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S02E04 Jazz, Africa & Islam - Part Two: 'Scenes In The City'
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The demographic shift of The Great Migration during the period following the Civil War was a transformative historical moment for African Americans where they seized the opportunity to forge new cultural identities in the northern cities of the United States like Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Detroit. Dancehalls and music venues like The Savoy Ballroom in Harlem became important culture centres for new generations of young Black Americans whose lives and urban politics were soundtracked by the revolutionary Bebop Jazz being played in venues like Minton's Playhouse and Monroe's Uptown by musical mavericks like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Max Roach.
During a period of monumental social and political change, Hard Bop and its more aggressive, bluesier tones would reflect the harshness of these modern urban environments. Black Jazz artists would introduce aesthetic innovations to re-establish Jazz music's link to Black working class culture, and to stay two steps ahead of the mass market consumerism and appropriation that swept through American culture in the 1950s.
Hard Bop was heavily influenced by the music of the Black Church, particularly the gospel stylings which emanated from the Baptist Churches of Chicago. As time progressed, with the traditional Black Church seen as representative of a moderate mainstream class within the Black population, conversion to Islam became an increasingly common component of the new urban identities which emerged in the period following World War II, with Black Muslims adopting what they saw as a modern ideology that offered models of self-determination and solidarity for working class African Americans in the mid-20th Century. Islamic themes of spirituality and universal brotherhood seeped into Jazz music and were most famously represented in the music of John Coltrane and his 1965 masterpiece 'A Love Supreme'.
Tracks:
Take My Hand, Precious Lord - Thomas Dorsey
Filthy McNasty - Horace Silver Quintet
Woody N' You - Coleman Hawkins
Song of Happiness - McCoy Tyner
Tenderly - Lynn Hope
Onda Callejara - Ry Cooder
Acknowledgement / Pursuance / Psalm - John Coltrane
Books:
What The Music Said: Black Popular Music & Black Popular Culture - Mark Anthony Neal
Soundtrack to A Movement: African American Islam, Jazz & Black Internationalism - Richard Brent Turner
A Love Supreme - Ashley Khan
Giant Steps / Cookin' - Kenny Mathieson
3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans & The Lost Empire of Cool - James Kaplan
Jazz & Justice - Gerald Horne
EMCK
Recommended
Transcript
The Influence of African and Islamic Culture on Jazz
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to Real Gone. This episode is part two of a series of episodes about the influence of Africa, Afrocentrism and Islam on the production of American jazz music. In this particular episode, we're going spend some time looking at how the Great Migration, before and after the turn of the 20th century,
00:00:17
Speaker
saw millions of black Americans migrate from the southern states of the US to northern cities like Boston, Philadelphia, and New York to pursue work and to escape the hostility of the southern states in the post-Reconstruction period after the Civil War.
00:00:31
Speaker
Jazz music became a crucial component of the new social identities forged in the process of this demographic shift to the urban centres of the northern states.
World War II Era and the Evolution of Jazz
00:00:40
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With the onset of World War II, the emergence of bebop music helped consolidate these new identities, which fell under the umbrella of what social philosophers refer to as black Atlantic cool.
00:00:52
Speaker
The emergence of hard bop jazz and the radical politics that underlined much of urban life for black Americans, including migrants from the South, but also the Caribbean, was a further indicator of coming social change.
00:01:04
Speaker
As the 20th century progressed, the internal tensions between moderate and radical approaches to how black communities could progress their civil liberties seeped into musical culture, and in doing so accelerated the growth of American Islamic movements.
00:01:18
Speaker
to many black Americans, including a long list of prominent jazz musicians. Islam represented a modern alternative to the traditions of the black Christian church and a challenge to its political influence over black communities.
Jazz, Civil Rights, and the Rise of Islam
00:01:30
Speaker
The development of hard bop, spiritual jazz, and later free jazz, mirror developments within the civil rights movement, the diffusion of moderate Islamic organizations such as the Ahmadiyya movement, and the burgeoning strength of more militant black nationalist movements like the Nation of Islam.
00:01:46
Speaker
Islamic religious practice became an intrinsic part of the aesthetic of American jazz music during a time in the late 1950s when anti-colonial sentiment was at an all-time high. During this period, between World War II and the onset of the Cold War, the internationalist outlook of black Americans, spurred on by the historic activism of Marcus Garvey and artists like Paul Robeson, drew influence from newly independent African nations to create a movement that would champion the notions of freedom, dignity and racial equality that had until then been absent from their experience of life in America.
Post-Slavery Challenges and Segregation Laws
00:02:24
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The end of chattel slavery following the American Civil War created the conditions for the emergence of a new black public sphere, the creation of public spaces in the reconstructed southern states.
00:02:35
Speaker
Emancipation offered new legal status for many black Americans, but failed to elevate them from the bottom rung of America's social hierarchy. Despite the visibility of this new black public, social mobility, cultural expression and commerce for black people were still constrained by the dynamics of legal segregation in housing, education and public services, a political environment of white supremacy and the threat of physical violence.
00:03:03
Speaker
These constraints became more apparent during a period of intense racism and open hostility to African Americans at the commencement of what is referred to as the post-Reconstruction era. After the Civil War, plantations and other lands throughout the South were seized by the federal government.
00:03:18
Speaker
In January 1865, General William T. Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15, which announced that he would temporarily grant newly freed families a mule and 40 acres of the seized land on the islands and coastal regions of Georgia.
00:03:33
Speaker
Many believed that this policy would be extended to all former slaves and their families at the end of the war as reparations for their poor treatment. This promise was ultimately broken. In the summer of 1865, President Andrew Johnston, as one of the first acts of the Reconstruction, instead ordered that all land under federal control would be returned to the owners from whom it had been seized.
00:03:55
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The post-Reconstruction era is generally held to refer to the period following the withdrawal of federal troops from the southern former Confederate states in 1877, which saw the introduction of the Jim Crow laws that legally imposed racial segregation and criminalised interaction between races,
00:04:11
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This era marked the commencement of wider attempts to stall or reverse civil rights gains for black Americans with orchestrated attacks on black public formations. It lasted well into the 20th century.
00:04:22
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The massacres and pogroms of the 1921 Tulsa race riots being one of the most famous examples. This was a time of extreme hostility and violence towards black people. 1,600 black people were lynched in the eighteen ninety s alone.
00:04:35
Speaker
Not unrelated, this was also a period in which white nostalgia for the old mythic South was fuelled by music and stage shows, and the appearance of a new medium in the form of cinema at the start of the 20th century.
The Impact of Migration and Industrialization on Black Identity
00:04:47
Speaker
These new moving pictures communicated a motive and often false narratives of a homogenous and economically prosperous white society free of immigrants, an America that in fact had never existed.
00:04:58
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The story of the Klansmen. A celebration of the fundamentally racist Ku Klux Klan was adapted by Director D.W. Griffith as the birth of a nation in 1917, reviving the active operations of the KKK as it did so.
00:05:12
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During the Prohibition era of the 1920s, the Klan used the pretense of enforcing laws prohibiting the sale of alcohol as cover to terrorise the businesses and neighbourhoods of Catholics, Jews, Hispanics, African-Americans and immigrants in the American South.
00:05:27
Speaker
The nationwide ranks of the KKK grew to over 2 million people by 1925, enabled by a government indifferent to its racist practices. major factor in the escalation of racial hatred was the industrial restructuring of North America, where the urban centres of the northern states became the dominant sites of industrial production in the country.
