Trumpet artist Ryan Nielsen explores jazz through the lens of alchemy and Jungian psychology in homage to his mentor, John McNeil. A waking dream image led him to Boston to study with McNeil directly, pulling him away from his Mormon upbringing. In the alchemy of McNeil’s approach, radical ordinariness or self-acceptance is the heart of the alchemical opus.

Woven through the article are musical links: sonic doorways inviting the reader to listen and experience, not just read.

« Breaking Through » by Holly Parson Nielsen.

Intro – John McNeil
First Solo – Choice and radical ordinariness
Second Solo – Radical ordinariness as Mercurius
Interlude – John and the Mormon temple
Third Solo – The test of authenticity
The Head Out – The alchemy of jazz
Outro – Sophia’s wisdom in matter
Riff – When you accept yourself like that

The language of alchemy

I fell in love with the world of Jung because of the idea that the many within us wish to be known, to be seen, to be witnessed. That there is more to us than we consciously sense. That something in us knows us better than we know ourselves (as James Hollis is fond of saying).

I also loved the notion that this something has innate intelligence and communicates in the language of symbol/metaphor through our dreams, myths, fairy tales, symptoms, astrology, and alchemy. To me, these are like playgrounds where we can relearn our first language of metaphor.

This emphasis on symbol and metaphor struck me, because I lived from a place of monotone literalism for the decades before I encountered Jung, having grown up Mormon. (Though I have since left the Mormon church, I know many a thoughtful Mormon whose lives I certainly do not see as monotone.)

As I started paying attention to my dreams, that literalizing voice inside would still pop up and try to dismiss dream images that seemed strange to me. That’s when I would go to alchemy. Often, when a dream image felt so unusual that it couldn’t possibly mean anything, I would look up the given image or symbol in an alchemical text and experience resonance.

The alchemical references opened doors to dancing with the dream image in unexpected ways. Gradually, I caught myself saying: I feel three-dimensional for the first time in my life.

Alchemists started their work (the opus) with the raw materials of life, which they called the prima materia (mud, excrement, or other ordinary substances). They took this prima materia into their workshop and placed it into a glass vial called an alembic.

The alembic was the container for the entire process, a kind of temenos for transformation.

It had to be hermetically sealed (hermetically as in Hermes, that most shape-shifting of trickster gods) so that the heat of transformation could not escape.

The alchemist would then work with the prima materia to transform it (and so themselves) into the lapis, the Philosopher’s Stone, the alchemical gold, or the alchemical Sun.

They did this through a variety of procedures:

Separating out or separatio. I like to think of this as differentiation on some level. We might consider the motif of sorting that is so prevalent in fairy tales.
Dissolving or solutio. Sometimes, things that are rigid need to dissolve for new life to come into being. How often the portal to newness is a well.
Coagulating or coagulatio. The stickiness of attachment. Enmeshed, this keeps us from ourselves, as with motifs of stepparents or terrible bargains in tales. Differentiated, it is the relatedness that lets us know ourselves and others, as with encounters with guides and mentors in those same tales.
Calcifying or calcinatio. Sometimes intense heat is required to transform the parts of us that are no longer participating in our unfolding. Consider the tale of Vasalisa, whose fire, obtained from Baba Yaga, consumes the figures within who cannot stay with her in her newfound self.
Inner marriage or conjunctio. The union of those seeming opposites within, imaged as Shiva and Shakti in Tantric traditions, Yin and Yang in Taoist traditions, and Feminine and Masculine in Greco-Roman traditions. Maturely differentiated, conjunctio represents the joining of these (apparent) opposites via the friction that compels towards death and rebirth, sometimes little, sometimes not.

The seven metals (ranging from lead to gold) corresponded, symbolically, to the seven planets (ranging from Saturn to Sun), where the purpose of the work was to transform the prima materia into the alchemical gold/sun, known as the lapis.

For many alchemists, their understanding was non-literal. Most did not think they were trying to make actual gold. Rather, they sensed that the process unfolding within the alembic reflected their interiority, their own inner states, which seemed inexplicably connected to the material world in the alembic.

Perhaps most mysterious of all is the elusive Mercurius, the agent of transformation.

Mercurius was said to be found in three places at once: the prima materia, the Philosopher’s Stone (or alchemical gold), and in the alchemists themselves. Mercurius was also alive in three times at once: the beginning, middle, and end of the work. As Liz Greene explains so beautifully:

The alchemist is not changing something into something else […] She is releasing what was always there […] Nothing is added and nothing taken away. (Green, 1988, p. 267)

I love the implication that we are already whole in that sense.

In waking life, alchemists were accessing dreaming-psyche and partnering with it in connection to the materials of their workshop. It is as though they were tracking or attuning to the movements of psyche, through alchemy.

