John Coltrane & R. Buckminster Fuller were soul brothers.The two most influential geniuses opening my ears to hearing were John Coltrane and R. Buckminster Fuller. An unlikey combination of names, you may say, to combine in the same sentence. The comparison is very interesting to me, and maybe it will be to others, so here's one of my ideas on it.
What I feel about Coltrane applies to Fuller and what I feel about Fuller applies to Coltrane. They are peers, one in music, the other in design. Understanding one helps me to get the other and visa versa.
Fuller, an American genius of design and concept revolutionized structural design and redefined structural integrity. I still remember the first time I saw his tensegrity model: an astounding tower built from two elements, one was tension steel cable, the second was compression members (wood struts), AND none of the wood struts touched any other wood strut! All wood struts touched ONLY steel tension cable. Yes! Think about this and you will quickly realize that this description is nearly impossible to imagine. You almost have to see the actual tower to believe it. Here's a picture of a tensegrity structure in the shape of a sphere at the University of Wisconsin's engineering department:
http://www.engr.wisc.edu/graphics/photos/campus-scenes/TENSEGRI.jpg
Visually, an analogy of what Coltrane independently created in music and composition. The following quote from Fuller couuld apply just as well to Coltrane. While reading the quote have fun with Fuller's advanced use of the English language, which freaked out a lot of people, as did Coltranes advanced us of compositional structure....
"The word 'tensegrity' is an invention: a contraction of 'tensional integrity.' Tensegrity describes a structural-relationship principle in which structural shape is guaranteed by the finitely closed, comprehensively continuous, tensional behaviors of the system and not by the discontinuous and exclusively local compressional member behaviors. Tensegrity provides the ability to yield increasingly without ultimately breaking or coming asunder." -Fuller
This applies to Coltranes compositional inventions too. Both men shocked and amazed the world and both men, Coltrane's integral necessity to expand one's attention span and Fuller's too, found listeners, whether at Fuller's lectures or John's music dates, having to connect the dots in new ways. This is, I feel, one of the many ways that John Coltrane passed his ascended consciousness on to his listeners. To hear, really hear Coltrane, required the listener to shift into an altered state.
I was deeply impressed upon first hearing Coltrane and am eternally thankful that he was on this planet.
