Transrational Jazz

Music has been a huge part of my life ever since I can remember, and jazz specifically has jumped to the forefront in the last 5 or so years.

As I was reading about the "pre-trans fallacy" for the umpteenth time, I started to draw musical parallels to the critics of free jazz that I had encountered.

Musicians such as Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane (late career especially) have been criticized by many lay people as being "just noise" while jazz experts hail them as musical geniuses.

What really made the parallels clear was when one apparent jazz expert claimed that chris potter was "just playing random notes".

The terms "pre-harmonious", "harmonious", and "trans-harmonious" jumped into my mind (I know it's a bastardization, but it's what made sense to me).

I immediately thought that a novice jazz player (PreH) would just stand up and play random notes during a solo, before any understanding of chord structure or scales had formed.

An intermediate level jazz player would stand up and play a solo that was directly in line with the chord changes (harmonious), producing a pleasant sounding solo that the layman would approve of. 

Finally, a trans-harmonious player would have become tired with just playing inside the changes, and would experiment with creating musical "rub", by playing outside the chords in a controlled manner.

At the end of the day I concluded that these free jazz "critics" were not at a sufficient musical altitude to interpret what the performers were saying. The almost exact overlap into critics of Ken Wilber's work was what led me to make this post.