In today’s Jungian community, I find a similar tracking and attuning to psyche in Marian Dunlea’s BodyDreaming approach to the treatment of developmental trauma.

Von Franz, Jung, and others sensed a resonance between the materials, processes, and states of being in alchemy, and the movements of the psyche/soul. Jung even said that Mercurius was the « beginning and end » of the work. No Mercurius, no transformation. This piece will focus on de-mystifying Mercurius.

I like to play with the image of the prima materia as a symbol of symptoms, of pathologizing psyche, or as events in life that I perceive as adverse.

I love Liz Greene’s sense of the lapis, gold, or sun as a symbol of one’s innate sense of validity and uniqueness, a sense of authenticity no longer at the mercy of attachment, of the collective, or of the external.

As a jazz musician, these images resonate with me.

Like alchemy, jazz values authenticity (alchemical gold), forged on the bandstand (the alembic), spontaneously transforming the shit of life (the prima materia we call the Blues) through creative play (the opus).

It is at once playful and deadly serious.

There is one crucial difference between alchemy as such, and the alchemy of jazz. Jazz musicians spend thousands of hours in the practice room, like alchemists alone in the workshop. We actually call it the shed, as in the woodshed or the place where you go to chop and store wood for fire.

However, in jazz, one cannot accomplish the opus alone. It is only in collective improvisation, with other people, that we refine and deepen our experience of who we are.

Since I am writing on the intersection of alchemy and jazz, this piece follows the form of a jazz performance: Intro, Solo, Solo, Interlude, Third Solo, Head Out (the main theme), Outro, Riff (a repeated figure).

While we never know where the music will take us, every member of the audience is part of the band. Your presence changes the music, as it will the life of this piece.

Intro – John McNeil

Having opened a door between Jazz-land and Jung-land, I want to share some initiatory experiences I’ve had, courtesy of a mentor of mine who unexpectedly passed away in September of 2024. I am doing this, at least in part, out of a need for ritual, for a space where I can re-member and re-collect, in the absence of a funeral service for him.

His name is John McNeil. This piece is a tribute to him.

For a perfect introduction to John’s eccentric sense of humor, go to YouTube and type in « Happy Holidays from Hush Point. »

John is an icon in the jazz world: he’s the musician’s musician.

He was trumpeter in the Horace Silver Quintet and played on dozens of albums with his utterly unique voice.

You might go listen to John’s performance of The Old Standard, from his album Fortuity.

He once told me he was especially proud of that performance, in part because his CMT had flared up a month before the session. This neuromuscular disease plagued him his whole life and felt like « having a shotgun pointed at his head ». This particular episode disabled his right hand, which is the one trumpeters use most.

Faced with the decision to cancel the session or play left-handed, he chose to play left-handed.

You would never know it, listening to the album.

The next thing to know about John is that he would despise the jargon in Jung-land, and he would not hesitate to tell us so.

He was suspicious of language that allowed experts to set themselves above their students; suspicious of language that functioned as a gate-keeper for power structures of any kind; and especially dismissive of language that could be used as arid intellectualizing, allowing one to pose as if they had experiential knowledge when, in fact, they were using the language to avoid meeting themselves.

John was the same person in every situation.

Every moment, every interaction, was infused with his distinct signature. He left it to others to decide if they approved or not. He could be maddeningly stubborn. He also called me (and everyone else) Sweetie. And speaking of sweet, his devotion to the love of his life, Lolly, with whom he lived for more than 40 years, carried an unmistakable sense of gentleness, reverence, wit, and a sense of humor between them that took no topics off the table.

When the mother of a prospective student asked, « If my son comes here to study with you, what will you teach him? », he understood that she meant, « I have no respect for this art form you have devoted your life to, and feel it a waste of time and money for my son to pursue it ». John, sensing her bias, played into a stereotype by replying, « Well, first I’m going to teach him how to tie the rubber band so that the needle doesn’t leave a mark » (by which he meant: I will not give your question the dignity of a response).

When he shared this with me, I was speechless. It didn’t matter if you were the pope, the president of New England Conservatory, a colleague, a student, a stranger, or the mother of a prospective student. John showed up as John, everywhere he went.

His ability to show up as himself also makes him an apt guide into the alchemy of Jazz. For the heart of John’s teaching, writing, and artistry came from this very sense of radical ordinariness.

First Solo – Choice and radical ordinariness

In the alchemy of John’s approach to jazz, radical ordinariness, or radical self-acceptance, is the heart of the opus.

