“The Yoko Ono of Jazz”

 This week, an old, ugly, misogynist, racist, character smear reared its ugly head (as so much vile, misogynist, racist slime does these days) when Dominic Green, music critic of the Weekly Standard, wrote: “The story goes that Coltrane was using LSD after 1965. If so, then the overreach and incoherence of his final music, and his mingling with admiring but inferior talents like Alice Coltrane, the Yoko Ono of jazz, suggest that Coltrane might be the sixties’ first and foremost acid casualty, flailing out rather than flaming out, the peak of his late style already behind him.”

Despite the welcome and robust rebuke Green has received online, this view, that “Alice Coltrane is the Yoko Ono of jazz” and that she is an “inferior talent” is not new. When Wynton Marsalis put together a celebration at Lincoln Center of Coltrane’s 80th birthday in 2006, he not only excluded any post A Love Supreme music (the music, with which Alice was most intimately involved), but relegated her concert to a side performance. Ben Ratliff, the great commentator on Coltrane’s music, was judicious in his comments at the time: “As far as Coltrane’s later work — mid-1965 to 1967 (when he died) — that music is alive from within and mysterious from without, and perhaps it’s better celebrated by other musicians anyway. (The accompanying list of highlights includes other concerts, including one by his widow, Alice Coltrane, that might do the job.) But let’s not get hung up on this issue.”

This hatred towards Alice Coltrane, her music and her relationship with John, had reached a crescendo in 1972 with the release of the album Infinty. On that album, Alice overdubbed her own orchestral arrangements over unreleased recordings of her husband’s playing. Though the outrage most music critics exhibited at the time was the re-contextualization of Coltrane’s playing (something akin to colorizing black and white films), it was also the “eastern” spirituality, the “feminine” strings, the squelching of the fire music that were also often cited.
    

What I find interesting about Green’s use of the “Alice Coltrane is the Yoko Ono of jazz” is that I grew up and developed musical taste somewhere between the controversy surrounding the release of Infinity and the 80th birthday tribute. My taste in music really developed in the 1990s, during a boom in CD reissues. I was in a position to actually compare Alice Coltrane and Yoko Ono’s music respectively because Journey in Satchidananda and Yoko Ono: Plastic Ono Band were both reissued on cd in 1997 and I bought both when they came out. I think it’s safe to say that Alice Coltrane’s music and Yoko Ono’s music don’t have very much in common (or as much in common as Johns Coltrane and Lennon have to each other). I loved both cds very much, and understood each as a radical, alternative path for their respective chosen genres: jazz and rock. 

Moreover, even if their music doesn’t share much in common, it is clear that both musicians were greatly respected by their peers: Ornette Coleman frequently collaborated with both Alice Coltrane and Yoko Ono (he appears on the bonus tracks of the Plastic Ono Band cd). Finally, as was pointed out by many musicians in magazines like the Wire during the 1990s, Alice Coltrane and Yoko Ono’s musical influence was/is widespread, with many younger musicians collaborating with Ono on her 90s albums, and musicians as widely diverse as Paul Weller, Nick Cave and Sunn0))) singing the praises of Alice Coltrane and naming songs/pieces after her and her work.
    

But, of course, Green doesn’t ask you to compare their work, their relationship with their life partners, or their subsequent influence on music. He just asks you to nod in assent and recognize the opportunistic succubus for what she is. He would probably protest this characterization and sugar-coat it as something more along the lines of “these poor geniuses (Johns Coltrane and Lennon), if only they weren’t so blinded by love and clouded by acid, they would have recognized how talentless these women are.” It’s a kinder, gentler form of misogyny, but it is still bald enough on its face that most people called it out on social media.
    

Green’s column comes just weeks after David Crosby (who is an odious person, lacking any meaningful friends at this point) responded to new songs by Yoko Ono by tweeting: “She may well be a very nice person but She cannot sing , write , or play, at all ...I was offended by her demanding to be taken as seriously as John ...pretension to artistic standing she did not deserve.” In a sense, Crosby is basically saying the same thing as Green only about the other person in the analogy. The reactions on social media couldn’t have been different. Many people came to Alice Coltrane’s defense when Green called her the Yoko Ono of jazz, and then subsequently came to Yoko Ono’s defense as well. The minute anyone on David Crosby’s social media page attempted to simply point out facts, i.e. Yoko Ono had an artistic career BEFORE she met Lennon, and that HE met HER at one of HER shows, someone was there to respond with how talentless she is, or how much money she’s made since Lennon’s death. 

It is not surprising at all that jazz fans would come to the defense of Alice Coltrane, not only because jazz has a longer history of embracing many musical forms (if not being known for gender diversity), but because many of the people defending her online seem to be my age and younger. I imagine many of them either grew up with the cd reissues that I did (and therefore didn’t have to simply go with the received notions older siblings and parents passed down), or grew up in the age of YouTube and Spotify, where they can hear these albums in multiple contexts. Also, younger jazz musicians have embraced the larger, technicolor, worldly, yet spiritual approach to jazz that Alice used as her palette (Kamasi Washington comes most readily to mind).
    

Yet, Crosby’s timeline demonstrates how deep rooted the misogyny against female musicians can be in our society, especially among the baby boomers and the culture surrounding their music. If, in the current generation of jazz musicians and fans, such disparaging of Alice Coltrane can be called out for the misogyny it is, clearly misogyny among boomer classic rock fans can still be couched in terms of talent, technique and creativity.  Green can get away with the shorthand of “the Yoko Ono of jazz” only because David Crosby and others had already laid the groundwork of the talentless, minority wife of a more famous guy.