In July 1966, the great jazz saxophonist John Coltrane embarked on a tour of Japan with his wife Alice Coltrane and the rest of his band. When they arrived at Tokyo airport Coltrane was shocked by the hundreds of fans who welcomed them. Coltrane and some other US jazz musicians had a massive following in both Japan and Germany at the time. Paradoxically, the popularity of jazz in these countries was a legacy of the tens of thousands of US troops stationed in both after the second world war.
When the group arrived by train on July 16th for the concert that Coltrane had insisted on in Nagasaki, his hosts found him playing the flute in the express train. He said he was searching for an appropriate sound and asked if he could go immediately to the site where the atomic bomb had fallen on the city 21 years before. They took him there and he stayed for some time in silence and laid a wreath of flowers.
During the sixties, partly in response to the growing civil rights and black power movement, John Coltrane had become progressively more political and his music more experimental. His 1964 ballad “Alabama” famously served as a requiem for four young girls killed by racists in an arson attack in Birmingham.
As Coltrane became more political his style became freer and less conventional and his popularity waned in the US. But in Japan and in Germany it grew. Partly this was because Coltrane’s music was taken up by the new left seeking a culture opposed to their national pasts but critical too of the cold war superpowers.
On the night of July 16th at Nagasaski, John Coltrane and his band performed a new song, Peace on Earth, an elegy for the dead in the US nuclear attack on Nagasaki and a condemnation of war in general. The performance was received with reverence and rapture.
Coltrane’s pioneering anti-war song was amongst the last pieces of music he created. He died tragically young at the age of 40 in the July of 1967. But the ghetto uprisings, anti-colonialism, the racism of the draft and the growing movement against the Vietnam War were starting to generate a militancy that linked the struggle against racism and poverty with the struggle against an imperial system.
Music: Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders, pianist Alice Coltrane, bassist Jimmy Garrison and drummer Rashied Ali with “Peace on Earth.”
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