00:05:47
Speaker
The mechanisation of agriculture in the southern states in the first half of the 20th century, accelerating after the Great Depression, effectively made obsolete systems of share cropping that had been put in place at the end of the Civil War, where landowners sublet farmland to tenant workers for a share of the crops collected,
00:06:05
Speaker
Proactively recruited by the northern factories as the supply of cheap European migrant labour dried up after the First World War, many black people rushed at the chance to escape a lack of social and economic opportunities in the segregated South, exacerbated by the spread of racist ideology and the infamous Jim Crow laws.
00:06:26
Speaker
As written by music professor Mark Anthony Neal in his classic text, What the Music Said, Black Popular Music, Black Public Culture, from which this episode borrows heavily, The reinvigoration of black public life in the North in the context of the continued erosion of the quality of black life in the American South provided a steady migration from the rural South to the urban spaces within the North and border states that would reach its peak in mid-20th century America.
00:06:50
Speaker
This great migration, as it was called, would radically change the nature of African-American life. Black Americans in the southern states looked to the northern cities of America to fulfil the promise of the freedom they had achieved.
00:07:02
Speaker
Black culture and social change would progress in the south in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles, but for the purpose of the these next few episodes, our focus is on the development of new social and musical identities that developed in the northern and western cities as a consequence of the Great Migration.
00:07:20
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The American North, as presented by newspapers such as the Chicago Defender, represented the possibilities of full citizenship in a newly racially integrated America. This was the fundamental goal of a newly constructed ah African-American diaspora.
00:07:34
Speaker
However, the integrity of this message became increasingly fred as the 20th century progressed. Those who had migrated to the northern industrial cities from the southern US states and the West Indies were faced with the same pervasive structural racism and de facto segregation in housing and public spaces that they had migrated to escape from.
00:07:55
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Notwithstanding the major demographic shifts in the black population of America, the protection of covert social spaces was recognised as a necessity by black Americans, particularly during during the Prohibition era, with thousands of speakeasies in Manhattan alone during this period.
00:08:11
Speaker
For performing jazz musicians seeking to preserve their livelihood and to protect their lives, this often meant reluctantly aligning with the agents of the criminal underworld who controlled nightlife venues and bootlegging operations.
00:08:23
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In St. Louis, Missouri, during the 1920s, the Charlie Burger Gang of Lithuanian Jewish Extraction went to war with the KKK, who were picketing music venues owned by the mob, like Jazzland on the Mississippi River, to block the hiring of black musicians.
00:08:39
Speaker
Displeased with the police attention this noise brought in their commercial operations, the Burger Gang's use of dynamite and machine guns managed to bring Klan operations in the city to an end by 1926. This type of protection did not come without complications.
00:08:54
Speaker
Whether it was in the pool halls or the gambling joints of Toledo, Ohio, or the speakeasies of Harlem in New York, mob control meant that musicians and other nightlife workers were exploited in terms of low wages and an inability to move between venues freely for work.
00:09:09
Speaker
Gangster Oney Madden forced many black business owners to sell their enterprises in Harlem to him during the 1920s and instilled fear in musicians by using prominent performers to spread the message that they would have their fingers shot off if they moved to downtown clubs for better wages.
00:09:25
Speaker
It was the early institutions of the traditional black public sphere that would inform the creation of new public spaces for black Americans in the urban north during the late 19th century and the early 20th century, namely the black church, which signified a kind of respectable official mainstream, and the institutions of leisure like the Duke Joints and ultimately the jazz clubs of northern cities like New York, Chicago and Boston, also Philadelphia and Detroit, which represented a counterculture within black American society.
00:09:55
Speaker
Many of the black musicians that came to exemplify the links between Islam and jazz music passed through the black churches. Drawn to the level of solidarity they offered for local communities, and their incorporation of jubilant musical celebration in their religious practices.
00:10:09
Speaker
However, what these churches often lacked was a realistic means of furthering the notions of freedom, affirmation of black identity, and self-determination championed by those followers of Marcus Garvey's movement, who we discussed in the last episode.
00:10:21
Speaker
It was in these areas that Islamic movements operating within the United States were able to recruit converts from Christianity, most notably among jazz artists, always a kind of unsanctified religion of outsiders.
00:10:33
Speaker
Moderate movements within Sunni Islam, the Ahmadiyya missionaries, and later the more radical separatist nation of Islam, enabled black Americans to inhabit a new modern transnational identity.
00:10:46
Speaker
The demographic shift of the Great Migration was a moment of transcendence for African Americans, where they seized the opportunity to forge new cultural identity in the northern cities of the United States. As time progressed, conversion to Islam became an increasingly common component of this new identity.
00:11:01
Speaker
Islam was seen as a modern ideology that offered a model of self-determination and solidarity for working-class African Americans, who, as the 20th century progressed, were becoming increasingly frustrated with the message of gradual integration and submissiveness that had emanated from the black church and the moderate political leadership within black American society.
00:11:21
Speaker
In the 1940s, Boston was one of America's major jazz cities, This reputation stemmed from the black jazz communities in the South End and clubs like the Roseland State Ballroom, the Professional and Business Men's Club and Wally's Paradise in Massachusetts Avenue, the Hi-Hat Club, Tangerine Room, Golden Gate Cafe and Old Club Savoy on Columbus Avenue and Estelles on Tremont Street.
00:11:44
Speaker
All the major stars of the day, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Lester Young, Ella Fitzgerald, Lionel Hampton, Ben Webster, played in these venues. Black performance, including swing jazz dance, as exemplified by the Lindy Hop dance, was a communal form of social expression, drawing influence from the Black Christian churches and the rhythms of gospel blues.
00:12:05
Speaker
This was musical and dance performance as a transcendental experience.
00:12:11
Speaker
1940 to 1950 was a dynamic period of growth in Boston. The great migration of black Americans from the southern and midwest states from the beginning of the 20th century, together with the influx of Caribbean immigrants, increased the city's population of those from African descent to 40,000 people.
00:12:28
Speaker
By 1946, black communities had been forcibly removed from Beacon Hill, their home since the 18th century, to densely populated immigrant enclaves in the South End, around Massachusetts Avenue, Tremont Street and Columbus, and to Roxbury, which became Boston's equivalent of Harlem, New York City, as a black population and cultural centre.
00:12:47
Speaker
In this period, the black community in Boston worked to expand their pan-African consciousness beyond Marcus Garvey's United Negro Improvement Association, to incorporate new ideas emerging from swing music and bebop jazz, and recent converts to Islam.
00:13:03
Speaker
Afro-Caribbean immigrants had first-hand experience of British colonial rule in countries like Jamaica, Barbados, Panama, Bermuda, and Trinidad and Tobago. They maintained transnational networks, and they were accustomed to the pan-Africanist ideology of Marcus Garvey's UNIA, which could be summarized as a modern black consciousness promoting global unification,
00:13:23
Speaker
The UNIA branch on Tremont Street in Roxbury was founded in 1919.
00:13:32
Speaker
that might recraft african culture and identity in the diaspora and encourage immigration to africa ua air branch on tremont street in roxbury was founded nineteen nineteen One influential Boston Garveyite was Elma Lewis, who founded the Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts in 1950 and the Center of Afro-American Artists in 1958, both in Roxbury, which hosted esteemed jazz musicians, Duke Ellington among them.
