A Love Supreme: John Coltrane at 100
On Wednesday, September 23, John Coltrane would have turned 100. From 5am to midnight, WPFW gives the whole day to Trane and to Alice Coltrane. Our programmers will share what this music has meant to Black people fighting to be free, and what it still offers us now.
Born Under Jim Crow, Reaching for the Infinite
John William Coltrane was born in 1926 in Hamlet, North Carolina, and grew up in High Point, in the segregated South. Both of his grandfathers were ministers. The sound of the Black church, calling out and waiting for the answer, stayed in his horn his whole life. He lost his father and grandfather within months of each other as a boy, and joined the Great Migration north to Philadelphia as a teenager.
He came up playing with Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk. He got clean from heroin by his own will in 1957 and later described that year as a spiritual awakening. What followed was one of the most astonishing ten years any artist has lived.
Freedom Was the Point
The 1960s Black freedom movement and the new music grew up side by side. Coltrane never gave speeches. He put it in the sound.
When Klansmen bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in September 1963, they killed four girls: Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Carol Denise McNair. Coltrane answered with Alabama, a lament that many listeners hear following the rise and fall of Dr. King's eulogy for the children. It grieves, and then it gathers strength. It refuses to let the dead be forgotten.
White critics didn't always know what to do with him. In 1961 a DownBeat critic dismissed what Coltrane and Eric Dolphy were playing as "anti-jazz." The music kept going anyway. It was Black artists deciding for themselves what their art could be, with no gatekeepers in charge of the ceiling. The Black Arts Movement heard that clearly. A generation of Black poets wrote to him and for him, and Trane became a kind of patron saint of Black creative freedom.
He also looked toward Africa. You can hear it in Africa/Brass, Dahomey Dance, Liberia and Kulu Sé Mama, and in his support for Babatunde Olatunji's Center of African Culture in Harlem. He played one of his last concerts there in April 1967, three months before he died of liver cancer at 40.
A Love Supreme, recorded in December 1964, is a four-part prayer of thanks. For a Black man in America in 1964, declaring that all of us come from one source was a political statement as much as a spiritual one.
Alice Coltrane, a Liberation of Her Own
Alice McLeod grew up in Detroit, playing piano and organ in the church. She studied bebop in Paris with Bud Powell and played in Terry Gibbs's group before she met John. She joined his band in 1966. Some critics blamed her for the direction his music took and wrote her off as the woman who "ruined" the classic quartet. That was the old story about Black women in jazz, and it was wrong.
After John died in 1967, Alice raised four children, protected his recordings and his legacy, and built a body of work that belongs to nobody but her. On albums like Ptah, the El Daoud and Journey in Satchidananda, she brought the harp to the center of jazz. She joined Detroit gospel to Indian devotional music and created a sound people now call spiritual jazz. She took the name Turiyasangitananda, founded the Vedantic Center, and led a spiritual community in California, where she wrote devotional music that mixed Sanskrit chant with the call and response of the Black church.
Alice showed that liberation can mean healing, inner freedom and the right to define your own path. Two shows tomorrow are centered on her, and that's on purpose.
The Lineup
- 5amKatea StittCosmic Love: Alice and John
- 8amDemocracy Now!
- 9amCraig WilliamsColtrane in Europe, 1961 to 1965
- 11amEllen CarterA Love Supreme: The Spiritual and Romantic Side of Trane
- 1pmMwiza Munthali and James Pope, Africa Now!The Praxis of John Coltrane through Alice Coltrane
- 2pmWillard JenkinsThe Atlantic Trane
- 4pmCandy ShannonMy Favorite Things: The Artists Surveyed
- 6pmJosh MyersTrane Live! The Vanguard, Newport, and Recently Released Live Recordings
- 8pmMiles WillisThe Classic Quartet: 1962 to 1964
- 10pmJordan StrudwickAscension: June '65 Forward
Keep This Music Free
WPFW has carried jazz and justice together on the air in Washington, DC, for nearly 50 years. We're listener-supported, and no corporation decides what we play or what we say. Help us reach our Coltrane at 100 goal, and choose a centennial thank-you gift.
Centennial Thank-You Gifts
Coltrane 100 Commemorative T-Shirt
$75or $8.93 a monthA soft black short-sleeve shirt made for WPFW's Coltrane centennial, in sizes S to 3XL. Wear it and carry the celebration with you, all over DC.
Coltrane 100: Highlights 1957–1964 (2-LP Set)
$180or $15 a monthThe heart of Trane's rise on two records. This new centennial collection covers the years he found his own voice and went on to lead the classic quartet.
Coltrane 100: Selections 1951–1967 (6-LP Box Set)
$500or $42 a monthThe whole journey on six records, from his earliest recordings as a sideman to the spiritual searching of his final years. A collector's treasure and our top gift of the day.
T-Shirt Plus 2-LP Set
$250Wear it and play it: the commemorative shirt and Highlights 1957–1964 together.
The John Coltrane Pack (2-CD Digipak)
$50Pacifica has been recording Black music and Black thought for over 75 years. This set comes straight from those archives, including a rare interview with John Coltrane in his own words, and John Coltrane, produced by poet and critic A.B. Spellman for the series Essays in Black Music. You can't find this at a record store, and your gift keeps archives like this alive.
Or call 202-588-9739 during the broadcast
Gifts arrive in 4 to 6 weeks. Tune in to WPFW 89.3 FM or stream at wpfwfm.org, and celebrate a love supreme with us.
