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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“This is triumphant music.”

In 1964, Martin Luther King, Jr. penned an essay concerning the significance of jazz at the
request of the organizers of the 1964 Berlin Jazz Festival.
The lineup of the 1964 Festival included: Meade Lux Lewis; The Miles Davis Quintet; the
Coleman Hawkins-Harry Edison Swing All-Stars featuring Jimmy Rushing; Sister Rosetta Tharpe;
Roland Kirk; the Dave Brubeck Quartet, and many more.

Although Dr. King was not personally at the 1964 festival, his essay loomed large over the 3-day
event. In 1964, he had risen to prominence on many fronts of the Civil Rights movement. At the
time of writing the essay, he was a finalist for the Nobel Peace Prize. Also that year, he played
an essential role in the passing of the Civil Rights Act and appeared on the cover of Time
Magazine as “Man of the Year.”

Dr. King’s essay on the importance of Jazz to humanity and the Civil Rights movement was not a
speech, but even without his recorded voice, the words are powerful.
Dr. King wrote: “God has wrought many things out of oppression. He has endowed his creatures with the
capacity to create and from this capacity has flowed the sweet songs of sorrow and joy that
have allowed man to cope with his environment and many different situations.
Jazz speaks for life. The Blues tell the story of life’s difficulties, and if you think for moment, you
will realize that they take the hardest realities of life and put them into music, only to come out
with some new hope or sense of triumph. This is triumphant music.

Modern jazz has continued in this tradition, singing the songs of a more complicated urban
existence. When life itself offers no order and meaning, the musician creates an order and
meaning from the sounds of the earth which flow through his instrument.
It is no wonder that so much of the search for identity among American Negroes was
championed by Jazz musicians. Long before the modern essayists and scholars wrote of racialidentity as a problem for a multiracial world, musicians were returning to their roots to affirm that which was stirring within their souls.

Much of the power of our Freedom Movement in the United States has come from this music.
It has strengthened us with its sweet rhythms when courage began to fail. It has calmed us with
its rich harmonies when spirits were down.

And now, Jazz is exported to the world. For in the particular struggle of the Negro in America
there is something akin to the universal struggle of modern man. Everybody has the Blues.
Everybody longs for meaning. Everybody needs to love and be loved. Everybody needs to clap
hands and be happy. Everybody longs for faith. In music, especially this broad category called Jazz, there is a steppingstone towards all of these.”

Music – From “Miles in Berlin”, recorded at the Berliner Philharmonie on September 25, 1964, Miles
Davis with his "Second Great Quintet," featuring tenor saxophonist Wayne Shorter, pianist
Herbie Hancock, bassist Ron Carter and drummer Tony Williams, marking their first recorded
work, here’s “Autumn Leaves”.

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