00:13:57
Speaker
The Boston Chronicle, founded by Jamaican immigrants in 1915, became Boston's most important black newspaper during the nineteen thirty s It reported on local black American political events and conditions in African and Caribbean countries.
00:14:10
Speaker
Its focus on international black culture was a model for Mohammed Speaks, a newspaper published by the Nation of Islam during the nineteen fifty s
00:14:19
Speaker
The emergence of the black church as one of the most visible and effective distributors of black critical discourse follows the social and cultural logic of pre-Civil War black communities. African American acceptance or appropriation of Christian ideology allowed the black spiritual tradition to develop with relative autonomy.
00:14:37
Speaker
This was on the basis that the white elite essentially perceived Christianity to be a positive social and civilising force, and were for the most part oblivious to the coded language of the spirituals and their message of defiance, escape and transcendence.
00:14:50
Speaker
Black people were denied access to public space such as parks, libraries and restaurants. The black church, open to both secular and religious groups in the community, came to signify a public space available to everyone.
00:15:02
Speaker
The church served as a meeting hall for virtually every large gathering, holding political rallies, athletic clubs, vocational training and music concerts. The church was also a discursive political arena where issues were discussed, debated and disseminated through the larger community.
00:15:18
Speaker
If the black church represented a kind of mainstream in the black public culture, it follows that leisure spaces like the Duke Joint represented a counterculture, In the era where leisure time and mass consumer culture were still foreign to the sensibilities of the American working class, the overt and aggressive pursuit of leisure was generally acknowledged as transgressive behaviour among black Americans.
00:15:39
Speaker
The Duke Joint functioned as an institution that was perceived as transgressive in its very nature, and the antithesis of the black church when compared to more bourgeois sensibilities. Suffice to say, blues and jazz musicians playing in these underground venues got a bad rep, and often, what most infuriated those passing judgment, was that the music being played drew so heavily from gospel and spiritual traditions, the Lord's music being warped to devious ends.
00:16:04
Speaker
the presence of the Duke Joint, which incubated honky-tonk and ragtime music, would portend the emergence of such institutional icons as the Apollo Theatre and the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem, and the establishment of the Chitlin Circuit, a sophisticated cultural network preserving the economy of the covert black subcultures in America.
00:16:22
Speaker
To go back and give Duke credit, the black churches in Roxbury and the South End contained a vibrant mix of African-American religious internationalism. In terms of the Black Baptist churches, Ebenezer Baptist Church in West Springfield Street in Roxbury was established by African immigrants.
00:16:38
Speaker
12th Baptist Church in Warren Street, Roxbury, was originally located in Beacon Hill, founded in 1840 as an anti-slavery church and a refuge for fugitive slaves from the southern states.
00:16:49
Speaker
The Baptist impact on American music was significant, with the improvisational techniques of the church musicians becoming hugely important in jazz, blues and R&B performance practices. The improvised use of the body, shouts of exaltation and hand claps traced back to West African and Central African sacred rituals of dance.
00:17:09
Speaker
Some historians even argue that the roots of the blues melancholy sound can be traced back to the African Islamic style of reciting the Koran among enslaved West African Muslims in the American South. The National Baptist Convention was the largest denomination of black people in the US, renowned for the performance spaces it provided within its churches.
00:17:29
Speaker
at the Pilgrim and Ebenezer Baptist churches in Chicago that Thomas Dorsey and Mahalia Jackson became the most famous progenitors of what would become commonly known as gospel music in the 1930s. This was the social and musical foundation from which performing artists like Sister Rosetta Thorpe and later Aretha Franklin would emerge.
00:17:49
Speaker
Gospel was a black Atlantic fusion of the rural blues of black southerners and modern emotional worship music of the working class southern migrants living in urban northern cities like Chicago and Boston.
00:18:00
Speaker
Dorsey was a Georgia blues pianist who had played with blues legend Ma Rainey and established modern gospel in 1932 with his song, Take My Hand Precious Lord. Take my hand.
00:18:12
Speaker
Lead
00:18:36
Speaker
Let me stand
00:18:44
Speaker
I am tired Black gospel music and charismatic preaching were also central to the African Methodist churches in Boston. These churches had been established in Beacon Hill before the Civil War, but followed the movement of their black congregation to create new religious spaces in the South End and Roxbury in the early 20th century.
00:19:02
Speaker
common among those attending the African Methodist Episcopal Church on Columbus Avenue and the Union United Methodist Church in the South End were migrants from North Carolina and Virginia. The West Indian followers of Marcus Garvey, the Garveyites, were also in attendance.
00:19:18
Speaker
The St Cyprian's Episcopal Church on Tremont Street was directly across the road from the Boston branch of the UNIA in the 1940s, built with funds raised by the black community. It was the most important Afro-Caribbean church in the city and was attended by a young Calypso singer named Louis Walcott, later known as Brother Reverend Louis Farrakhan, future leader of the Nation of Islam and minister of NOI, Temple No. 11, in Roxbury.
00:19:42
Speaker
Roxbury was ethnically and religiously diverse around the time of World War II, but Boston was a city known for its severe racial inequality and violence during the nineteen thirty s and forty s Property ownership was almost entirely white, and the majority of black Bostonians held jobs in manual labour or low-paid service work.
00:20:00
Speaker
Lunch counters and restaurants were racially segregated. The characteristics of Jim Crow were not just reserved for the former Confederate States. Boston's black population spearheaded militant protest, which was inspired by the black internationalism of the UNIA.
00:20:16
Speaker
Boston's radical waste Indian newspapers published stories on anti-colonial resistance strategies so and challenged Boston's reputation as a city of liberty by reporting on frequent racist attacks within the city.
00:20:27
Speaker
During World War I, the black communities looked for powerful leadership from its civic representatives, but the UNIA and the black church failed to deliver effectively for their people. The Afro-Caribbean immigrants who founded the Chronicle used their newspaper in an attempt to challenge institutional racism.
00:20:45
Speaker
Barbados-born Victor Bino and other attendee at St Cyprian's Church was crucial to the revival of the National Association the Advancement of Coloured People, the NAACP in Roxbury and the South End during the 1940s.
00:20:59
Speaker
But despite their best efforts, the transnational activism of those within the Marcus Garvey movement were unable to translate their work into an improvement of social and living conditions for black communities in this era.
00:21:10
Speaker
Racist practices within the police, courts, housing market and employment sector persisted. The civil rights movement had not yet gained sufficient momentum to effect social change.
00:21:22
Speaker
By the mid-1940s, swing music, the national popular music of the time, was given way to an exciting and revolutionary new form of jazz music called bebop, This was a distinctly modern urban music with high tempo, aggressive rhythm, energy, syncopation and harmonic changes.
00:21:38
Speaker
In smaller numbers, musicians were able to experiment more freely than had been possible in the big band orchestral setup. In the post-World War II economy, it was impractical and imprudent to support the elaborate needs of the big band, which gave rise to smaller combos, setting the stage for the rise of bebop and R&B with electrified guitar.
00:21:59
Speaker
It may be a lazy analogy, but the influence of bebop on jazz music is comparable to the impact of punk rock in terms of how it redefined rock and roll for the decades that followed. The global shortage of shellac, essential for the production of vinyl records,
00:22:14
Speaker
primarily due to the Japanese military seizing the Malay Peninsula, limited the number of 78 RPM records produced after World War II. The recording industry focused on more popular vocal music as opposed to bebop, which developed almost in secret, fastening the underground character of the music.
