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

His time with Monk provided an apprenticeship with one of the greatest musical minds of the twentieth century. While with Monk, Coltrane’s conceptual approaches broadened significantly, including melodic invention, rhythmic variations, and mastery of vertical approaches to improvisation and sophisticated harmonic variations. His confidence grew str

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

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.”

For example, Gerald Early claims that the point of the search for freedom was simply the expression of greater freedom.

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.

the everyday world in which he lived and worked: his formation in the segregated South of the 1930s, his early losses—his father’s death at an early age; a sojourn that exchanged an insular southern life for an urban northern one; the ceaseless search for a spiritual life that greatly expanded but was ultimately rooted in the southern black Christi

Coltrane’s own account, the period most associated with his first great defining style finds him trying to develop and master complex harmonies and chord structures.42 His aim, of course, was to expand the limits of the existing styles—swing, R&B, blues, and early bebop—in which he was formed and out of which he played. Coltrane’s second great

for some he is a threat, for others he is musically illegible and therefore beyond comprehension. For still others, this is the Coltrane of pure sincerity—of pulse, energy, and sound.

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.