Wesley La Violette — The Bhagavad Gita: An Immortal Song

Wesley La Violette brought together musical modernism, comparative religion, independent Los Angeles publishing, and the contrapuntal thinking that helped shape West Coast jazz. His private pupils included Jimmy Giuffre, Shorty Rogers, John Graas, and Frank Patchen, who carried his lessons in linear motion onto 1950s bandstands. At the same time, La Violette wrote books on love, consciousness, and religious experience. The Bhagavad Gita: An Immortal Song is the strangest meeting point of those careers. He called it an interpretation rather than a translation: Sanskrit names largely disappear, Krishna is identified with Christ, and the dialogue becomes nearly two hundred pages of patterned English verse. Recurring phrases, internal movements, and three levels of indentation give the poem an almost musical architecture. Spiritually earnest and historically revealing, the book captures both the ambition and the limitations of a mid-century American attempt to remake Indian scripture.