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

A Love Supreme

All these men were accomplished musicians leading black bands that played across the Midwest and South to predominantly black audiences in mostly segregated communities.

In other words, Coltrane practiced or enacted a concept of tradition, community, and identity (in sound) that sonically expressed and illustrated for black people a range of possibilities for crafting individual and collective selves into a more expansive and complex notion of blackness.

We know that he was a modest man, that he practiced incessantly, that he was generous to younger musicians, and that he loved working in the studio as much as performing

The spiritual songs have continued in the black community into the twenty-first century and provided the foundation for the phenomenal development of gospel, blues, and jazz.

Historically, the musics commonly labeled “blues” and “jazz” were created by black musicians to meet the needs of their people and community. These musicians were a part of the community and shared common experiences as black Americans.

He was nurtured by the black American belief that children should be taught to sing; that learning to sing—running sound through one’s body—was an essential component in developing to one’s full capacity as a human being.

Later, Coltrane chronicled one of these tragedies in his composition “Alabama,” which was written in the same year, 1963, as the murder of four little black girls in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham.

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