The powerful oratory and evolving political views of civil rights leader Malcolm X deeply influenced jazz musicians in the 1960’s, including John Coltrane, who saw parallels between his own search for liberation and Malcolm X’s message.
As a young man, Malcolm was famously passionate about music. In his autobiography, he boasts of how, as a shoeshine boy in Boston’s Roseland State Ballroom, he shined the shoes of Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Lionel Hampton, and other greats. As a young man in Harlem, Malcolm danced and played drums at jazz bars, under the stage name Jack Carlton. But when he joined the Nation of Islam, his views began to change. In 1950, while in prison, Malcolm penned a letter to a fellow Muslim, describing his love of jazz and its “comforting effects.” “My ace girl was Dinah Washington,” he wrote, “She’s still the greatest.” But the music also reminded him of his “sinful past”, and he vowed to indulge only in jazz performed by Muslim artists.
For the rest of his life, Malcolm X would try to balance his love of music with his political and religious commitments. In a 1964 speech, he underscored the importance of music to black liberation, stating that music was “the only area on the American scene where the black man has been free to create. And he has mastered it.”
Malcolm’s personal papers are sprinkled with references to music, containing mentions of Thelonious Monk and his “Muslim Band,” the vocalist Dakota Staton, and a newspaper clipping of Duke Ellington’s State Department tour in Syria and Iran.
While traveling in Africa, Malcolm immersed himself in the musical life of the newly independent states, visiting social clubs and dance centers, heartened by how they were trying to revive indigenous musical forms as part of their decolonization. At the Ghana Press Club, he took in a heady performance of highlife music, and—in Maya Angelou’s telling—tapped his fingers on his lap, but refused to dance. In Cairo, he hung out with African American jazz aficionados who were trying to create a “progressive” Afro-Asian genre to counter what was being broadcast by the State Department.
In a society where inequality, bigotry and injustice were the norm for African Americans, Malcolm said, “No wonder we do some of the things we do … no wonder we drink, dope and all sorts of things to soothe our soul … no wonder we so continuously have sought the lures of night life to create some sort of peace within ourselves … no wonder we have so longingly turned so often to music for its comforting effects.”
Music: “The Opening” from Terence Blanchard’s “The Malcolm X Jazz Suite.”
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