00:22:33
Speaker
The most famous bebop musicians, Charlie Parker, Max Roach, Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, Kenny Clark and Fats Navarro, and a fledgling Miles Davis, all played the 52nd Street Clubs in New York and Uptown venues at Monroe's Uptown House on 130th Street and Minton's Playhouse on 118th Street in Harlem.
00:22:53
Speaker
Bebop drummers Max Roach and Kenny Clark, who were both heavily engaged in black internationalist activism, would later convert to Islam. The advent of bebop marked a break in time where jazz music would no longer be exclusively played as a soundtrack for dancing, partly due to the imposition of the cabaret laws discussed at length in our first episode.
00:23:13
Speaker
Audience members would for the most part become seated spectators, helping to enhance the appreciation of jazz music as artistic performance, rather than simply musical entertainment. The limited access to the smaller music clubs meant audiences at these live shows gained an insider's knowledge and appreciation of the technical aspects of the music, but also the thematic preoccupations of bebop.
00:23:36
Speaker
Dizzy Gillespie's piece, A Night in Tunisia, introduced themes of global politics and religious internationalism, describing the conflict between Allied forces and Axis powers in Tunisia in 1942.
00:23:48
Speaker
Gillespie, another fundamental figure in modern American jazz, had migrated from South Carolina in 1942, lived in Philadelphia and New York, but was married in Boston in 1940, his career sustained by the jazz audiences of these northern cities.
00:24:04
Speaker
A night in Tunisia encouraged African Americans to consider their own struggle for freedom in the context of global politics, Jazz music started a conversation with the Muslim third world during the World War II era, and bebop helped formulate what became an oppositional consciousness among black Americans during the civil rights era.
00:24:23
Speaker
The fact that the West African nation of Togo placed Duke Ellington's face on one of its official stamps was one small example of the cultural reach that American jazz music had globally, even at that time, and signified the socio-political influence that bebop musicians would begin to exert in black communities in America and abroad.
00:24:41
Speaker
Music professor Ingrid Monson describes how bebop's internationalist turn towards non-Western modes of spiritual expression and ritual enactment in the jazz world was connected to an identification with both the anti-colonial struggles of the emerging non-Western nations in Africa and Asia and the cultural heritage of the African continent in particular.
00:25:27
Speaker
The wartime recording ban imposed by the Musicians Union, the American Federation of Musicians, between 1942 to 1944, a feature of the national strike for an increase in the payment royalties on commercially recorded performances,
00:25:40
Speaker
meant the American public had little chance of hearing bebop music unless they attended the East Coast Jazz Clubs to hear the music live. Since the wartime ban applied only to commercial recordings, a great number of musicians devoted more time to radio, cementing the importance of that medium.
00:25:56
Speaker
Many musicians could not find work, meaning that the smaller format groups like the bebop trios and quartets prevailed in the post-war years, which saw the decline of big bands and the rise of vocalists and small jazz combos.
00:26:10
Speaker
Bebop, for the most part, was a musical movement that evaded commodification by the larger record companies. It was a music largely developed beyond the grasp of the marketplace and, as such, could be performed, for the most part, without artistic compromise.
00:26:23
Speaker
This was perfect for mavericks like Charlie Parker, who had cut his teeth in the tough, mob-controlled music clubs of his native Kansas City. The recording band halted business between major record labels and musicians under contract with them, enterprising music promoters, record distributors and store owners with the right connections.
00:26:43
Speaker
So this is an opportunity to start small boutique labels such as Savoy, which opened in 1942, and Apollo, operating between 1943 and 1944, that catered to musicians who were not under contract.
00:26:56
Speaker
The large urban markets such as New York, Chicago and l L.A., facilitated their independent business model, where profit could be made from local distribution. Many of the historically important recordings of jazz and R&B from the mid-1940s originated from these small labels, including an early 1944 recording of What Do You Knew for Apollo, featuring Coleman Hawkins and Dizzy Gillespie, often cited as the first formal recording of bebop jazz.
00:27:45
Speaker
The New York riots of 1900 that ravaged the Tenderloin District served to politicize the black community in New York's urban spaces for decades to come. In the aftermath of the riots, New York students organized the Citizens Protective League, which served as a precursor to the civic and political organizations that helped define the black public sphere in the 20th century.
00:28:07
Speaker
The organization, which called for justice and public acknowledgement of legal rights for black Americans as citizens, reinvigorated notions of black public life left dormant during the Reconstruction era.
00:28:20
Speaker
The NAACP and the Urban League were inspired by a new era of black public discourse dedicated to the protection of black life within the black public sphere, including a focus on anti-lynching legislation and the dismantling of segregated public space.
00:28:36
Speaker
Harlem emerged at the beginning of the 1940s, ravaged by economic neglect, structural erosion and the spawning grounds of an angry and frustrated constituency. The first generation born in Harlem after the beginnings of the Great Migration were coming of age and attempting to redefine their social status.
00:28:53
Speaker
The emergence of a disaffected and increasingly militant youth constituency was a direct product of the changing urban demographics of Depression-era Harlem. When the Great Depression began, there were more black children in New York than any other city in the world, 75,000 under the age of 15.
00:29:10
Speaker
While New York sought $121 million dollars in federal funds for new school buildings, only $400,000 was earmarked for schools where black children made up the majority of students. It was a steady increase in the number of black children arraigned in children's courts, this being a strong indicator of the poverty of the area.
00:29:29
Speaker
Many of these children became of working age in the 40s as World War II arrived. Their lived experience was unemployment, racism, poverty and police brutality.
00:29:40
Speaker
And with the lack of progressive leadership in the black community, these were the issues that politicised and radicalised black youth. Harlem's Amsterdam-starring newspaper noted a democratic upsurge in rebellion, bordering on open hostility.
00:29:52
Speaker
There was growing frustration that the promised land of the urban north was turning out to be a myth. Black people no longer accepted that their position in society was changing for the better. After five decades of elite leadership by moderate organizations such as the NAACP, the black working class would emerge out of the shadow of bourgeois values to directly address its own economic concerns.
00:30:15
Speaker
The early forty s saw the 1941 March on Washington, 1943 riots in New York and Detroit, and a second wave of southern migrants moving to the cities of the urban north, who rejected a history of slavery and sharecropping in the south to pursue their own economic interest.
00:30:31
Speaker
Bebop was the soundtrack to this moment of social change in the urban environments of the northern American cities.
00:30:39
Speaker
Bebop musicians and young jazz and R&B fans travelled back and forth between Boston and New York during the 1940s, working and dancing in venues like the Savoy Ballroom, the Apollo Theatre, the Braddock Hotel, Small's Paradise and Jimmy's Chicken Shack in the black mecca of Harlem.
00:30:54
Speaker
New York also had large numbers of black people migrating there to escape the more extreme racism of the southern states and the violent white supremacy of organizations like the Ku Klux Klan, which contributed to the lynching of around 4,700 black people between 1882 and 1964.
00:31:10
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Even by the 1950s, there was no federal state anti-lynching laws to assist civil rights campaigners with their activism. This was an open wound in the African-American experience that was powerfully conveyed in the song Strange Fruit, recorded and made famous by Billie Holiday in 1939.
00:31:29
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Certain events contributed to lending bebop the quality of militancy in the early 1940s. In April 1942, the and NYPD and the Licensing Authority closed the Savoy Ballroom in Lenox Avenue in Harlem.
