the meaning of the scattered few ‘extra bars’ was unclear – and I wasn’t even sure which note of the sixth (“Night, melancholy”) was the root.

  • [Bhairavi pic]

After delving further into the decades-deep world of academic Coltraneology, I discovered that ethnomusicologist Carl Clements had also written about the Porter scales, likewise identifying the second as Bhairavi in his 2008 PhD (John Coltrane and the integration of Indian concepts into jazz improvisation, an absorbing read fleshing out the timelines and conceptual context). But he left the others, including all of Simpkins’ modes, untouched. This pattern is repeated in several other academic works (). However, it seemed that nobody had really paid too much attention to decoding them, let alone tracing their ultimate origins.

 

This seemed like an odd state of affairs: Porter’s book, still deservedly renowned as the ‘definitive’ Trane bio, was published over twenty years ago – and any Coltraneologist who read it would surely have seen that the scales potentially offered up a unique glimpse into *one of his most significant points of modern musical interchange*. After all, Trane is universally hailed as one of the 20th-century’s most influential improvisers, and Indian classical is universally recognised as one of the greatest influences on him. And, as a man of few words, he didn’t leave us a lot else to go off here.

 

Perhaps these scales were a central component of his Indian study, and maybe their source – whatever it was – helped shape his broader musical thinking. Or he could just have jotted then down in passing one afternoon. We can’t know what they may reveal without solving the puzzle of their provenance. At the very least, gleaning some fresh Indo-Trane insights will add sonic depth to the mysticism of his track titles, and help us to share in his musical beliefs and experiences a little better. But what had the scholars been missing here? What was I missing?

 

“To be a musician is really something. It goes very, very deep. My music is the spiritual expression of what I am: my faith, my knowledge, my being…When you begin to see the possibilities of music, you desire to do something really good for people, to help humanity free itself from its hangups…I want to speak to their souls” (Trane, *)

 

• Decoding Trane’s mystery modes •

Here…

As an instrumentalist rather than a scholar, my natural impulses were practical yet vague – running something like, ‘How can I see what Trane saw in these notes? How can I bring them to life in my own playing? What new understandings might they spark?’. We jazzers tend to attack such questions in a direct manner, learning via endless hours of painstaking, looped listening and ear-based transcribing. But while the desire for improvisational expansion may have led me to Trane’s puzzle, it clearly wasn’t going to be one I could just jam my way through.

 

To get to the heart of things, a three-pronged strategy seemed best: identify the scales, trace Trane’s source for them, and find out how they might have fit into his broader study (simple jump street). I didn’t really know where I might be headed, so aimed for a broad, scattergun approach – this way, each line of inquiry could be approached separately. My hope was that these unfurling threads would eventually intertwine, revealing fresh insights into what was really going on in Trane’s musical mind as he sat with the scales.

 

My initial thoughts on identifying the remaining sequences ran something like, ‘well, this should be simple to solve: I just need to record myself playing the ascent-descent patterns, and maybe write them out in sargam (Indian do-re-mi), then send it all over to some Indian classical masters: they’ll know what they are straight away’. It was no surprise that I didn’t recognise them all – there  are hundreds of ragas in circulation, and properly internalising the canon requires many more decades of rigorous taleem (immersive training) than I’m ever likely to rack up in this lifetime. Even by Coltrane’s extreme standards, full-on Indian training is incredibly intense.

 

As a student, bansuri (bamboo flute) maestro Pandit Rupak Kulkarni was allowed to play nothing but Bhairavi for a full five year stretch (“…that is what made me realize what swarabhyas [the study of notes] really means…”) – and sarod pioneer Ustad Ali Akbar Khan famously proclaimed that: “If you practice for ten years, you may begin to please yourself. After twenty years you may become a performer and please the audience. After thirty years you may please even your guru – but you must practice for many more years before you finally become a true artist. Then, you may please even God.”

 

I highly doubt my occasional sitar performances at Bristol’s Hindu Temple ever captivated any of the deities who may have been in attendance. In fact, I barely received on-site sitar instruction for long enough for my fingers to stop hurting. My guru-ji, Pandit Shivnath Mishra, was an excellent teacher, and I’ve studied intermittently hard in the decade since then – but still, surely the identification issues here were just down to my own lack of knowledge?