And, paradoxically, such radical self-acceptance cannot be cultivated alone. Radical self-acceptance requires relatedness, requires playing with other musicians. One of the clearest descriptions of this paradox comes from Liz Greene, Jungian analyst, scholar, and astrologer:

I would have no awareness of you unless I projected a bit of myself onto you, and you on me. But in creating this energetic flow and counterflow, we will inevitably force each other to define ourselves in order to survive as individuals. Without projection we would never interact with each other; and we would not only never recognize each other—we would never recognize ourselves. And then we would be truly fated, because we would possess no capacity for choice. (Greene 2023, p. 66)

She may as well have been describing jazz. And the capacity for choice Liz Greene talks about is exactly where John started with me.

Coming into our first lesson together, I had a very different sense of improvising than he did. I thought it meant regurgitating phrases I had memorized, as played by other jazz musicians. We call these licks. At the time, when I improvised, I wasn’t making my own choices. I was hiding behind the sounds of others which I had learned by rote memory.

But to John, improvisation is nothing more, nor less, than making choices: your own choices.

John immediately heard what I was doing and designed an exercise for me, using two basic musical structures, where he limited my choices with guidelines for moving between them. These were the rules of the game. The choices allowed were simple. Not too many so as to avoid being overwhelming. But they were mine. Within a week, I was hearing and playing sounds I had never played before.

A year later, I went to John and had a conversation that changed my life as an artist, teacher, musician, and person.

Me: John, we need to talk about teaching.

John: Oh! Teaching’s easy!

Me: What do you mean, it’s easy?!?!

John: Well, everybody learns the same way: exposure and repetition.

Me: (Thinking to myself that this was heretical. Everyone learns the same way?) Let’s say I’m willing to accept that. How do you get your students to engage repetition creatively?

John: Simple. You just have to be sure they’re making choices all the time while they practice.

He said it like it was the most obvious thing in the world. But it felt revolutionary to me.

Just be sure you’re making choices all the time while you practice.

In my decades of music study, I had never before encountered a truly choice-centered pedagogy. Every other system of study I learned centered around rote memory.

Choice. Simple, non-overwhelming choice. This was the beginning, middle, and end of the path that John designed for me to encounter my ordinariness (eventually).

And repeated encounters with my ordinariness gradually cultivated a sense of my innate validity and uniqueness. Radical ordinariness, practiced by making simple choices, was the catalyst for creative development in John’s studio.

And, not just any choice would do. To unlock creativity, the choices had to seem obvious to the person. « What’s obvious to you is not obvious to me, or to anyone else », he often reminded me.

By the same token, in John’s view, reaching or striving took people away from their innate creativity. This stood in stark contrast to my previous musical training.

John just kept reminding me: What’s ordinary to you, is who you are.

I once asked John, « What’s the greatest stumbling block facing music students today? »

He didn’t hesitate at all: « Easy. They try to play well. »

A bit perturbed and intrigued, I responded, « Of course we do, John! Isn’t that what we’re doing in school? Learning to play well? »

To which he responded: « That’s the whole problem. How many musicians do you know who play poorly on purpose? »

I went quiet. « None », I replied.

« Then it’s wasted effort. You’re wasting energy that could be brought to the task at hand by trying to do well. »

You got me, John.

Second Solo – Radical ordinariness as Mercurius

To translate John’s world into alchemical language: radical ordinariness is Mercurius, that elusive agent of transformation in the alchemist’s work, and in the creative process. To John, choice was an especially effective road to unlocking it.

My favorite overview of the role of Mercurius in alchemy comes from Liz Greene:

Through the lens of alchemy we can see the potential in the shit […] The prima materia is the beginning of the opus. At the end of it stands the lapis […] sometimes called gold […] a sense of individual essence.

If a person does not have this sense of inner validity and uniqueness, then [they] are at the mercy of the collective and of external events […]
The alchemists believed the lapis […] also referred to as Mercurius […] had a catalytic effect on the world around it. In other words, the lapis would transform other base substances simply by being what it was.
(Greene 1988, p. 265)

Simply by being what it was.

John might say that the lapis transforms shit by being ordinary. But there is more to this alchemical mystery. Returning to Liz Greene:

However, Mercurius is also the prima materia—the base, smelly, devilish and conflict-ridden in us. There is a secret unity between Mercurius as base substance and Mercurius as alchemical gold. The feces which cause shame and guilt are the same as the luminous figure of Christ.

The alchemist is therefore not changing something into something else […] She is releasing what was always there […] Nothing is added and nothing taken away. But an alchemical transformation occurs. Even more paradoxical: the alchemist considered herself Mercurius as well.
(Greene 1988, p. 266-267)

So, Mercurius is a mysterious substance, a transformative agent within and without, present in the shit of life (the blues/prima materia), present in the lapis or alchemical gold (the sense of inner uniqueness), and in the alchemists themselves.

