Urban Magic
Urban Magic
Jazz Communitarianism1
The history of American religions is overrun with intentional communities and religious utopian experiments, many of which have a strongly pedagogical and/or social critical dimension. Jazz has nurtured a number of significant counter-academies, community organizations, and experimental societies focused on musical and religious development simultaneously. This chapter examines several such endeavors—Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, St. Louis’s Black Artists Group, Los Angeles’s Union of God’s Musicians in Artists Ascension, the Church of John Coltrane, and Alice Coltrane’s ashram—in light of this long history of new religious movements and their alternate socialities. By examining and contextualizing the motivations of community members, we see how the disciplines of music-making are integral to (even coterminous with) the formation of new religious identities that contrast with those of an artless world.
Keywords: Communitarianism, Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, Black Artists Group, Union of God’s Musicians in Artists Ascension, John Coltrane, Alice Coltrane, social criticism
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