 

I duly recorded the scales on guitar and santoor, and sent them to artists from each of India’s main classical traditions, including some of the Darbar Festival headliners I’d interviewed in 2019 (Living Traditions: 21 articles for 21st-century Indian classical music). These maestros – several of whom I’d grown up idolising as a teenager – knew their ragas better than anyone alive. If Trane’s scales were a clear match for any, they would know.

  • [pic: collab]

The artists responded quickly and generously, intrigued by the puzzle (…pleasingly, quite a few were Coltrane fans already). But, to my surprise, these great masters were largely as nonplussed as me when it came to what the remaining scales might represent. They had plenty of half-suggestions I hadn’t thought of, but no firm matches for any of the five unknown modes. Instead, their combined weight of knowledge could do little more than help clarify the nature of the confusions we faced. (Damn, I wish Trane had had such easy access to rigorous Subcontinental feedback…the joys of the internet).

 

Bengali sarod star Debasmita Bhattacharya elaborated on how some of the sequences pointed to several different Indian possibilities. Though many ragas share the same scale tones, each has a unique set of melodic, symbolic, and cultural identifiers. Trane’s brief outlines just don’t give us much to work with here – Debasmita explained how the notes of the first scale (“Night, power & majesty”) could be seen to vaguely approximate the ascending lines of Desh, Bihari, Brindabani Sarang, as well as various ‘rain ragas’ including Surdasi Malhar. 

 

There were limitations to how much the words could help us too. Here, the “night” samay (time of day) descriptor may seem like a major clue – after all, what are the chances that all the four options just mentioned are night ragas? Well, it turns out, pretty high: in fact, all but one of them are. Traditionally, the samay of a raga is closely tied to its melodic form, with musicians drawing on detailed aesthetic symbology to decide when and where a given set of notes should sound most powerful. For one example, ragas with flattened 2nd, 3rd, and 7th scale degrees (komal re, ga, ni) are almost always allocated to the dawn or dusk hours – when the sun, like the notes, is lower down. Many ‘brighter’ scales, with raised notes, tend to cluster around midday.

 

Likewise, “Night, power & majesty” has its own integral structure – one of strong, emphatic intervals, arranged in a malleable, easy-to-internalise manner. I generally seek to avoid using prescriptive ‘mood words’ when writing about music, but would definitely say this scale could feel ‘celebratory’, and ‘inclusive’. Perhaps ideal for adding energy and colour to dances, singing, and folk festivities – events which tend to run on well beyond sunset…especially in India – which, being near the equator, rarely holds the light much past 7pm. And, indeed, all but one of our Hindustani options do turn out to be folksy night ragas (and the other – Brindabani Sarang – though allocated to noon, is still pretty folksy, having long been associated with the Krishna festivities of the Braj region).

 

(This doesn’t mean our notes ‘inherently’ imply night in any broader sense, or even anything as specific as ‘power’ or ‘majesty’. That all depends on how, where, when, and to whom they are performed – which in turn encompasses everything from the listener’s entire lifetime of cultural experience to whether the singer had an extra shot of espresso before walking onstage. The dense interactions between vibration, perception, cognition, and emotion are not yet well understood…hence my general preference for ‘shape words’ over ‘mood words’. While music does, in many respects, resemble a true universal language, it is still an unpredictable, highly subjective mode of emotional transmission: you can never really know what the person sitting next to you at a concert is experiencing – or, indeed, quite how you’ll react the next time you put on a well-worn old record.)

 

• North vs. South: India’s classical bifurcation •

Here…

We seemed to be stuck at an identificatory impasse. Even seasoned stars such as chaturangi slide guitarist Pandit Debashish Bhattacharya and tabla maestro Pandit Sanju Sahai were out of suggestions, as were my scholarly contacts at the ITC Sangeet Research Academy. Even Indo-jazz sax master Jesse Bannister – a man I’ve previously collaborated with for his Trane-like improvisational abilities – was out of ideas (…I’d already checked through the full deck of his raga playing cards).