Thus, the art is one of releasing what was always there. Nothing added. Nothing taken away.

Translated into John-speak:

Whatever is obvious and ordinary to you is the transformative agent in the creative process. You aren’t lacking anything. And you will encounter your sense of inner uniqueness to the extent that you radically accept and trust the winding, circuitous ordinariness of you (Mercurius).

Translated into Christ-speak:

Consider the lilies of the field; how they grow. They toil not; neither do they spin, and yet Solomon in all his glory was never arrayed as one of these. (Mathew 6:28 KJV)

Translated into Buddha-speak:

The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on green earth. (Hanh 1995, p. 23)

Translated into Grecian myth-speak:

Narcissus, after encountering self-as-other, speaking with the trees, glowing and eventually being consumed by the fire of love, becomes an ordinary flower. (Moore 1992)

Be ordinary.

Interlude – John and the Mormon temple

One creates inner freedom only through the symbol. The symbol is the [sound] that goes out of the mouth, that one does not simply speak, but that rises out of the depths of the self as a word of power and great need and places itself unexpectedly on the tongue. (Jung 2009, p. 310)

That John would initiate me into such a mystery was made clear in one of my first experiences of active imagination as an adult. For context, a touch of background.

I grew up Mormon. Having left Mormonism 7 years before writing this, you might say I now consider myself a recovering Mormon.

In the Mormon church, there are ordinances (rites seen as necessary for salvation) reserved for the most faithful. One of those is called the endowment. In that ritual, participants enact the story of Adam and Eve in a narrative that portrays eternal progression from pre-earth life, to earth life, to post-earth life, where they ascend the kingdoms of heaven.

To gain access to the endowment, one must be pronounced worthy by a judge in Israel, a member of the all-male clergy, by answering a series of questions meant to gauge one’s commitment to Mormonism; one’s loyalty and obedience to the male leaders of the church. Once pronounced worthy, one is issued a pass called a temple recommend, which allows entrance into a Mormon temple to participate in the endowment and other rituals seen as essential to get to heaven.

The climax of the endowment ritual, for me, was the point at which we passed from the Terrestrial Kingdom (the second-highest kingdom of heaven) to the Celestial Kingdom (the highest kingdom of heaven). In that passing, one stands at a white veil separating the participant from the presence of God. Then, from the other side of the veil, an officiant, representing God himself, parts the veil with his hand to teach the participant what they must learn to enter God’s presence.

The image that Psyche offered me was that of John’s hand, parting the veil in the Mormon temple, as if he were the officiant, as if he were the proxy for God.

In the image, he took me by the hand. The obvious implication is that John would be bringing me into the light. And this image came at a time when I was trying to decide where to go for my doctoral studies as a fully believing Latter-Day Saint, who believed I belonged to the only true church.

Immediately, my conscious self went to work reclaiming the image so as not to rock ego’s (or the institution’s) boat. After all, that image was a bit backwards, wasn’t it? I mean, I was the one with the truth of Mormonism, not John.

There’s something literal in my initial interpretation of this image, which I understood as a vision of John becoming Mormon. But, as a new Jungian friend pointed out, perhaps there is something of the Trickster archetype at play here as well. Without a doubt, if I had accurately understood this image, I would never have gone to Boston.

I read the image as me needing to go to Boston to convert John McNeil to Mormonism.

Anyone who knew John is definitely laughing right now. But that is exactly what I set out to do. It hurts to make this public knowledge.

But in retrospect, it is so clear. That image of John’s hand parting the veil in the Mormon temple to bring me into the light was an image of what was about to happen over the next 15 years, as John mentored me into the radical acceptance of my own ordinariness, and into an innate sense of my inner wholeness.

For me, that meant (eventually) leaving the faith of my upbringing, which meant walking away from my job at a Mormon university, my entire world view, and the only community I had ever really known.

Over that time, I experienced an unbearable tension of the opposites between John’s teaching, designed to root me in my authenticity, and my Mormon culture, designed to root me in loyalty to the institution through obedience to the male leaders of the church. This was exemplified in the practice of the worthiness interviews I referred to previously.

I experienced these worthiness interviews as a requirement to hand over the locus of my sense of worthiness to another human being, as determined by authorized priesthood leaders. This priesthood leader sat in judgment over me and, according to what I was taught, had the power to keep me from accessing heaven if they deemed me unworthy. They determined my worthiness by virtue of the gift of discernment, a spiritual gift believed to have been bestowed on the male leader of the congregation, which allowed them to know the heart of the person they were interviewing.

For a fuller treatment of this story, see « Mormon Stories Ryan and Holly Nielsen » on YouTube.

