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

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’

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.

A Love Supreme

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

He was part of the 1930s and 1940s migration of southern black working-class people who moved from agricultural areas of the South to urban cities in the North. For many writers, it is this circumstance that helps to account for Coltrane’s freedom quest, his contribution to an “epistemology of black freedom.”4

We have absolutely no reason to worry about lack of positive and affirmative philosophy. It’s built in us. The phrasing, the sound of the music attest this fact. We are naturally endowed with it.

most explicitly political, referencing the racial strife of the time. This move on the part of Coltrane and the force of its appeal among young black intellectuals, writers, and artists was less the expression of a whimsical adventure of happenstance or misdirection than the articulation of a very powerful yearning for black expression and dialogue

The proper name for it, if you want to speak about it historically, is music that has been created and developed by musicians of African descent who are in America.”11

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.”