00:31:41
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By that point, the venue had become a cultural institution and was a positive example of healthy interracial interaction between black and white people in the city. The Savoy was very much a centre point for Harlem's youth culture and the spurious reasons cited by the local authorities for closing the venue only served to anger those young men and women who had their social hub taken away from them.
00:32:00
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An outbreak of venereal disease among Coast Guard servicemen was questionably attributed to prostitution of the Savoy, which had been patronised by these sailors in their downtime. The solution presented by city officials was to close the venue.
00:32:14
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The head of the NAACP, Walter White, and City Councilman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. circulated public complaints about the Savoy's closure. The introduction of Bebop also chained with the rise of black internationalism in America and the pan-African message of the United Negro Improvement Association, especially among those of Afro-Caribbean descent in New York City, the largest concentration in America.
00:32:39
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The local concerns of Jamaican, Trinidadian and Cuban immigrants were addressed from an international perspective. Discussions about race, politics and revolution were common among those who worked, danced and socialised at venues like the Savoy and Minton's Playhouse.
00:32:53
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It's no surprise that such discourse drew the attention of the FBI. It began monitoring grassroots organisations like the Moorish Science Temple in Brooklyn and burgeoning American Islamic temples that would feed into the Black Power movement of the 1960s.
00:33:07
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The bebop musicians' conch hairstyles and zoot suits were adopted by the young audiences. The Zoot Suit style was emblematic of a subculture that emerged in the early 1940s. Historian Robin D.G. Kelly writes about how jazz played a significant role in the radicalisation of many youths.
00:33:24
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Jazz allowed members of dynamic youth cultures existing on the periphery of city life to construct a style and community, to express new modes of black and brown affirmation, freedom and self-determination, to embrace identities that resisted the institutional racism of the dominant white culture, the classicism of the black middle class,
00:33:44
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Across the country on the west coast, the extent to which the civic authorities were threatened by this new subculture was evident when zoot suits were banned in Los Angeles in 1942. The official reason given was that these clothes were in violation of the War Production Board's guidelines on fabric.
00:34:00
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Rationing of fabrics and certain foods was required at the time for the war effort. Those young jazz fans wearing stylish zootsuits and fedora hats were consequently labelled as deviant and unpatriotic, their aesthetic seen as an affront to the more patriotic white population.
00:34:16
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Zoot suits became a fashion that were only available on the black market, lending the fashion a dangerous outsider association. Black, Mexican and Asian Americans all wore the zoot suit fashion which became closely linked to the revolutionary musical style of bebop musicians.
00:34:32
Speaker
Long draped jackets, baggy pleated trousers and wide brim hats with a feather in the headband. This style, popularised by photographer Clyde Duncan in 1941, would soon take on a political significance in northern cities like Boston, Harlem and across the country in Los Angeles and Southern California after what became known as the Zoot Suit Riots of 1943.
00:34:54
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By the late 1930s, around 3 million Mexican-Americans resided in the United States. Los Angeles had the highest concentration of ethnic Mexicans outside of Mexico. Job discrimination in Los Angeles forced minorities to work for below-poverty-level wages.
00:35:10
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The Los Angeles newspapers described Mexicans with racially inflammatory propaganda, suggesting a problem with juvenile delinquency. These factors fuelled much racial tension between Mexican immigrants and those of Mexican descent and European Americans.
00:35:26
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During this time, Los Angeles was undergoing widespread urban expansion, which caused disruptions in public space. One major decision was to put a naval training school for the Naval Reserve Armory in the Chavez Ravine, a primarily working class and immigrant area for Mexican Americans.
00:35:42
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This area would later become a flashpoint for physical encounters between zoot suitors and Navy servicemen. On the 7th June 1943, eight white sailors from the American Navy attacked a Mexican-American teenager named Victor Morales during a performance by Lionel Hampton's band at the Orpheus Theatre in Los Angeles.
00:36:01
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He suffered a broken nose, cracked ribs, and a zoot suit was torn to pieces in the process. This was the culmination of days of violence and rioting in downtown L.A., Days earlier, on the 3rd of June, a large group of around 200 off-duty sailors and US s Marines booked a convoy of 20 taxicabs and headed for Mexican-American neighbourhoods in East Los Angeles.
00:36:23
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The soldiers had been taxied into Mexican and African-American neighbourhoods to attack local residents. Local black, Mexican and Filipino zoot suiters were deliberately targeted, and they were stripped of their clothing in the streets, cinemas, nightclubs and restaurants, their bold and beautiful style seemingly an affront to their racist attackers.
00:36:42
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In the epic Ry Cooder concept album Chavez Ravine, the song Ondo Calihara recounts these attacks when hundreds of young African-American and Mexican men banded together to defend the predominantly black neighbourhood on Central Avenue and 12th Street.
00:36:56
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Era la medianoche
00:37:01
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When oímos a scream Se requere cien taxis En el armería De Chavez Ravine
00:37:25
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The close of the violence, no soldiers were arrested, but police, some of whom had joined in the rioting with their fellow white servicemen, had arrested more than 500 Mexican-American civilians on charges ranging from rioting to vagrancy.
00:37:41
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Latino zootsuiters, pachucos and pachacas, spoke a coded language known as callo, a mixture of Spanish and English slang. Many of these Mexican-American youths, who were immersed in the jazz culture of the time, that had adopted the zootsuit as a kind of gang uniform, would later join the Nation of Islam in Northern California, the future home of the Black Panthers.
00:38:02
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The zootsuiters in California also consisted of Nisai youth, the second generation of Japanese immigrants born in the U.S., many of them living in a part of Los Angeles-dubbed Little Tokyo.
00:38:14
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Again, the zoot suit was a type of gang uniform and was even worn by Japanese men imprisoned in the West Coast internment camps after the attack at Pearl Harbor in 1941. The government forcibly removed 37,000 LA residents of Japanese descent from the city in 1942 to comply with President Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066, which imprisoned 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent during the war.
00:38:40
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The expediency of this order was consistent with Roosevelt's long-time racist views towards Japanese Americans. During the 1920s, he had written articles in the Mekon Telegraph opposing white Japanese intermarriage for fostering the mingling of Asiatic blood with European or American blood.
00:38:58
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This American racism towards Asian people was a constant theme of President Harry S. Truman's political life and would reach a horrible climax in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II.
00:39:10
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Parallel to the Zoot Suit Riots in Los Angeles, back in New York, the Harlem Race Riots on 1st August 1943 were triggered by events at the Braddock Hotel, where an and NYPD officer shot and arrested Robert Bandy, a black army policeman who was defending his mother.
00:39:26
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Soon after the shooting, 3,000 black New Yorkers surrounded the police station on 123rd Street, leading to an outbreak of violence where protesters fought with police, smashed windows and overturned on-street vehicles.
00:39:39
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By the time order was restored, five people had been killed, more than 300 injured. Frustration with systemic racism against black people and ethnic minorities, combined with resentment of the cultural, economic and political progress made by black and Latino communities during World War II, heightened racial tension.
00:39:58
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Dominic Capge called the 1943 riot the first clear example of a commodity riot. The act of looting which took place after altercations with police, in part a redefinition of property rights.
00:40:11
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Bebop, likewise, emerged partly as a conscious attempt on the part of black musicians to remove black musical expression from the clasps of an often indifferent and exploitative marketplace. The complex rhythm and melodic structure of bebop with its intricate chord inversions and improvisations created an oral landscape that privileged community and autonomy within a receptive black market and a largely urban constituency.
