John Coltrane and Black America's Quest for Freedom: Spirituality and the Music

His personal discipline was also expressed through his devotion to an ideal of purity and spirituality that led him to devote his life and work to the service of God and the human community.

Coltrane, on the other hand, “felt that his music could explicitly evoke and render something racial in its sound, just as he felt it could explicitly render something spiritual in its sound, both of which he felt would be obvious to a listener.”32

As a result, over the course of his career, Coltrane explored a number of different ways of approaching music and absorbed a vast variety of influences. Saul notes that “Coltrane moved from hard bop and modal jazz, to the suite form of ‘A Love Supreme’ and then the freer combinations that dropped the musical pulse entirely,”

quest for spiritual purity and racial solidarity became a quest for orthodoxy and the reinvention of alienation, a reaction to ideology of integration or assimilation.”

Coltrane’s own account, the period most associated with his first great defining style finds him trying to develop and master complex harmonies and chord structures.42 His aim, of course, was to expand the limits of the existing styles—swing, R&B, blues, and early bebop—in which he was formed and out of which he played. Coltrane’s second great

Scott Saul writes that “when Coltrane … reduced ‘Tunisa’ to its basics, he did so not to claim a higher originality but to reveal an even more direct and powerful drama of energy within the original piece, a charismatic drama that had been hidden by the earlier scaffold of sophistication…. Coltrane dug into ‘Tunisa’ to rewrite a song of spiritual d

In this sense, Coltrane’s sound of freedom, his infamous quest for perfection and ceaseless search for the “right sound” is, I think, neither mysterious nor otherworldly—but rather it is, I believe, the actual work of making freedom, grounded in the routine and everyday practice of doing and living.

The final period of his short life finds Coltrane pushing against both of these prior periods while drawing deeply on both. The period from 1965 to 1967 finds Coltrane in search of a new language, a new vocabulary of rhythmic and sonic possibilities. He draws these increasingly from world cultures and his own southern background. This, of course, i

One of the constants that appear in interviews with Coltrane is his commitment to push the limits of his own mastery regardless of how this mastery is fixed and canonized by the professional jazz critics.