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Chapter 4 examines the shared goals and values of jazz and Islam through the wider lens of Sunni Islam, the Nation of Islam, and the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, and the militant aesthetic of hard bop and free jazz in the late 1950s and 1960s. The chapter tells the story of jazz artists who played their music in Third World Muslim countries during the Cold War. Black internationalists saw a contemporaneous emergence of black American and African freedom struggles across the black Atlantic world during this period. Malcolm X’s and John Coltrane’s meditations on Islam, jazz, and Pan-Africanism resonated with the spirit of the civil rights and Black Power era in the 1960s.

This chapter focuses on John Coltrane's rise in the jazz world, identifying three main performance models that were favored by Coltrane and his groups from the late 1950s until his death in 1967. It then introduces three subjectivities—called being, becoming, and transcendent—that compare to the musical “personas” configured by the three models. The chapter also suggests that Coltrane's listeners have imagined and heard—through these personas—their own ideas of who Coltrane was as a person and what his performances meant.

This chapter explores the reception of Coltrane’s late works in relation to A Love Supreme, focusing on Ascension, Interstellar Space, and The Olatunji Concert: The Last Live Recording. It discusses how the late recordings challenge established musicological methods and problematize dominant representations of Coltrane today. It observes the possible motivations behind the social and political context in which the albums were created. It also suggests methods of critical listening that both help situate the recordings in their historical context and which liberate the recordings from the confines of the neo-traditionalist agenda.

“Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane” contains some alternate takes of pieces already issued and some entirely new records. “Functional” was a magnificent, unaccompanied piano solo. It was the alternate version to the one included on the LP “Thelonious Himself” and different from the original that critics thought it should have been given another label. “Off Minor and Epistrophy” are alternate and simpler renditions of performances from the septet that produced “Monk's Music.” The former had very good solos by Monk, Hawkins, and Copeland, the latter solos by Coltrane and Copeland.

This chapter discusses the common interpretations of Coltrane’s suite and how the album is described in musical terms. It highlights how the album feeds into the established binaries of jazz history, from the balance between the composed and the improvised, to the live and the mediated. It also states that it is important to develop an understanding of why binaries exist, and to explain the need for ideological control and the dominant discourses, which range from the idealized construction of the jazz canon to the deification of Coltrane and his music. It concludes by suggesting that A Love Supreme provides a means of challenging straightforward reading of music and established models of understanding.

This chapter examines the starkly divided reception of 1960s free jazz, focusing on its most characteristic, commented-on, and instantly recognizable timbre, the screaming saxophone, as exemplified by John Coltrane’s late recordings (1965–67). Approaching this reception history through an analytical lens that synthesizes phenomenology and cognitive neuroscience, it argues that the polarized perceptions were largely driven by the mechanisms of embodied timbre cognition. Some listeners interpreted this timbral effect positively (as a sign of spirituality, as righteous Black rage); others interpreted it negatively (as unredeemable noise, unjustifiable Black rage, gendered hysteria). The chapter closes by suggesting that reception of this timbral quality was bound up in a complex nexus of both innate responses and culturally inscribed modes of hearing.

Pharoah Sanders was a Grammy Award winner American jazz saxophonist. He was tagged as the “best tenor player in the world” by the great Ornette Coleman. He was famous for his harmonic and multiphonic techniques on the saxophone. He was born in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1940. Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy, and John Coltrane were his earliest musical influences. Sanders first performance was on Coltrane's Ascension, then on their dual-tenor collaboration Meditations recorded in November 1965.

This chapter examines the relationship between audio and audiovisual recordings following the release of John Coltrane’s seminal album, A Love Supreme, in 1965. The lack of the visual and Coltrane’s sound create a context for the studio recording to be experienced as profound and mysterious; thus, the album transcends its status as a physical object to become a reified phenomenon. In contrast, the chapter draws on video footage of the Classic Quartet’s live performances at the Antibes Juan-les-Pins and Comblain-la-Tour festivals in 1965. The Antibes footage is fragmented, distant, and low-quality, while the Comblain-la-Tour recording conveys a sense of chaotic liveness. Counterintuitively, the chapter argues that these audiovisual recordings of the Quartet performing “live” are clearly products of mediatization and have less impact than the profound experience of the studio album. The chapter also discusses how mediations of Coltrane’s music following his death chart his transformation from trailblazing musician to mythic spiritual master.

Four superbad jazzmen, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, and John Coltrane, were the embodiment of jazz that is at once earthy and exalted. These four giants were superbad because they tried to work out a jazz style that was their own, shaking off tired bebop clichés, breaking free from traditional jazz harmonies and changing a few things that did not fit with the personal ways they wanted to leave a stamp on the genre. These four musicians had their own styles, but in the idea that jazz could not be created by sticking to a formula, they were united. These four musicians would go on to influence many, many artists and contribute significantly to the already multilayered art form that is jazz music.

The history of American religions is overrun with intentional communities and religious utopian experiments, many of which have a strongly pedagogical and/or social critical dimension. Jazz has nurtured a number of significant counter-academies, community organizations, and experimental societies focused on musical and religious development simultaneously. This chapter examines several such endeavors—Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, St. Louis’s Black Artists Group, Los Angeles’s Union of God’s Musicians in Artists Ascension, the Church of John Coltrane, and Alice Coltrane’s ashram—in light of this long history of new religious movements and their alternate socialities. By examining and contextualizing the motivations of community members, we see how the disciplines of music-making are integral to (even coterminous with) the formation of new religious identities that contrast with those of an artless world.

