John Coltrane and Black America's Quest for Freedom: Spirituality and the Music
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John Coltrane and Black America's Quest for Freedom: Spirituality and the Music
Black American culture believes it is important to exercise this part of your being—the part of your being that is tampered with when you run this sound through your body is a part of you that our culture believes should be developed and cultured; that you should be familiar with and that you should be able to get to as often as possible. And that
... See moreLeonard Brown • John Coltrane and Black America's Quest for Freedom: Spirituality and the Music
Singing was a principal means for enslaved blacks to express their humanity.
Leonard Brown • John Coltrane and Black America's Quest for Freedom: Spirituality and the Music
his understanding of the roles and functions of music in Black American culture, the legacy of black aspirations for freedom in the United States, and his intent to follow the “creative urge.”
Leonard Brown • John Coltrane and Black America's Quest for Freedom: Spirituality and the Music
Coltrane’s uses of harmonics, swoops, overtones, slurs, bends, multiphonics, yawps, and squawks are rooted in the aesthetics of the language of Black American music culture that can be found in performances of spirituals, sankeys, and shouts, as well as gospel, rhythm and blues, fusion, and even today’s rap. Archie Shepp’s comments on Coltrane’s
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creator of the Smithsonian Museum’s “Programs in Black Culture,” and one of the leading authorities on Black American music culture,
Leonard Brown • John Coltrane and Black America's Quest for Freedom: Spirituality and the Music
Many of the great black blues territory bands of the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s would often perform blues for an hour or more for all-black audiences who would dance the entire time.
Leonard Brown • John Coltrane and Black America's Quest for Freedom: Spirituality and the Music
His body of work produced in this period with the great quartet is characterized by greater and greater melodic and rhythmic freedom. This is the period in which Coltrane turns decidedly to Africa and the Third World for influences, producing song titles and arrangements that explicitly gesture to Africa; it is also the period when song titles and
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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
Leonard Brown • John Coltrane and Black America's Quest for Freedom: Spirituality and the Music
Meeting the man himself, it is hard to believe that such a quiet, calm, and serious individual could be responsible for the frantic ‘sheets of sound’ which emanate from his tenor saxophone, or that such [a] sensitive person could think of his uglier wailings on soprano as beautiful.”