 

To add further complication, some of Trane’s words seemed to be wholly inconsistent with their scales. Most obviously, the tones of the fifth were an exact match for Malkauns, even mirroring the raga’s characteristic emphasis on the 4th scale degree (ma). But the descriptors (“Evening, gay”) pointed the other way entirely: Malkauns is an austere, ‘severely tranquil’ raga of the late night, inseparable from its darkly mythic reputation. In the words of Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, Malkauns is “a favourite raag of the djinns [spirits]…if they like the way you play it, they will do anything for you. And if they don’t, they will kill you”. This definitely sounds like something that would have fascinated Trane…but is it really anyone’s idea of a ‘gay evening’?

 

My crack squad of raga theorists highlighted these mismatches as the most baffling aspect of the puzzle. To explain why, we need some historical context. Indian classical music is divided into two main traditions – Hindustani, from the North, and Carnatic, from the South. Both share the same ancient roots, stretching back to the folk melodies and devotional temple chants of the Vedic era (**BCE: back when the Pharaohs ruled the Nile valley). But the two styles began to diverge from around the 16th century, when the Mughal conquest of the North introduced a swathe of Islamic ideas into its sonic mix. The South, lying further from these political clashes, has drawn less from the Muslim world over time.

 

Five hundred years on, the two traditions still resemble each other in many key respects, with shared improvisatory foundations in raga (melodic framework) and tala (time cycle) – both concepts which predate the Mughal bifurcation by a good couple of millennia. But they differ in how they use them: for example, South Indian musicians place a greater emphasis on song-based lyrical learning, and also perform in larger ensembles than their Northern counterparts – Hindustani percussion is usually a lone tabla player, whereas a ‘full bench’ Carnatic rhythm section features the mridangam (double-headed skin drum), ghatam (clay pot drum), kanjira (pitchable tambourine), and morsing (jaw harp), as well as konnakol syllabic vocalisations (“spittin’ bars, South Indian style”).

 

Many feel that the vast South Indian melakarta (‘lord of the scales’) framework naturally lends itself to more structured, mathematical modes of melodic analysis, while Northern ragas tend to be much more closely intertwined with their canonic bandishes (compositions) and accompanying cultural signifiers – gods, origin myths, seasonal celebrations, and so on. And crucially, modern Hindustani musicians still broadly seek to uphold samay (the traditional convention of only performing a raga at its specified hour of the day), while Carnatic music all but abandoned this practice long ago.

 

This is what confused us. Though brief, Trane’s verbal descriptors were specific enough to strongly suggest a North Indian origin – it’s been a long time since Carnatic ragas commonly stated their time of day, and it’s much less common for them to be summarised along with such prominent ‘mood words’ too. And Bhairavi – the one clear match from the Porter set – is unambiguously a Hindustani form. The Carnatic Hanumatodi (our already-named Scale 8) shares Bhairavi’s note set, but not its morning associations – or its characteristic omission of Pa (5th) in ascent (n.b. I don’t yet know which set of our scales Trane wrote down first).

 

On top of all this, South Indian music was much harder to come by in Trane’s pre-internet era, with few Carnatic records on sale or touring artists to catch in concert. Virtually all the first Indian stars to go global hailed from the Northern gharanas (teaching lineages), including all those Trane is known to have loved: sitarist Pandit Ravi Shankar, tabla drummer Ustad Alla Rahka, and shehnai (reed horn) virtuoso Ustad Bismillah Khan. (n.b. While the first two Simpkins scales are South Indian in origin, his collection looks likely to have come from a separate source – surely a general global scale compendium of some kind.)

 

Based on all this – in particular, the unmistakable presence of samay time descriptors – my collaborators were in broad agreement that the Porter scales were very likely to have come from a North Indian source. Though some did resemble known South Indian ragas, this was hardly surprising – the Carnatic katapayadi system works by calculating every possible seven-note combination allowable under the music’s traditional melodic axioms, and then arranging all 72 of these janaka (‘father’) scales in a logically-ordered ‘wheel’ structure. On top of this, there are hundreds more janya (‘offspring’) ragas in circulation – meaning that most of the scales you might realistically dream up would probably match to something from South India. Taken alone, this wasn’t enough to go off – and the descriptors and context all pointed North.

