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

“All of us would have perished long ago” clearly refers to Coltrane’s knowledge of the history of the black American experience.

“This form of yawps, squawks, and countless repetitive runs … should be confined to the woodshed.”7 Once again, these critics illustrated an ignorance of the syntax and semantics of Black American music culture.

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

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.

Believe me, Don, we all know that this word which so many seem to fear today, ‘Freedom’ has a hell of a lot to do with this music.

growing tendency of jazz to become more nihilistic and more self-consciously technical in its attempt to serve the psychological needs of its marginalized, intellectual audience as well as to become more anti-intellectual as it aspired for transcendence.”28

It also illustrates his awareness of the continued fear that existed in many black communities all over the United States as the Civil Rights Movement grew and expanded. Black lives were on the line daily, and many were subjected to abuse and even death.

his work is primarily arranged into three discernible periods—his early or harmonic period, his middle or modal period, his late or experimental period—to distinguish and weigh the significance of each.