00:40:35
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The Harlem Race Riots and the l LA Zoot Suit Riots in 1943 were part of a wider sequence of events that also saw similar riots break out in Mobile, Alabama and Detroit, Michigan, also in 1943.
00:40:48
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The radicalism of bebop was the siren call for coming social change. Richard Brent Turner writes that the youthful political consciousness of zootsuiters in Harlem and Boston resonated with the rebellious and oppositional spirit of black and brown youth who were so strongly drawn to jazz, a music that identified black Atlantic identity and creativity and its rising interest in Islam.
00:41:11
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This period highlighted a clear distance between the sensibilities of black youth and a politically mainstream black middle class. There was increasing stratification within black society at this stage.
00:41:22
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The recording of bebop and its subsequent commodification codified the form as the next generation of black expressive arts to be appropriated by an emerging post-World War II middle class, reappropriated as cool jazz.
00:41:37
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The popular success of bebop and its subsequent move from the music clubs of Harlem to 52nd Street in midtown Manhattan, which challenged the very intimate relationship between modern jazz and the black working class communities it emerged from.
00:41:50
Speaker
Martin Luther King and Motown Records became the dominant icons of black middle class aspiration. However, the ultimate failure of the traditional middle-class driven civil rights movement to adequately respond to the realities of black working class life allowed for the emergence of political alternatives like Malcolm X, the Nation of Islam and the Young Nationalists within the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the SNCC.
00:42:16
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The 1965 Watts riots in Los Angeles bespoke a rage that could no longer be contained within black neighbourhoods.
00:42:24
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The theme of spiritual liberation and the synthesis of musical and religious consciousness were central to the great jazz music of the late 1950s and 60s, what many see as the golden age of American jazz music.
00:42:36
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This next progression in jazz music at this time was delivered by hard bop. The style of hardbop was described by Samuel A. Floyd as a bluesy, funky delivery with forceful interaction between trumpet and drums, elements from gospel and R&B, offbeat accents, riffs, call and response, vocal inflections, cymbal melodies, and ostinatos.
00:42:57
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Music writer Kenny Matheson says that perhaps the most fundamental identifying feature of hardbop over bebop lay in its feel rather than the technicalities. The music drew more heavily on the earthier sounds and tonalities associated with the secular idioms of the blues, rhythm and blues, and even folk forms, as well as the sanctified church idioms of gospel and the spirituals.
00:43:18
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It was a music with a distinctly urban ambience, despite all its throwbacks to rural forms. and It's no accident that many, but not all, of its principal creators came from the big cities of New York, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Philadelphia,
00:43:33
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Hardbop was radical black jazz music formed in reaction to commodity culture. Whereas bebop lent heavily on reinterpretations of classic jazz standards, there was a greater emphasis on original compositions in hardbop, a further push towards artistic ownership by the musicians.
00:43:49
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The more aggressive style of the music was also seen as part of a deliberate attempt by musicians to distinguish themselves from the prevalence of cool jazz at the time. generally seen as a style more associated, but not exclusively with white musicians and white audiences.
00:44:04
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Hardbop was partly a reaction to jazz transforming into concert music for white audiences and a mainstream cultural elite, and intense commodification and mass consumption of an organic black musical form by way of radio and record and industry culture.
00:44:19
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We talked a few episodes ago about how the acceleration of consumer culture in the post-World War II period, perfectly captured in the TV series Mad Men, Repurposed popular jazz music as part of an aspirational West Coast, East Coast lifestyle being sold by publications like People Magazine and Esquire, and even some of the popular jazz music periodicals where white artists seem to be given preferential coverage, these artists being easier to market to the mainstream national audience.
00:44:46
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During the 1940s, radio stations started using recorded music instead of live music in their programming. Records became the staple of the music industry, and the appearance of the transistor radio, which replaced the preeminence of jukeboxes, and the expansion of the recording industry were the stimuli for the mass commodification of black popular forms, including jazz music.
00:45:08
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Radio was a medium by which young white audiences would experience the new black music. This was the initial accessibility that led the path for the success of white artists like Dave Brubeck, something we discussed a few episodes ago in terms of the prevalence of cool jazz within the American mainstream.
00:45:25
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The success of hard bop was dependent on the support of socially taught communities and cultural networks, like the music venues and cultural centres in northern cities, and for the touring bands travelling to the American South, the Chitlin Circuit.
00:45:37
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That loose network of nightclubs, juke joints, theatres and after-hours venues throughout the eastern, southern and upper midwest areas of the United States, which functioned as a touring circuit for black performers, necessitated by the exclusionary systems of racial segregation in place between the 1930s and the 1960s.
00:45:55
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The Chitlin circuit as a network proved invaluable for the creation of common aesthetic and cultural sensibilities among the African-American diaspora. largely in response to the economic transformations in the American South, primarily the mechanisation of the farming process.
00:46:12
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Four million black Americans migrated from the South to the urban North during the post-World War II period. Mark Anthony Neill writes that, at its core, the Chitlin circuit invoked the reconstruction of community and the recovery of cultural memory for many of these second wave migrants.
00:46:29
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The most famous of the hard-bought bands was Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, We talked in the last episode about Art Blakey's incorporation of African style in his music and his conversion to Islam. Along with Blakey's singular, powerful drumming, it was Horace Silver's energetic piano playing that most delightfully conveys the hard bop style.
00:46:47
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This is the track Filthy McNasty from the 1961 Horace Silver album, Live at the Village Gate.
00:47:24
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The soulful urban sound of hard bop was the soundtrack to the lives of black migrants who flocked to the northern cities at this period, one of the most important being Philadelphia in Pennsylvania, the fourth largest city in the US by 1966.
00:47:38
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Art Blakey had strong ties to Philadelphia through the members of his band, the Jazz Messengers, and his personal connections, including a close friendship with trumpeter Clifford Brown and the inclusion of several Philadelphia-born musicians in the band in 1958, such as pianist Bobby Timmons, bassist Jimmy Merritt, and trumpeter Lee Morgan.
00:47:57
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Informed by the Black Church, Hardbub emerged in the mid-1950s as a form of modern jazz with roots in black working-class culture. Harbub's utilisation of the Hammond B3 organ, an emblem of gospel music, pulled the dominant instrument of the black sacred music out of the church and into secular musical culture.
00:48:15
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Music historians cite Vats Waller as having introduced the organ to jazz music. as He was the son of an assistant minister at Harlem's famed Abyssinian Baptist Church and began recording on the pipe organ shortly before his death in 1943.
00:48:29
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The Great Migration brought thousands of southern migrants into the city of Philadelphia, which by 1956 had a black population of 376,000. This demographic development was crucial to the election of Democratic Mayor Joe Clark in 1956.
00:48:44
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Clark oversaw the implementation of the governmental civil rights innovations in the city, including a new urban charter with a commission to monitor anti-discrimination laws and an independent board to support equitable access for black people to the job market.
00:48:59
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Despite these institutional reforms, it was felt that the Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations had not done enough to tackle racism and de facto segregation in African-American neighbourhoods. By the late 1950s, activists had increasingly turned away from reliance on state action towards traditions of black collective action and self-reliance to achieve advancements in access to education, housing and employment for black communities.
00:49:26
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As drivers of societal change, Philadelphia had a rich Islamic culture that included Sunni Islam, Ahmadiyya, and Nation of Islam members by the mid-20th century. Muslim jazz artists were part of the challenge to white supremacy and making the physical presence of Muslims a positive and normative aspect of city life.