  • [pic: melakarta]

But while all this Northern-suggestive context very much seemed to apply to scale five (“Evening, gay”), its notes just don’t match with any known Hindustani raga apart from Malkauns – a ‘severely tranquil’ scale famed for its unique pentatonic simplicity, with no tone-set ‘competitors’. In other words: there is no North Indian raga that fits with both Trane’s words and his notes. The South Indian Hindolam shares the same tones, but none of us had ever heard it described as an ‘evening’ raga (the only designation I could find was “noontime”*). And our scale, which, as noted, was on the same page as the Hindustani Bhairavi, included a characteristic motion of Malkauns (Sa-ma-ga-ma = 1-4-b3-4).

 

It’s not like some jolly evening variant of Malkauns could ever have arisen in secret, evading detection by other artists before somehow finding its way to Trane (…or his source). Ragas do evolve through time, but their very existence relies on some public, shared consensus around certain distinctive essences and characteristic boundaries. While we could yet unearth previously hidden scores by Bach, Ravel, or Stravinsky, the concept of an ‘undiscovered raga’ makes little sense, at least in Trane’s era of recorded sound and widespread artistic interchange. If matching ragas really were out there, my collaborators would have known about them.

 

“I would like to discover a method so that if I want it to rain, it will start right away to rain. If one of my friends is ill, I’d like to play a certain song and he will be cured; when he’d be broke, I’d bring out a different song and immediately he’d receive all the money he needed. But what are these pieces, and what is the road to travel to attain a knowledge of them? That I do not know.” (Trane, 1963)

 

• Pursuance…and confusion •

Here…

So what was going on? A few possibilities sprung to mind. The scattered extra bars suggested Trane -or his source – may have been ‘thinking aloud’ about which notes to strengthen in his own explorations. This is a core dimension of raga – each has several ‘centres of gravity’, including the Sa (root note), vadi–samvadi (king and queen notes), and nyas (resting tones). 

 

The handwritten copying process may have introduced other approximations – while scale four’s strange four-in-a-row descent doesn’t seem to be an exact raga match, it does correspond to the shape of the Bebop Dominant, an eight-note jazz staple he already knew inside-out. But why is this familiar form now a ‘Scale of India’, linked to “Evening & night, praise”? (…I guess the phrase is a neat ‘when and how’ summary of Trane’s own concert routines of the era).

 

Similarly, any seeming inaccuracies could also be down to the source. The Simpkins scales, with their exoticised, outsider-ish titles (“Algerian”, “Chinese”, “Japanese”), must surely have come from a Western-authored compendium of some kind – and, given the vagueness of these names, I’d say it was probably a pretty fallible one in other respects too. (Scale theorist Ian Ring and I are still trying to track it down, but fortunately all three of Simpkins’ ragas were easily identifiable at first sight…although the same cannot be said of his other 15 global scales).

 

Likewise, the English-language Indian music textbooks of Trane’s era – often arcane works that barely made it outside of localised circles in the East or West – tended to be of dubious quality. Nazir Ali Jairazbhoy, an eminent musicologist (and guest sitarist on the Incredible String Band’s 1968 album The 5000 Spirits or the Layers of the Onion, credited as ‘Soma’), notes that “publications on Indian music have appeared in English…and the standard of scholarship often leav[es] much to be desired”. I can attest to this from experience (…and constantly fear that my own writing may become part of the problem) – but, despite years of raga reading, I’d never come across anything with quirks that matched Trane’s.

 

After stalling at what seemed like a dead end for a couple of months, I finally managed to contact Carl Grubbs, Trane’s cousin-in-law who had originally notated the Porter scales as a teenager. Clearly a keen student, Grubbs went on to achieve sax success in his own right (*), and is still going strong as a stalwart of the Baltimore jazz scene at 75. Our long Skype conversation covered many intriguing topics, including a vivid description of how Trane was exploring the modes in his 33rd Street living room in the early ‘60s – all of which we shall return to in depth later (spoiler alert: Trane seems to have been pretty into these ‘Scales of India’. Then again, he was pretty into a lot of other things too).

 

But despite an impressively detailed memory, Grubbs could recall nothing specific about the scales’ origins – just an unplaceable feeling that they may have come from a spiritually-inclined music book of some kind. This was already my working assumption: in late 1960, Trane told Downbeat interviewer Don DeMicheal that he’d “been devoting quite a bit of my time to harmonic studies on my own, in libraries and places like that. I’ve found you’ve got to look back at the old things and see them in a new light.”

