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

But when blacks went to church and experienced the presence of Jesus’ Spirit among them, they realized that he bestowed a meaning upon their lives that could not be taken away by white folks. That's why folks at Macedonia sang: “A little talk with Jesus makes it right”—not that “white is right,” but that God had affirmed the rightness of their exis

But the sources for the dreams of music he had were Fletcher Henderson’s “Soft Winds,” “Moonrise on the Lowlands,” or “Shanghai Shuffle,” or Duke Ellington’s “Dust in the Desert,” “Pyramid,” “Moon Mist,” “Perfume Suite,” or “Magenta Haze,”

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.

Some African and Indigenous languages don’t have a specific word for “singer” or “musician”; it’s a given that anyone who breathes can dance, drum, or sing. Music not only sprang from the human brain—it has the capacity to alter the structure and functioning of the brain itself. Aniruddh Patel, a music-cognition expert at Tufts University in Medfor