It’s July 17, 1967, and poet/activist Amiri Baraka whistles John Coltrane charts from his New Jersey jail cell. He’d been beaten and arrested for his part in Newark’s violent protests – the “rebellion,” as he called it. Music keeps his mind off the pain, and his ears distracted from the tanks rolling in the streets … until the jailer passes his cell to tell him that Coltrane is dead.
Amiri Baraka founded the Black Arts Movement, and with Maya Angelou, Nikki Giovanni, and others, he sought to alter American consciousness through African-American arts. Like the protests erupting across America, his poems and plays were intense, often incendiary, but deep with a passion for change.
He and the Movement found a kindred spirit in John Coltrane. From his writings on jazz, Baraka wrote, “Trane was our flag. We could feel what he was doing. We heard our own search and travail.” Baraka felt the connection between Black politics and jazz improvisation. He noted that, “Black music has its own kinetic philosophy … the fundamental call for freedom.”
Elements of the Black Arts Movement are still active today, and Coltrane’s jazz is still its soundtrack. From “Alabama” – Coltrane’s elegy to the 1963 Birmingham church bombing, to A Love Supreme – the deeply spiritual testimony to Coltrane’s own struggle to find peace in the turmoil of the times, Baraka believed Coltrane’s music would carry the message longer than any “movement.”
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