The silence between the notes is as important as the notes themselves.
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.”
Leonard Brown • John Coltrane and Black America's Quest for Freedom: Spirituality and the Music
The mind is a creature of labeling and encapsulating and filing things into categories. But this was music that was begging the soul to tell the mind to shut the hell up, turn up the volume, and not worry about what to call anything.
Carlos Santana • The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light
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.