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

In the black neighborhoods, he learned that developing one’s own sound was essential and that sound and feeling were paramount over technique.

Nina Simone: “Jazz is not just music, it’s a way of life, it’s a way of being, a way of thinking. I think that the Negro in America is jazz. Everything he does—the slang he uses, the way he talks, his jargon, the new inventive phrases we make up to describe things—all that to me is jazz just as much as the music we play. Jazz is not just music. It’

In other words, Coltrane is profoundly shaped by his generational location and his class position.

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.”

“Coltrane discovered and refined a style whose authority seemed purchased through the publicly performed anguish of his concerts and recordings. He pursued freedom not for the hell of it, but for the heaven of it—and he did so by creating settings of musical purgatory that forced him to confront his own limits.”

A Love Supreme

Max Roach:

His statement reflects his understanding of the power of the music’s sound to sustain his ancestors through three centuries of miserable, often horrific times, to lend strength and resilience to a people, and to serve as an anchor for the Freedom Movement in United States in the mid-twentieth century.

The black community had required, even demanded, music of a certain type and feeling—something that expressed their trials and tribulations, hopes and dreams, wants and needs, and that made them want to laugh and cry—on a nightly basis in the ’hood.