 

I’d already checked through the main textbooks Trane was known to use, including his beloved Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns, published by composer and lexicographer Nicolas Slonimsky in 1947. I’d also asked a host of Trane-linked artists and scholars for possibilities and pointers, including both biographers mentioned above. The resulting discussions catalysed a wealth of new insights into his thinking (covered in Indo-jazz context: life and learning in NYC). However, nobody had any fruitful leads on the scales’ origin.

 

***

 

Lewis Porter confirmed Grubbs as a reliable source, and fleshed out the details from his own biography. He considered it likely that his scales came from a raga-specific textbook rather than a general anthology, and that Trane had just omitted the raga names, which would have been essentially meaningless to him (and, I would add from bitter experience, a nightmare to spell: anyone for Chayashankarabharanam, Kadanakuthuhalam, or Dvigandharabhooshani?). (Link to audio: female voice). 

 

Porter also added that Trane could have got them from guitarist Dennis Sandole, his longtime teacher, “who was known to show fancifully named pages of scales to his students, [who] in the days before copy machines, hand-copied them…he published a few pages like this in a book called Guitar Lore” (a great work, but no match). And similarly, Porter explained how virtuoso multireedist Yusef Lateef “collected ‘exotic’ scales, and must have shown some to Trane. He later published them in his Repository of Scales and Melodic Patterns…described similarly to Trane’s page, although he has raga names there” (ag 

 

Hafez Modirzadeh, an unclassifiable microtonal sax pioneer and SFSU Professor who wrote a 2001 paper entitled Aural Archetypes and Cyclic Perspectives in the Work of John Coltrane and Ancient Chinese Music Theory, recommended Alain Daneliou’s Introduction to the Study of Musical Scales, a tuning-tinged 1943 work that Trane is thought to have read at the Philadelphia Library. Though a likely-sounding candidate, it contained nothing that matched – and neither could I track down any searchable listings for the Philadelphia Library catalogues of the early 60s.

  • [pic]

I’d already been working my way through every English-language Indian classical textbook I could lay my hands on, seeking to trace the music’s historical evolution as part of a forthcoming Raga Index project. None I had flicked or scrolled through contained any hint of Trane’s sketches: nothing in William Jones’ Musical Modes of the Hindus (1799), nor N. Augustus Willard’s A Treatise on the Music of Hindusthan (1834), nor K.B. Deval’s The Hindu Musical Scale and the Twenty-Two Shrutees (1910), nor Dr. Ernest Clements’ Introduction to the Study of Indian Music (1913), nor Arthur Henry Fox Strangways’s The Music of Hindostan (1914).

 

Nor the Philharmonic Society of Western India’s 129 Sarigamas or Skeleton Melodies in 79 Ragas Collected and Arranged in an Adaption of the Staff Notation of Europe (1918), nor Dr. Arnold Adriaan Baké’s Researches in Indian Music and Folklore (1933), nor H.L. Roy’s Problems of Hindustani Music (1937), nor Alain Daniélou’s Ragas of Northern India (1949). Nor any others I could find. Even the works of Hazrat Inayat Khan, a veena-playing Sufi master who moved to London in 1914 to spread his doctrines of divine vibratory unity, yielded nothing – although Trane is thought to have read his Mysticism of Sound and Music (1923), a lecture collection focusing on such things as the spirituality of sound, the power of mantra-style repetition, and the interconnected nature of the whole universe. There’s even a chapter on music’s mind-altering powers entitled ‘Impressions’.

 

I was excited to spot that Swami Prajnanananda’s Historical Development of Indian Music was first published in 1960, the exact year that Coltrane really began to look East – but further googling revealed that it only came out in America some time afterwards. Similarly, Nazir Ali Jairazbhoy’s Rags of North Indian Music, though still widely respected in both the East and West, arrived in 1971 – a decade too late for Trane.