Both John Coltrane and Bob Dylan followed their own musical desires, sometimes alienating their fans. In this year, both of them broke out of their older modes. For Coltrane, always experimental, he took jazz into the realm of the transcendent, seeking spiritual liberation through his music, especially in the recording A Love Supreme. It was excessive in sound and length but brilliant in conception and feeling. Dylan, at the Newport Folk Festival, signaled his break with folk and his embrace of rock. The rock beat of “Like a Rolling Stone” shocked and delighted, while his recording of “Visions of Johanna” would brilliantly blend poetry and rock, in a recording of unusual length and emotion. All of this is discussed within the context of the Great Society and racial conflict in this year.

There can be no argument that Eric Dolphy, born in 1928, who died of complications linked to diabetes in 1964, was a good human being. In fact, Charlie Mingus called him a “saint”. Dolphy's reputation, however, has somehow not been given quite the type of posthumous recognitions one would expect. Part of the problem had to do with the comparisons that were about his work, with Ornette Coleman's and John Coltrane's. Ornette Coleman “taught me a direction,” Eric said in 1960. For Eric, it was a matter of “getting the horn to . . . speak,” as he once put it.

As exemplified by the Africanisms of modernist concert music, music is a venue in which this question has historically been raised with particular urgency. This chapter pursues the question of what “blackness” means as an expressive category, and how it relates to blackness as a racial category. In negotiating the space between these socially or racially marked compositions, a concept that has proven useful in negotiating the similar space between works in different media is drawn on. The musical chiaroscuro is one of the issues raised by John Coltrane's landmark album, which seeks to refashion their music into an American songbook of a different color. With African American culture, the paradigmatic example is perhaps the pattern of call and response, a structuring structure that is at once social, religious, ethical, and aesthetic. Debricolage adapts old materials to new uses for reasons of desire, not of need. Instead of assemblage, its basic principle is disassemblage, and what it disassembles are the norms and forms of a dominant culture. Those who have been historically excluded from the privileges of a dominant culture can redefine their relationship to it through such disassemblage, which transforms the instruments of exclusion into a means of self-definition and self-creation. Similar effect occurs in Coltrane's “Summertime.” Debricolage like Coltrane's can be understood as a reaction to the historical collapse of that faith, which tends to survive, where it does survive, only among the groups least affected by exclusion and rejection.

In the post–World War II years, jazz started to split off into many different directions, spurring a fragmentation that expanded the creative range of the idiom but caused long-lasting divisions among artists and fans (the so-called jazz wars). The first fault lines emerged between traditional and modern jazz exponents, but during the 1950s and early 1960s, many different styles emerged—including cool jazz, hard bop, soul jazz, West Coast jazz, modal jazz, Third Stream jazz, and various experimental approaches. This chapter traces these stylistic developments, and their leading exponents. It looks at the life and work of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Stan Getz, Charles Mingus, and Bill Evans, among other major jazz stars of the era, and assesses key albums such as Kind of Blue, Mingus Ah Um, and Giant Steps.

John Coltrane was born in Hamlet, North Carolina, on September 1926. He and his family moved to Philly and there, John took up E-flat alto horn, clarinet, and saxophone during high school. He pursued his music studies at Granoff Studios and Ornstein School of Music, also in Philadelphia, and played his first professional job in 1945. He was a leading jazz musician during his time, not only because of imaginative and technical abilities, but also because he was one of the most advanced in the genre. His passion was in things all musicians and music lovers knew were breaking new ground.

This chapter draws on Charles S. Peirce's semiotics as a basis for understanding musical phenomena and indicating some advantages of a semiotic approach to musicology. It sketches a semiotic account of the musical work as a process of representation and interpretation, employing terminology from Peirce and from Jean-Jacques Nattiez's Music and Discourse. The semiotic framework is introduced by application to a “standard case” of Western art music (“classical” music), Chopin's “Revolutionary Étude,” to show how the musical work can be nearly identified with the score. This framework is then applied to John Coltrane's A Love Supreme, a musical work that is particularly hard to reconcile with such a view. The application highlights the overlooked role of the energetic and logical interpretants of musical symbols, and suggests a semiotic basis for normative criticism of musical performances.

The introduction describes the central arguments, themes, and overviews of the chapters in this book. It shows that Malcolm X and John Coltrane were two of the leading stars in what might be called the golden age of African American Islam and jazz. This book argues that the values that Islam and jazz shared were key to the growth of black Islamic communities, and that it was jazz musicians who led the way in shaping encounters with Islam as they developed a black Atlantic cool that shaped religion, jazz styles, and black masculinity and femininity.

The chapter describes Johnny Hodges’s break with the Ellington orchestra in the early 1950s. He had occasionally threatened to leave the band, and in early 1951 he did so with the encouragement of record producer Norman Granz, who signed him to a recording contract and financed his break. Hodges took two Ellingtonians with him, and among other noteworthy musicians who joined was a young John Coltrane, whom Hodges had to fire because of his drug habit. Hodges said he and his co-conspirators made the break because they wanted to return to simpler music than the ambitious works that Ellington would sometimes write. The economic reasons for the break are also discussed. The big bands were suffering, and Ellington had announced a pay cut. Ultimately Hodges found that he was not suited to be a bandleader; he disbanded the group and returned to Ellington in 1955.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the importance of recordings in spreading the jazz culture, enabling it to develop into a global phenomenon. It presents John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme as the subject for the study, claiming that it is the most canonical of jazz works. The book focuses on using different strategies to demonstrate that when listening to music on record, listeners get much more than purely sonic experience. It also deals with the influence of recordings on culture and encourages critical listening and an awareness of the cultural impact of the recording both at the time of its creation and beyond the artist’s lifetime.