But on the other side of that unbearable tension of the opposites, when it finally transformed in a moment of crisis (prefigured by another dream), there was a sense of finally being real, of being enough, of being ordinary, obvious, me.

It also meant birthing a newfound sense of wellness and wholeness alongside a creative life deeper than perfectionism. Radical ordinariness as the alchemical Mercurius. So much transformation.

Third Solo – The test of authenticity

In 2010, having studied with John for 9 months, I flew back to Idaho for a performance of my own music. My intention was simple: be ordinary. I intended to play only what I heard, only what was obvious to me.

And for the first time in my life, I did. No reaching. No striving. No playing things that I knew would sound cool. Just grounded, ordinary, obvious me.

Here’s my performance of Abel Promise, which happened to be bootlegged that evening.

But instead of the profound healing experience I had expected, I felt a disorienting sadness and sense of loss. And yet, I knew the music had unfolded beautifully. It was so confusing to me.

I returned to Boston feeling concerned and shared my experience with John. I asked him if I was going crazy. « Does any of this make sense to you? »

He replied with an image of his own « All this time you were clinging to a rope, swinging out over what you thought was an abyss. On that gig, you finally let go of the rope. » To John, I was grieving the loss of who I’d thought I was: the loss of the rope I thought was me.

He also assured me the descent wasn’t into an actual abyss. Rather, he suggested, it was the territory of myself. « There’s a lot more there than you think », he said. Any Jungian might chuckle at that vast understatement.

A life of striving, reaching, grasping (life prior to letting go of the rope) had led me to believe that creative life was always higher, always a high. But after letting go of the rope-I-thought-was-me, I was no longer interested in the highs of the transcendent. They may come, and they may go; but the alchemy of ordinariness, of experiencing life in my particular body, with my particular footprints, is the practice that draws me out.

Letting go of the rope, and the grief that followed, made room for new creative life.

I later composed a piece entitled Letting Go, which feels like the most ordinary-me of any work I’ve done to date.

There is something about authenticity that produces a sense of loss. James Hillman, too, speaks to this.

The imaginal realm has its own paths which start with whatever comes to mind—any fantasy or image—much like alchemy. Fantasy does not need to achieve a goal. Imaginative activity is both play and work, and as the images gain substance, the ego’s autocracy tends to dissolve. But ego dissolution does not mean disorder, since all fantasy is carried by a deeper, archetypal order.

The best test of authenticity is that the habitual ego senses itself at a loss. (Hillman 1992, p. 40-41)

We might see these as insights into the alchemical solutio: the experience of the dissolution of my identification with ego, of the rope-I-thought-was-me.

To my perception, Hillman’s insights present four steps within the solutio process:

An encouragement. Start with anything. Start with whatever comes to mind. John would call this playing or choosing what’s obvious to you. Truly, there is no pressure to start with something good.
A letting go. As the images gain substance, or we might say, as the music comes alive, the ego’s autocracy tends to dissolve. In John-speak, we let go of the rope.
A reassurance. The other side of letting go is not disorder. There is something deeper. Hillman’s sense of archetypal order. McNeil’s sense of what I (inaccurately) perceived as an abyss. There’s a lot more there than you think.
A sense of loss. But don’t fret. This feeling of loss is the best test of authenticity. We grieve letting go of the rope we thought was us. Loss is only the end if we remain committed to ego’s delusion of life as linear, and loss as the proverbial end of the line. By contrast, Clarissa Pinkola Estes emphasizes that myth and folklore reveal « the Life/Death/Life Nature » of the psyche (Estes 1992). In Psyche’s realm, the cyclical reigns, and with it the promise of rebirth. Or, as John would say: « There’s a lot more there than you think. »

The Head Out – The alchemy of jazz

What the blue devils of gloom and despair threaten is not the soul. What is at stake is a sense of well-being that is at least strong enough to meet the requirements of the workaday world. Accordingly, in addition to forthright confrontation and expurgation, [jazz] also consists of rituals of resilience and perseverance through improvisation in the face of capricious disjuncture. (Murray 2017, p. 42)

And so, we find ourselves back at jazz as an alchemical art: the stage an alembic, the music the transformative fire, the audience and musicians the alchemist(s).

And I have made the case that, in this art form, radical ordinariness is Mercurius. It is the agent that transforms, synchronously present in the blues (prima materia), in the inner sense of uniqueness (alchemical gold), and in the musicians/audience (the alchemists).

Now I hope to invite you deeper into the soulful as it relates to this music. We will be singing in the playgrounds of alchemy and myth, dancing with what James Hillman calls the work and play of seeing through, applied to the nature of jazz.