00:49:46
Speaker
The involvement of jazz musicians with Islam in the 1950s and 60s was shaped by the practices of Sunni Islam, and the black internationalism of several African-American Muslim communities that organized in the early 20th century, most notably the Islamic Mission of America, 1939, the Alaya Association, 1938, the Cleveland Mosque, 1937.
00:50:05
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universal arabic association nineteen thirty eight the first cleveland mosque thirty seven These Sunni organizations emphasized the importance of pride in African ancestry, the need for unity among African-American Islamic groups, the empowerment of women, and the goal of self-reliance through independent Islamic programs, institutions, and networks.
00:50:26
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By 1963, tenor saxophonist Lynn Hope, originally from Birmingham, Alabama, home of Sunra, among others, was a leader of Philadelphia's African-American Sunni Muslims.
00:50:38
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He attended a mosque named the School of Wisdom, which was connected to the Wali Akram and the Adenu Ali Universal Arabic Association. The International Muslim Brotherhood, which still stands to this day, was another prominent mosque in Philadelphia, set up by Talib Dawood, who had played a trumpet with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers in the 1950s. Famous for wearing a turban while performing, Lynn Hope suggested that the US s needed the racial and social justice philosophy of Islam to wipe out white supremacy and to elevate black people towards equality.
00:51:10
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hoping his family had lived in Egypt and Lebanon for a number of years after his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1952. He was happy to escape the racism of American jazz venues where black artists were still forced to enter by the back door, among many other indignities.
00:51:26
Speaker
On his return, Linhope and his band members toured the southern states wearing turbans and fez hats, a brave of move in the Jim Crow south of the 1950s. Hits like Tenderly and Summertime were great examples of the soulful Philly hard-pop style.
00:51:40
Speaker
However... By the 1960s, club owners had blacklisted Hope, preventing him from performing in many jazz stages because of his open criticism of racism in the US. This had an adverse effect on his career, but Lynn Hope's example provided a model for other musicians to understand the musical and political implications of African-American religious internationalism.
00:52:01
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Hope's pan-African, Arabic, and anti-colonial sensibilities would be developed by other jazz musicians in the coming years.
00:52:40
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Jazz pianist McCoy Tyner was born in Philadelphia in 1938. The Tyner family were neighbours with bebop piano legend Bud Powell, from whom the young McCoy took inspiration.
00:52:51
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He began playing professionally as a teenager in Philadelphia with local artists such as Lee Morgan and Jimmy Heath, participating in the city's modern jazz scene. He joined Benny Goldson's band The Jaz Tet in 1960 before joining the unassailable John Coltrane Quartet.
00:53:08
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Tyner's wife, Aisha Davis, encouraged him to become a Muslim, and he converted to the Ahmadiyya movement in 1955, adopting the name Suleiman Saud. Tyner spoke of how the creativity of his music was underwritten by the strength and discipline of his religious faith.
00:53:24
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There's a deep introspective spirituality that runs through all his music, especially his brilliant leader records as a band leader like The Real McCoy. He began a 10-year musical relationship in 1955, performing with his close friend John Coltrane, another Philadelphia resident, producing some of the greatest American music of the 20th century.
00:53:42
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If there's a signature sound to spiritual jazz, it's the sound of McCoy Tyner's powerful piano chords.
00:53:50
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This is Song of Happiness from the 1969 album Expansions. expansion
00:54:35
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John Coltrane was born in North Carolina in 1926. His grandfathers were ministers in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. Coltrane's father and grandfather had died by 1939.
00:54:48
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After graduating high school in 1949, where he learned to play alto saxophone, he moved to Philadelphia to live with his mother Alice. After a period in the U.S. s Navy between 1945 and 1946, where he was stationed in Honolulu, Hawaii, he would buy a house for his family on North 33rd Street in Philadelphia, where he lived from 1952 1958.
00:55:12
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Coltrane's early hard bop sound was influenced by playing in jam sessions and club performances by the rich network of black musicians playing on Columbus Avenue in the north of the city and South Broad Street in South Philadelphia.
00:55:25
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Saxophonists Benny Golson and Jimmy Heath, bassists Jimmy Garrison and Steve Davis, trumpeters Lee Morgan and Cal Massey all played at clubs like Spider Kelly's, The Crystal Ball, Club Medea, The Red Rooster and the big ballrooms and theatres like The Earl, The Lincoln and The Colonnade Ballroom.
00:55:42
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Coltrane met his hero Charlie Parker in the 1940s and helped him carry a saxophone case into a show at the Downbeat Club. Several Muslim musicians influenced Coltrane's sound and his musical and spiritual developments during his years in Philadelphia.
00:55:56
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William Langford, also known as Hassan Ibn Ali, was a talented pianist and composer who had played with Miles Davis, Clifford Brown and Max Roach. He's often referred to as the Coltrane of the piano.
00:56:08
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Coltrane became fascinated with Langford's sweeping extended chord sequences and his discipline of relentless round-the-clock practising. Charles Greenlee was a trombonist in Dizzy Gillespie's band who had converted to Islam in the 1940s, changing his name to Harnifan Majid.
00:56:23
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He would later marry Coltrane's cousin Mary and played euphonium on Coltrane's Africa Brass sessions. Coltrane saw many of his close friends convert to Islam in the late 50s, and although he did not officially convert to the religion, his music and his personal life were steeped in the influence of Islam.
00:56:41
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In 1955, Coltrane married a Muslim woman named Juanita Naima Austin, becoming stepfather to her daughter Saida, who was raised in the Islamic faith.
00:56:52
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Both women are named in track titles from Coltrane's 1959 groundbreaking classic Giant Steps.
00:57:30
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Naima's Muslim friends included McCoy Tyner's wife, Aisha, and her sister, Khadijah Davis, vocalist in Cal Massey's band and a spouse of bassist Steve Davis. All of these people participated in jam sessions at Coltrane's Philadelphia home.
00:57:45
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Yusuf Latif met Coltrane in Philadelphia in 1949 when he was playing with Dizzy Gillespie's Big Band. Latif was of the view that Naima had influenced Coltrane's rapid, sweeping musical sound and his distinct technique of superimposing or stacking up chords on giant steps by making sure that he had access to a harp at home, an instrument where he could express his sheets of sound in solo demo form.
00:58:08
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Coltrane had a two-year stint in Miles Davis' band, requiring him to live in New York and on the road when he recorded the first records that would make him famous. Coltrane's solo on Round Midnight, off the 1957 album released under Miles Davis' name, helped elevate the song to the level of a soulful commercial hit within African-American communities.
00:58:28
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His heroin addiction ultimately damaged his standing in Miles' band, and he returned home to Philadelphia in May 1957. He relied on the support of Naima and his mother to overcome his drug addiction.
00:58:40
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He managed to quit heroin, cold turkey, nursed through the intense experience of withdrawal by Naima at their home. During his recovery, Naima introduced John to the Muslim religion's daily rituals of spiritual prayer and purification of the body, something which helped frame Coltrane's desire to stay clean from narcotics.
00:58:57
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Naima encouraged special Islamic diets, incorporating vegetarianism as a means of improving his health. These Islamic practices helped shape John Coltrane's new identity, and he described himself as having undergone a spiritual awakening.