 

The canonic older works, such as Bharatamuni’s ~1st-century Nāṭyaśāstra (‘Rules for Artistic Representation’) and Śārṅgadeva’s 13th-century Saṅgītaratnākara (‘Ocean of Music and Dance’), also yielded nothing: some of Trane’s already-known ragas didn’t even exist until long after these treatises were released. And several towering modern landmarks, including Pt. Omkarnath Thakur’s Sangeetanjali Vols. 1-7 and Pt. V.N. Bhatkhande’s Hindustani Sangeet Paddhati series – both completed around 1930 – haven’t been translated into English even now (although for the latter, plans are afoot…).

 

Added to all this, I knew that Trane’s source was at least somewhat inaccurate – making it much less likely to have stood the test of time. But how had he come into possession of any Indo-Western textbook that I – and my scholarly collaborators – couldn’t trace the existence of?

 

“I’ve been devoting quite a bit of my time to harmonic studies on my own, in libraries and places like that…I want to broaden my outlook, [and] come out with a fuller means of expression. I’ve got to keep experimenting. I feel that I’m just beginning. I have part of what I’m looking for in my grasp, but not all.” (Trane, 1960)

 

• Lakshanagranthas: DIY scholarship •

Here…

Playfully frustrated by the continuing mystery, I had long reverted to just messing around with the scales on my guitar, seeing no further lines of enquiry I could follow other than keeping a watchful eye out for possible new sources as I completed other raga research. But Grubbs’ words had filled me with fresh hope: this spiritually-laden music textbook had to be out there somewhere.

 

The world of lakshanagranthas (‘scholarly writing about Indian arts’) is wide and refreshingly non-academised. Publishing habits have always been haphazard, and distribution was regularly confined to the city and language group of the author, with nothing resembling a central record of works to call on. Writers can have a range of motivations – no formal qualifications are required other than an impulse to explore a few fresh concepts in writing: perhaps an elderly vocalist seeking to preserve their family’s melodic knowledge for future students, or an intrepid 19th-century traveller taking ear-based notes during a whistlestop tour of the Subcontinent. 

 

As someone who used to procrastinate from my old office job by listening to ragas, I was pleased to learn that Śārṅgadeva, author of the ‘Ocean of Music and Dance’, wrote it in his spare time as a royal accountant at the court of King Singhana II (now I wonder what our accountants got up to when nobody was looking…actually, come to think of it, I have a lot to thank accountants for: Darbar, the Indian arts charity who gave me my first writing break, was founded by one – Sandeep Virdee – and world-leading violin virtuoso GJR Krishnan Lalgudi, who played at our festival, used to be a cost accountant. Superstar singer Shankar Mahadevan, of Jai Ho and Shakti fame, was a software developer for Oracle before turning pro, and Sandeep’s sitar-playing brother Harmeet juggles concerts with his day job as a Mercedes salesman in Slough. I think my grandparents’ friends bought a car off him once (‘this Indian chap, very polite’). Anyway, I digress – but to anyone surreptitiously reading this at work: don’t hesitate to find your own escapes).

 

This DIY ethic has led to a curiously fragmented state of musical discourse – something historically amplified by the dynastic competitiveness of the Mughal durbar (princely court) system, and further heightened by India’s vast geographical, cultural, and linguistic diversities. And the authors themselves, many of whom tended towards lives of introverted obsession, often didn’t bother self-publicising much beyond their existing creative circles.

 

So, while I may have been out of new leads, I always had hope that a new source might suddenly appear from somewhere…

 

I believe that man is here to grow into the fullest, the best that he can be. At least this is what I want to do. As I am growing to become whatever I become, this will just come out on the horn. Whatever that’s going to be, it will be. I am not so much interested in trying to say what it’s going to be. I don’t know. I just know that good can only bring good.” (Trane, **)

 

Next – Part 2: The Reverend Herbert Arthur Popley

 

• Trane’s Ragas •

John Coltrane left behind some cryptic, handwritten study notes entitled ‘Scales of India’. Here, I unravel the curious tale of what they are, where he got them, and what he was doing with them… [out 2022-23]

George Howlett is a London-based musician, writer, and teacher (guitars, sitar, tabla, & santoor). Above all I seek to enthuse fellow sonic searchers, interconnecting fresh vibrations with the voices, cultures, and passions behind them. See Homepage for more, and hit me up for Lessons!

• Support the site! •

everything 100% ad-free and open-access

Facebook Instagram Youtube Twitter