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

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

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.

An examination of Coltrane’s original compositions reveal over thirty that either use the term “blues” in the title or are harmonically and melodically based on the blues form with some variations.

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.

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.

I think the main thing a musician would like to do is give a picture to the listener of the many wonderful things he knows of and senses in the universe.

Max Roach:

“It is no accident,” says Early, that during the time of Coltrane’s greatest period as an artist, from 1960 to 1967, Martin Luther King was talking about redemptive love and sacrifice as a solution to the American race problem, many American artists and intellectuals, particularly after 1965 were going “Oriental” and turning to the East for