00:59:11
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Although he never publicly announced a conversion to Islam, he was adamant he had been touched by God and had revealed to him, through music, he could touch the souls of others. From 1957 onwards, he was very much a man on a mission, and he often described himself as praying when he was performing.
00:59:26
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what was increasingly obvious to be spiritually orientated music. It was in this period of recovery that Coltrane joined Thelonious Monk at the Five Spot in New York for what would become known as a legendary jazz residency, a kind of jumping-off point for the next developments in American jazz music.
00:59:43
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Naima and Saida would move to New York to live with John in an apartment on the west side of Manhattan in August 1957.
00:59:51
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During Monk's residency at the Five Spot, Coltrane sat in with other famous Islamic jazz musicians, including McCoy Tyner, Monk's bassist Ahmed Abdul Malik, Art Blakey, Max Roach, and Sahib Shihab.
01:00:04
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Coltrane rejoined the Miles Davis Group in 1958. Exploring the form of modal jazz, it would culminate in 1959's Kind of Blue, the most commercially successful jazz album of all time.
01:00:17
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James Kaplan's recent book Three Shades of Blue, The Lost Empire of Cool, beautifully evokes this period, focusing on events in the intertwining lives of John Coltrane, Bill Evans and Miles Davis, all of whom could be described as undergoing a period of transition in the late 50s, and all of whom would contribute to the sublime kind of blue.
01:00:36
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Coltrane would form his own group in 1960 with pianist McCoy Tyner, drummer Elvin Jones and Steve Davis on bass. along with an evolving roster of sidemen that would soon take in Reggie Workman on bass and later drummer Rashid Ali, saxophonist Farrow Sanders and John's second wife Alice.
01:00:53
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Coltrane's bands, which recorded for Atlantic Records and Impulse, explored African polyrhythms, Indian ragas and a range of musical styles inspired by third world consciousness.
01:01:04
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Invigorated by a spiritual devotion, the music John Coltrane and his fellow musicians created in that decade that preceded his death in 1967 is, fully acknowledging its global influences, some of the most powerful American music of the 20th century.
01:01:18
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Coltrane mapped uncharted territory in terms of what was physically and creatively possible in musical performance, at times playing as if he was determined to explode out of his own body. Despite never aligning himself with any specific Muslim organisation,
01:01:32
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It's John Coltrane's 1965 masterpiece, A Love Supreme, released on impulse records that remains perhaps the most famous declaration of African-American Islamic spirituality and jazz music.
01:01:43
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Cultural historian Scott Saul writes of how Coltrane represented music of black awakening, where intended to convey the intensity of a freedom in a world where the cultural roots of blackness were ripe for rediscovery.
01:01:56
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He pursued freedom not for the hell of it, but for the heaven of it.
01:02:00
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A Love Supreme takes the form of a celebration of Coltrane's devotional journey, a personal and spiritual expression following his escape from drug addiction in the late 50s. Coltrane set out the background of his spiritual conversion in the album's liner notes, and he described how, in 1957, he experienced a spiritual awakening which was to lead me into a fuller, richer, more productive life.
01:02:22
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At that time, I humbly asked to be given the means and privilege to make others happy through music. The existence of the St. John Coltrane African Orthodox Church in San Francisco is just one indicator of the effectiveness of Coltrane's spiritual message, and a reminder that, even during his short lifetime, Coltrane would achieve an exalted status, a level of respect and admiration, even sacredness, that's rare for any living musician.
01:02:48
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Coltrane's embrace of Islamic spirituality was aided by listening to speeches made by Malcolm X, who, like Coltrane himself, experienced a spiritual conversion that saved him from a life of drug addiction and turmoil in the jazz world.
01:03:00
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Although he's certainly the most famous representative of the militant and separatist nation of Islam, Malcolm X's own departure from the NOI and his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1964 would bring him, towards the end of his life, into a more universalist worldview, the more closely resembled Coltrane's perspective and that of Sunni Islam.
01:03:21
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Coltrane was influenced by the Islamic and Afro-Caribbean musicians we've discussed, Yusuf Latif and Babatunde Ola-Tunji among them. These were musical innovators who had incorporated African, Indian and Middle Eastern sounds in their music.
01:03:34
Speaker
Coltrane's track India is an example of his own attempts to explore modal improvisation, with no key changes based on Indian raga scales and his own fascination with drone stylings and the modal music of sitar player Ravi Shankar.
01:03:48
Speaker
Coltrane was also fascinated with Kuali music, the Sufi music of Pakistan and India, where the music was considered to be a mystical channel to achieve divine ecstasy. On the 1961 album Africa Brass, Coltrane's first on Impulse Records, he explored African polyrhythms.
01:04:04
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He hired a roster of musicians outside his usual band, including trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, to achieve what he called a powerful polyrhythmic sound. Coltrane said that he wanted the band collectively to have a drone.
01:04:16
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This interest in African music lasted throughout his life and played an important part stylistically in his journey towards spirituality and jazz music. With Coltrane focused on breaking through aesthetic boundaries to achieve something new and original, A Love Supreme was recorded at Rudy Van Gelder's New Jersey studio in 1964.
01:04:34
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The relatively short album unfolds in a suite divided into four parts. Acknowledgement, Resolution, Pursuance and Psalm. Coltrane's strong, lyrical and surging tenor saxophone melody on the opening track is framed by the vigorous supporting performances of McCoy, Tyner on piano, Elvin Jones on drums and Jimmy Garrison on bass.
01:04:54
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Coltrane plays the simple theme in every key and towards the end of the track the band join in a collective chant of a love supreme, underlining the prayer-like quality of the music.
01:05:24
Speaker
On the second track, Resolution, the Indian flavor of the melody is treated to Coltrane's hard bop playing and the percussive stabs of McCoy Tyner's piano. This is a reminder that, for all of Coltrane's enthusiasm for global musical stylings, this is distinctly modern American music.
01:05:39
Speaker
The other musicians in Coltrane's band take solos on pursuance, followed by Coltrane's most aggressive playing on the album.
01:06:12
Speaker
On Sam, the opening track's theme reappears framed by slower but no less magisterial and emotional musicianship to close out the album. A younger generation of black public intellectuals, such as Amiri Baraka with his book Blues People, began to posit aesthetic innovations of jazz artists like John Coltrane and Albert Eiler as emblematic of the post-colonial and black nationalist politics needed to empower the black community.
01:06:36
Speaker
Underlying these notions were powerful desires to sever black expressive culture from the mainstream critical establishment and to provide more authentic and informed interpretations of black culture. The 1960s would see the divergence of the headier free jazz exemplified by Coltrane from the earthier, blues-orientated mainstream jazz played by the likes of Cannonball Adderley.
01:06:57
Speaker
John Coltrane would make more extreme, experimental music in the years that followed, before his untimely death from liver cancer in 1967 at the age of 40, but A Love Supreme represents a perfect, unified statement that seems almost to sit outside Coltrane's own discography and even outside of or separate to American jazz music as an artistic statement.
01:07:18
Speaker
The album was a conscious attempt by Coltrane to communicate something to his audience that was broad enough to be understood, but rich and complex enough to honour both where he was at as a musician and the depth of the subject matter.
01:07:30
Speaker
As written by Mark Richardson in his retrospective review of the album for Pitchfork, in his mind, God had saved him and he was going to give back. A love supreme was his expression of gratitude, hopeful prayer for a better world, and a testament to Coltrane's quest for peace, love, elevated consciousness, and spiritual transcendence.