To Hillman, a starting point in this play has to do with personifying. To experience seeing through, our questions invite us into the imaginal when they ask who is animating phenomena (as opposed to what).

What follows is my engagement with that. Most of all, I hope you can sense how much I love this art form, which feels so alive to me.

In jazz, we play a song, and repeat the musical form of the song over and over, as a vehicle for improvisation.

An example is the love song The Nearness of You.

The musical form refers to the length of phrases (coming from the lyrics and melody) as well as the chords behind the melody. And improvisation on that form means that, within the limits of the form of the song, we are making up everything we play.

Our art is one of stating the truth of where we are in a given moment, while simultaneously making space for the voices of those around us, even as we challenge them.

As such, musical form in Jazz is spiralic. It repeats cycles of the “same” chords again and again (“same” in air-quotes here to share a laugh at the thought that one could possibly enter the same river twice). Marion Woodman (1982, p. 8) suggests that the spiral is a form familiar to the archetypal Feminine.

Beneath these repeating cycles, an oceanic wave rises, falls, crashes, whirlpools, sprays, plunges, settles, and flows, baptizing each return in the musical form as an « ever renascent fulfillment » of distinction (Rhudyar 1978, p. 113). Ever renascent, ever reborn, every return made new, every moment an initiation.

There is no linear evolution; there is only a circumambulation of the Self. (Jung 1989, p. 222)

Jazz undulates. Its grooves are Her grooves, the rhythms of Gaia, Earth Herself, whose seasons and cycles are reliable yet ever-changing. So it is with groove in jazz.

Happy Little Tune lets you experience our dance with the infectious grooves of the Brazilian Samba, which is always infused with some joy and celebration.

Embody Her sounds, and you sense Her living pulse, tributaries of en-earthed, en-souled veins, alive under our feet; a surging creative groove that calls to mind the image of the Virgin as archetypal Feminine complete in Herself, with no need for externals to seed Her creative gestation (Woodman 1985). Archaeologist Marija Gimbutas reminds us that the image of the Self-fertilizing phallus of the Goddess is ancient in the human psyche (Gimbutas 1982, p. 216).

I see this in contemporary culture in the astrological glyph for the constellation Virgo. These images of self-contained wholeness, creative matrix ensouled, entwined with the cycles of earth and moon, resonate with my experience of this music.

An example would be our New Orleans take on Driftin.

In his preface to the I Ching, Jung suggests that each moment in time has its own qualities, and every phenomena within that moment is consistent with its qualities. This idea is not so mystifying to musicians who perform the same piece, night after night. If we try to recreate a previous performance, a previous moment in time, the music dies.

Because jazz is an improvised music, it lives in the spontaneity of soul dancing with the qualities of this particular moment, in « our particular bodies, with our particular footprints » (Dunlea 2024). My dear friend, the great drummer Kobie Watkins once reminded me emphatically: « Feet! Feet! »

Keep your awareness in your feet, grounded, and you will be supported by the energy of the music. Leave your feet—go chasing the spirit/pneuma in the music by splitting and fleeing upwards—and you risk depletion.

Summarizing Robert Johnson, to enter the cathedral is to enter at the feet, after all (Johnson 2022).

As jazz musicians, inflation is a very real risk of the job. In Icarian fashion, many a jazz musician has been seduced by the impulse to taste spirit/light and identify with it. Touch the archetypal flame directly, identify with that upper world, and you will get burned. Even Prometheus needed vegetation to contain the solar light, and he was an earthy titan.

Make the mistake of believing you are the archetypal within the alembic of the stage, and you risk illness. Or worse. A cursory study of the history of Jazz makes this clear. So many untimely deaths.

Jazz is not just about expression or catharsis, and the blues are not sad.

Rather, Jazz is an art of spontaneously translating one’s interiority into a language of ritualized, archetypal sounds (Murray, 2017). Containers, temenoi, are paramount. We weave them within a mutually argued-and-agreed-upon experience of passing time: a groove.

The groove is the conflagrating threshold. Kronos (material time) becomes Kairos (mythic time).

Falling Upward shows an especially memorable take where the music opened into what I’m calling mythic time on the session. We knew it the second Kobie Watkins, the drummer and leader on the session, played his first notes.

We access the archetypal through each other, just as we can only touch the ocean by first touching a single wave.

In jazz, the gateway to the archetypal is the personal.

Our dance is at once individual and communal, inner and outer, since, by some mystery, inner shifts immediately impact the sound in the acoustic realm of space-time.

To the jazz musician, synchronicity is not mere theory.

Jazz shares ancestors with voodoo as well as with the kinds of charismatic Christian experiences that infuse the Black Church (Shipton 2008; Murray 2017). The occult and the pious, the heretical and the sanctified, side-by-side.

