John Coltrane's Love Is Still Supreme at Age 60

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.

Much of this music was rooted in practices of the African ancestors, and it often reflected adaptations and innovations resulting from black American life experiences.

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.

“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.”