Lineage is sacred and living in jazz. Make a trip to Snug Harbor in New Orleans just to hear Delfeayo Marsalis’s Uptown Jazz Orchestra, and you’ll feel exactly what I mean.

In playing with the raw material of the blues we transform our relationship to the blues; to what Hillman might call those adverse events with which psyche produces experience (Hillman 1992, pp. xvi, 57).

With all due respect to the devils we call the blues, we sing and dance them away in what Albert Murray calls a Dionysian purification ritual (Murray 2017).

Triple B Blues, North Carolina Style is a nice example of this. This was our first time playing together as a band.

Jazz is a music of soul. James Hillman’s life-long study of soul lead him to suggest that soul is the space between events and experience (Hillman 1992, p. xvi). That makes sense to me as a jazz musician. It speaks to a territory we cultivate and explore throughout our lives in this art.

Here is a « middle ground between repression and possession » (Greene 1988, p. 279). And we never know where our explorations may lead, guided by Psyche and Eros, or maybe even Hermes and Iris: that most Mercurial of energies with whom Jung said the work begins and ends.

But we could never say that we know the middle territory well. For, while we access the realm from time to time, it is an ever-changing inscape of living images: sonic, visual, and mythic.

And Jazz’s embrace of the sensual, of the embodied, gives us some understanding of the conjunctio in the alchemy of the music.

So central is the image of conjunctio in jazz that, to this day, when someone does something that throws off the groove, musicians commonly joke (or get upset) about coitus interruptus.

And, sometimes, the unexpected coitus interruptus on a gig produces a newly emergent beauty as we sort things out, in real time, on the bandstand (not unlike Aphrodite’s emergent life following Kronos’s interruption of his parents’ union).

These mythic Goddesses and Gods, these alchemical processes, are alive in this music. They are not abstractions to me, nor to the musicians I love and admire, though we may call the patterns and energies they represent by different names. We have experienced them, directly, through this extraordinary music, which is forever deep, a music of Soul. Of Psyche.

Outro – Sophia’s Wisdom in Matter

There is a totally new feminine coming into the culture. A conscious femininity in matter. The planet is expressing consciousness. Our bodies are expressing consciousness. Matter is coming alive in a way that She has never been alive before. (Woodman 2015, ep. 7)

The jazz musicians I love to listen to and play with know what it is to be danced by what Marion Woodman calls « Sophia’s wisdom in matter » (Woodman 1992), the consciousness of matter Herself.

Once the temenos is in place for Her release, She rises majestically from behind the dark pillar at the center of the ritual space, the stage-alembic. In her Androgynous and Amphibious Beauty, She opens the amphitheater of her mouth, and bathes us in her truth-telling waves of sound.

If we unhesitatingly cross that living threshold of groove together, Beauty, in all Her complexity, is bound to emerge, whether by Gaia’s Earth, Thetis’s Sea, or the Cosmic Black Substance of Nyx.

I have experienced this teeming throughout the rich Black soil of this music: songs and dances of the Black Madonna.

To me, the sonic-alchemy-of-Jazz is rooted in the archetypal Feminine, what Demetra George calls « The Law of the Cycle » (George, 1992), and Clarissa Pinkola Estes calls « Life/Death/Life Nature » (Estes, 1992). As such, I find myself chuckling about the pseudo-masculine view that darkness equates to negativity and evil, which I played host to for so long.

What happened to darkness as gestation, soil, germination, womb, seed, embodiment, the cyclic, rebirth, and the Lunar? Answers to that question are compellingly addressed in the writings of Riane Eisler, Mary Condren, Bell Hooks, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Marion Woodman, and Demetra George.

What I did not know, could not have known, was that it was Her calling to me, the whole time. Her cycles, Her rhythms, Her healing, Her aliveness, Her wisdom, Her truth-telling, Her dance.

How could I have known? Growing up as I did, we were not allowed to speak to Her. Those who did were thrown out of the group; literally excommunicated (Toscano 2007). She, the Divine Mother, was too fragile, we were told, to handle our mess in the world. We were not to burden Her; we were only to address our Father-God, under penalty of exile. Put alchemically, those who started the opus, were cast out of the community.

And yet, there’s something miraculous and subversive about how She found me through the music. How She called me back to Self and Life, within and without. How Psyche found a way to place me in the path of John’s mentoring through the cyclical forms and grooves of Jazz.

John played a central role in initiating me into the mysteries of this creative rebirth, of the cyclical, of the Feminine. That initiation can be encapsulated in a single phrase, shared with those he chose to mentor:

Be ordinary. What’s ordinary to you, is who you are.

Shortly after his passing, and thank you, Farayi, for calling me to let me know, I rediscovered a word-for-word transcription of something he said. It almost reads like a poem:

When you perform,
Don’t try to do anything.
You should feel like what you’re playing is the most simple,
boring thing in the world.

To you.

When you accept yourself like that,
First, you’ll feel a sense of loss,
Like you’re out to sea but there is nothing to hold onto.

In fact, what you were holding onto before
Was obscuring your view.
Stopping you from seeing what really is.

You may think, “This is just me! There is nothing interesting here!”

But you’ll find out.
You really are interesting.

Riff – When You Accept Yourself Like That

When you accept yourself like that, yes, you will feel grief as the best test of authenticity.

When you accept yourself like that, you will confidently, unhesitatingly show up as you. Not as a fixed entity, but as a living river whose innate sense of uniqueness allows you to move, no longer at the mercy of the collective and the external.

When you accept yourself like that, you will release what was already there. Nothing added. Nothing taken away. But an alchemical transformation takes place.

When you accept yourself like that, you might say, with Mary Oliver:

I don’t want to be demure and respectable. I was that way, asleep, for years. (Oliver 2020)

Or with Maya Angelou:

And still I rise. (Angelou 1978)

When you accept yourself like that, you will see that « There is nothing else to trust, nothing to do but follow the circuitous meanderings of this surprising character » (Greene 1988, p 270-271). That surprising character is obvious, ordinary you.

When you accept yourself like that, you’ll find out, you really are interesting.

Thanks, John. I miss you. We miss you.
Hoping to Keep on Keepin’ on.
I (we) could use your help.
“Lemme no.”

Ryan (“Sweetie”)
Reader’s Name Here (also, “Sweetie”)

March 2025

References

Angelou, M. (1978). Still I Rise. www.poetryfoundation.org
Dunlea, M. (2019). BodyDreaming in the Treatment of Developmental Trauma: an Embodied Approach. Routledge.
Dunlea, M. « Body Dreaming Training, » (Presentation at Body Dreaming Training: Mask Workshop, Einsiedeln, Switzerland, November 2024).
Estes, C.P. (1992). Women Who Run with the Wolves. Ballantine Books.
George, D. (1992). Mysteries of the Dark Moon. Harper Collins.
Gimbutas, C. (1982). Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe. University of California Press.
Greene, L., & Sasportas, H. (1988). The Dynamics of the Unconscious. Red Wheel/Weiser.
Greene, L. (2023). The Horoscope in Manifestation: Psychology and Prediction. The Wessex Astrologer.
Hanh, T.N. (1995). Living Buddha Living Christ. Riverhead Books.
Hillman, J. (1992). Re-Visioning Psychology. Harper Perennial.
Hillman, J. (2021). The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World. Spring Publications.
Johnson, R., & Woodman, M. (2022). Marion Woodman and Robert Johnson in Conversation: Jungian Psychology Through the Eyes of Two Masters. Better Listen.
Jung, C.G. (1968). Foreword to the I Ching, Wilhelm/Baynes edition. Routledge and K. Paul.
Jung, C.G. (1989). Memories, Dreams, and Reflections. Vintage.
Jung, C.G. (2009). The Red Book: Liber Novus. WW Norton.
Murray, A. (2017). Stomping the Blues. University of Minnesota Press.
Oliver, M. (2020). Devotions. Penguin Books.
Moore, T. (1992) Care of the Soul. Harper Perennial.
Rudhyar, D. (1978). An Astrological Triptych. ASI Publications.
Shipton, A. (2008). A New History of Jazz. Continuum.
Toscano, M. (2007). Interview: Margaret Toscano. American Experience. PBS.
Woodman, M. (1982). Addiction to Perfection. Inner City Books.
Woodman, M. (1985). The Pregnant Virgin. Inner City Books.
Woodman, M. (2015). Sitting by the Well. Audiobook. Sounds True.
Woodman, M., Danson, K., Hamilton, M., & Greer Allen, R. (1992). Leaving My Father’s House. Shambhala.

Ryan Nielsen, DMA

Dr. Ryan Nielsen is a trumpet artist who has performed and recorded with various artists to critical acclaim, including Kobie Watkins, Delfeayo Marsalis, Bobby Broom, and Ra Kalam Bob Moses. His YouTube channel, Ryan’s Trumpet, has thousands of subscribers from around the globe.

Nielsen is Jazz Editor of the International Trumpet Guild Journal, and authored, with John McNeil, The Classroom Guide to Jazz Improvisation, published by Oxford University Press in 2024. You can find him at www.ryanstrumpet.com.

Radical ordinariness: John McNeil and the alchemy of jazz

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